I heard this many, many times: “What do you plan on majoring in?”
And tbh I don’t know.
I’m currently a sophomore in HS. At school, we would do these ‘tests’ to help us decide what we want to pursue, but it was always absolutely useless. My results were jobs/majors that I didn’t think would benefit me (financially)
How did you guys decide? What did you decide? Was it purely because of personal interests or money based?
For me it was the intersection of personal interests and money. I wanted to make enough money to support my passions and hobbies, but I didn’t want to hate my job. I hadn’t really decided what major I wanted to pursue until after I had dropped out of community college.
First of all, you’re a sophomore in high school…it is way too early for people to be asking you this question (although not too early for you to think about it, if you want). If they do ask, you can just smile and say “I’m not really sure yet! Right now, I’m just focused on exploring my interests and finishing high school.” Preferably in a smug voice.
In my case, I decided my major long before I decided my career, simply because I was interested in it. I liked thinking about how people behaved and thought, so I knew I wanted a social science major. I decided against political science because the courses seemed boring to me at the time, and against anthropology because I didn’t like the research methods or the theories used. So I started out a sociology major, but when I took a class, it was close but just not what I wanted. So I took psychology the following semester and got hooked.
I decided on my career the same way - I tried things, ruled out things I didn’t like, did more of the things I did like and slowly found my way around to what I do now. It was partially driven by interests and partially driven by money (for example, I deliberately avoided certain careers because I knew they didn’t make enough money to support the lifestyle I wanted, and I knew I cared about that.) And you don’t have to do any one thing forever - I started my career doing research in public health, and now I work in technology. (And I make the same or more as a lot of software developers, so don’t assume that your major is deterministic of your salary - although admittedly, part of that is because I have a graduate degree.)