<p>This is my first post on here, but I've been reading the forum for quite awhile. I need help choosing a major. I'm almost 30 with two small children and still don't know what I want to be when I grow up! I'm currently working on my Associates through the local community college. I'm on the liberal arts track, but can still switch to science pretty easily right now. I LOVE foreign languages and human/cultural geography (taught myself beginning Russian, and have taken Mandarin and Spanish), but I also really really enjoy outdoors, nature, farming, etc. I grew up in the Cascades wading rivers with a net in one hand and an Audubon book in the other- Env. Science and Biology almost seem like second nature to me, specifically freshwater eco systems and plants. GIS and GPS seem interesting too, but I'm not sure. </p>
<p>I've been around enough to know I HATE business, finance, programming, etc. From reading these forums though, it seems there are very few jobs for Bio or Env Science majors?</p>
<p>To be realistic though, I'm a mom and wife and I don't have time or money to mess around. I'm decent at math up through statistics but I hate Calc. Other than that, school so far has been relatively easy, I have a 3.8 gpa. I don't want to sit behind a desk all day. My husband has a great job, so we're not moving. My career will be secondary unless something happens to him (God forbid!) and then I would need to be able to support my family. </p>
<p>I should mention there is a 4 yr college near me I will hopefully go to that has a great adult degree completion program. </p>
<p>Thank you ahead of time to anyone who can help me out with some real world advice, I really really appreciate it!</p>
<p>Bio and Environmental Science is almost jobless. If you can handle calculus and programming, Applied Math or Statistics is a great major. Math in the real world is not just about solving problems (because computers do it for you). Math in the real world is about putting real situations in terms of math and programming the computers to solve those problems. Take a look:</p>
<p><a href=“http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pubs/paper277.pdf[/url]”>http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pubs/paper277.pdf</a></p>
<p>You can write a mathematical model for DATING between any random man and woman Romeo and Juliet where their attraction towards one another dR/dt and dJ/dt are:</p>
<p>dR/dt = aR + bJ, and dJ/dt = cR + dJ where a and b specify romeo’s “romantic style” and c and d specify juliet’s romantic skill.</p>
<p>Another more applicable version to what you want to do is say, hunting. The population of an animal can be described by a differential equation. Now if you hunt the animal too much, no matter if you stop, it’ll go extinct. But there’s alot more factors than just hunting, and anything overboard might cause the animal to die off. So as an applied math major, your job is to find the equation/system of equations that tries to get as many measurable variables that might effect the animal’s population accounted for as possible, so you can measure how many hunting licenses to give out in a particular season and still maintain the animal’s population.</p>
<p>They don’t teach you this stuff in regular biology programs because alot of the biology people are scared of math, but it is precisely MATH and PROGRAMMING that are so, so useful in solving real world biology problems, especially in ecology and environmental studies.</p>
<p>If Calculus is out of the question for you, Liberal Arts is really your only alternative. At nearly all colleges science majors, even majors in the life sciences such as Biology, are normally required to complete at least one year of Calculus to earn a Bachelors degree.</p>
<p>Thank you both for your replies, they’ve given me a lot to think about. I’ll try calculus again this summer, it’s been 11 years since my last attempt… so we’ll see! =) Thank you too, for the idea about statistics. I don’t enjoy math or programming just for the sake of it, but if it was in a subject I enjoy, that would be different.</p>