ADVICE on Major Change- Business or Engineering (Big Difference)?

College Majors
1

Hello,

(help???)

I am an upcoming 2nd year student at the University of Georgia. I am currently an accounting major, but thinking about changing to ChemE. Due to some social anxiety and also lack of discipline, I made a GPA lower than 3.0 and also got some withdrawals my first year of college. However, I am determined to make a come back and regain my lost HOPE scholarship as well.

In high school, Georgia Tech offered me admission for my 2nd year as long as I take the right prerequisite classes (http://admission.gatech.edu/conditional-transfer-pathway) but I messed up that terribly by withdrawing from Calculus while I was at UGA. When I messed up Calculus, I went to my advisor and he recommended business majors, so I picked accounting because I thought it was the best one.

So I already signed up for three business classes for Fall 2017 and bought my accounting textbook, but I just don’t feel like accounting is the right field to go into: I have never considered business in high school, and have always been more interested in science-related fields. My early goal in HS was to become a pharmacist, but after job shadowing for a school-project and researching about pharmacists online, I decided to not do pharmacist or any type of premed/pre-health. My other plan was engineering, and I was all set to transfer to Tech to do that until I messed up Calculus.

:-/ People who have full-time job experience: Is the “picking the right field” just self-indulgent fluff (a job is just a job, something to be done and everywhere is the same), or are different job fields really better for some people than others to the point where it makes a major difference? :-/ I feel like I should change to engineering, but it feels impractical.

To change to engineering, I will be looking at more risk for failure, wasting some credits and textbook money, probable delay of graduation to 5-year or 6-year and all the financial problems that come with it, and also since my parents don’t want me to try it anymore because they don’t think I will do well, I’ll have to not tell or even lie to them about my classes until I prove myself through getting an internship, all A’s in classes, but even then they’ll still know that I deceived them and I’ll feel bad.

Accounting is ranked very high at my school, and engineering is not very good at UGA. So should I just stay in Accounting, even though it doesn’t “feel” right at all?

2

I would suggest you think about your high-level post-college and during-college goals. Is your goal to graduate in 4 years? To have a high paying job after graduation? Graduate with your sanity intact? Minimize college debt? Get a prestigious degree? So don’t think in terms of my goal is to work as a _______ at ______ company after I graduate. Think more in terms of I want to work 9-5 in an office once I graduate that pays decently well. Once you have that, figure out what decisions you need to make to accomplish that goal. I know it sounds like a lot, but facing the scary decisions of what you want to be when you grow up are part of the college experience. You’re basically now grown up.

As for engineering, I’m not going to lie. Its hard. It’ll require a lot of calculus and a lot of science classes that have to be done in a series where one is a pre-req for the next. So you’re going to have to pass the class in order to be able to take the next one, with no wiggle room. I love what I do as an engineer, but it might be different for you. If you withdrew from Calculus because of the material or the class itself, you are going to be in for a rough ride if you want to do engineering as a major.
I’d suggest you talk to the college of engineering at your current school to see if they have an intro to engineering course you could take. They are generally designed for freshman or people who want to get into engineering to see if ChemE or engineering is even something you want to do.

It also doesn’t sound like you are tied down to the accounting major, so give the other business majors a chance if that is what your advisor is recommending you do.

And, lying to your parents is a horrible idea from which literally no good can come of it. Especially if they are paying for you to be in school, they deserve to be told the truth. This doesn’t mean you have to do exactly what they say, it is you who is going to be doing the studying after all. But don’t lie to them.

3

It’s somewhere in between. The kind of work that you do will have a large impact on your quality of life: if you are unhappy at work because your role or field isn’t a good fit for you, that will bleed into other areas of your life as well. And being happy and fulfilled at work should not be underestimated: it’s a wonderful feeling and has the effect of increasing your happiness and satisfaction overall. Different people have different levels of attachment to their careers: for example, some folks’ identities are very tied up in their careers and unhappiness at work will have a bigger effect on them. For other people, a job is just what you do to pay the bills so you can live the rest of your life, and as long as the job is not terrible they don’t care. But generally speaking, something you are a very poor match for will have the effect of making you pretty unhappy.

That said, it’s not really about “field” necessarily, so much as it is position and role. For example, a lot of people ask about working in the tech industry and assume they need to major in CS or engineering to do so. In reality, tech companies hire lots of different kinds of roles and many of them are not technical. On the flip side, if you work in marketing, your role will likely be pretty similar regardless of whether you work for a pharmaceutical company or a tech company - you’ll be designing marketing campaigns and understanding your consumers. They’ll just be different audiences or consumers.

Again, there’s some flex in that, too. For example, I’m a UX researcher, and I work in video games. If I were to move to a non-games tech company (like Google or Facebook), the majority of aspects and tasks in my role would likely stay the same - but there are some unique things about working in video games specifically that I love that I wouldn’t get in another role. But generally speaking, I’d probably enjoy UX research at other tech companies almost if not just as much. Or for another, being a lawyer at a BigLaw firm is different from being in-house counsel at a corporation, which is different from being a lawyer in the public sector or at nonprofit. But many of the role tasks will be similar.

Well, not having considered before isn’t necessarily a good reason to reject it. High school students are exposed to a very limited number of subjects and careers, and many people fall in love with something that they didn’t know existed in high school (or college, for that matter). The question is, do you like it? Is it a career that you think you may want to pursue? On the flip side, why do you want to major in engineering? What is it that attracts you to the major and the career?

Also, UGA has fine engineering - you don’t have to go to The Best engineering school to get a job in the field later. If you want to major in engineering and you can’t transfer to Tech, staying at UGA is not a bad option. (As a side note, too bad Southern Polytechnic got absorbed by Kennesaw State!)