Last year, I took a personality quiz. It was supposed to assess how well I would be suited to certain jobs based on my personality. When it came time to tally up my score, I got a whopping zero in spontaneity.

Zero! Who knew you could even score that low on a personality trait? I’d certainly never gotten such a low score on anything in my life, and like any other self-respecting Northwestern nerd, I momentarily panicked. Maybe I should take it again? Was there any sort of spontaneity extra credit I could do??

I turned to my friend sitting next to me to share the news, and he said, “Well, yeah. I mean, you make a 10-week plan on the first day of class and you carry it around with you all quarter.”

He’s not wrong. I’ve always been a planner. I started off planning elaborate Barbie weddings in elementary school – everything from the white dress and the plastic bouquets to the seating arrangements, bridesmaids and the aisle made out of tissues. As a birthday present, I planned ahead and asked my parents for Barbie babies so I could be prepared for when the happy couple decided to have children.

I can assure you I’ve reined it in since my days as a 7-year-old wedding planning mogul. I pretty much stick to scheduling classes, dinners with friends and weekend plans. However, my inner control-freak has not strayed too far. When couples plan spontaneous getaways in romantic movies, I’m the one who wonders when they even had time to pack a suitcase. Disrupted plans give me a minor aneurysm, and my least favorite texts are ones that start off, “Hey, are you free right now?”

But when I reflect on the last four years here – and really just my last 21 years in general – all of the most amazing things I’ve done were unplanned. You might even say I stumbled across them. I applied for the cherubs program in high school because a guidance counselor suggested it, though I had never even heard of Northwestern University. I applied for Northwestern as a result, not really sure if I’d get in and not really planning on ever leaving California. I started writing for NBN because when I was a cherub, I happened to overhear some people talking about how cool it was in a CRC common area. I met my best friends because I was randomly assigned to live in the same dorm as them. I applied for the best journalism class I ever took because a friend of mine recommended it – a friend I met when a professor randomly assigned us to work together on a group project freshman year.

Realizing this seems like a huge slap in the face to all my meticulous planning. Is this the universe’s way of messing with me? Is that God I hear, laughing while I make plans?

Instead, I took it as a sign that I needed to learn to embrace the unexpected. I’ve realized that as hard as I might try, I can’t plan my life down to the minute. Northwestern has helped prepare me for a more unpredictable world where planners and color-coded charts won’t brace me for unexpected opportunities or protect me from inevitable roadblocks. I’ll probably always be a planner – college was never going to change that. But it definitely taught me that maybe God is laughing while we make plans, and maybe I should laugh along with him.