Hi! I’m an upcoming high school junior, so yes, I do understand that this is early to be seeking help. However, I would love anyone’s input.
So I have quite a bit of interests, however, I also feel very limited?
I’ve been strongly considering neuroscience recently. I love the biological side of learning about the brain, even though psychology is very interesting as well. However, I’m concerned about job opportunities, as I don’t know if I’m interested in going into medical school.
I have other interests, including social sciences, like psychology and politics. However, neuroscience has recently been interesting me a lot.
I would also love to hear about good colleges that have great programs for that major.
Any advice you can give would be great!
Thank you!
A good way to approach your thought process might be to look at all the components of the interdisciplinary Cognitive Science umbrella. CogSci can combine, variously, psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy/logic, and CompSci/AI/UX. Different programs have different emphases.
An actual neuroscience major is likely to require a broader/deeper base in biology and chemistry than the neuroscience component of a CogSci major would require. Are you interested more in the abstract/applied aspects of neuroscience, or do you like the nitty-gritty lab-science aspect? Note that whether you have med school aspirations or not, Neuroscience is a very popular premed major. (Rightly or wrongly, people perceive it as more distinctive and perhaps meatier than a “vanilla” bio or chem major.) So understand that at most schools you’re going to be quite immersed in premed culture as a neuroscience major.
An important fork in the decision tree is whether you want to take on the computing, modeling, and/or interaction design aspect of things… because that brings a whole region of career territory into play that isn’t in the picture if you’re purely in life-sciences “lab-rat” mode or psych-with-extra-science mode.
Knowing what you’re looking for will have a strong influence on where you might like to go. If you’re a Neuroscience + Linguistics person, you’d likely formulate a different college list than a Neuroscience + AI person or a social-sciencey Psych-with-a-dash-of-Linguistics person would.
Thank you @aquapt I didn’t even think of cognitive science for some reason! I do actually love both aspects (labs and more social science based psychology).
Yes I think the reason why I am not sure about neuroscience is because it’s medical based. I’m not sure if medical school is for me, even though I have considered it. However, I am so fascinated by the medical world, so I have no idea at the moment.
It seems like your interest, or lack thereof, in the computation piece is kind of the missing piece of this puzzle.
Maybe you’d get some insight from checking out a MOOC or two on this topic and see if it captures your imagination.
Examples:
https://www.edx.org/course/computational-neuroscience-neuronal-dynamics-of-cognition-0
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/brain-and-cognitive-sciences/9-66j-computational-cognitive-science-fall-2004/
You can look into combinations of those. For instance at William & Mary, they have a social networks and political psychology (SNAPP) lab where they research the intersections of psychology and topics like diplomacy. There are a lot of ways that you can combine those topics to explore those interests.