<p>I'm a freshman. Now that I've settled into college life, I need to figure out what my major will be.</p>
<p>Everyone says to go for my passion, but I don't really have an academic passion. I'd rather watch sports than do homework. I applied for the engineering school b/c I thought I liked math and science in high school, but now I wonder whether I really just hated those subjects less than humanities.</p>
<p>Math is too abstract, I don't care what the tangent plane to a function looks like. If I ever need to know, Mathematica can compute that much better than I can. Chemistry is slightly interesting but is very hard for me conceptually, and I have never liked science labs at all. In high school I was good at these subjects but here my classmates are much smarter and I don't feel I have much competitive advantage.</p>
<p>I'm in some business classes too. I seem to be very good at accounting, it comes naturally to me. But it doesn't seem very interesting, and I'm not sure if I'd get into the business school as a transfer.</p>
<p>The one high school class I really liked was AP Statistics. I wrote a lot of calculator programs to do simulations. This makes me wonder if I'd like CS, but that subject might be too theoretical.</p>
<p>(Also, I could graduate in three years with CS or accounting, engineering would take every inch of four)</p>
<p>My adviser hasn't been very helpful, so I wondered if you guys could ask me some questions that might help me figure things out.</p>
<p>Thank you!</p>
<p>There are many books in the library and articles and career tests online that you can read. You can talk to professors in different depts, the placement office at your school and upperclassmen. You can join clubs in different subjects to learn about them. You say accounting isn’t interesting but you are only in an intro class. I’ve had a long, varied career in business and I have an accounting degree. It is definitely not boring.</p>
<p>I’ve taken career tests. They aren’t too useful because a) some majors can still lead to less-related careers and b) the results are pretty broad.</p>
<p>Right now I like accounting because I can do it well and easily. Nothing about the subject itself draws me in right now. I can take another semester to dig a little deeper, but there’s a limit to how much time I have to invest.</p>
<p>Thanks for the response + suggestions.</p>
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<p>Have you considered majoring in statistics?</p>
<p>Also, writing programs to simulate probability and statistics is like 75% of what industrial engineering/operations research does. Sort of like Engineering Statistics, the major.</p>
<p>I’ve actually had some exposure to stats (my father works with statisticians) and I don’t find processing or interpreting data too interesting.</p>
<p>What I liked more was finding logical steps to make the process easier, not so much the actual data analysis.</p>
<p>Industrial engineering at my school is part of the MechE department, I think. I don’t want to take core ME classes, EE is more interesting to me.</p>
<p>Thanks for your help so far. My school’s academic planning office recommends making a pro/con list for different majors, so I’ll try that and return later.</p>
<p>What school are you at? I find it hard to believe that industrial and mechanical engineers would take substantially similar coursework, so much so that IE would be a specialization in ME.</p>
<p>I’m at a state flagship university with a very large research presence.</p>
<p>IEs here take all the same required courses as MEs but have different technical electives. I think the program was originally grounded in the manufacturing end of IE, not operations research.</p>
<p>You could do either EE or CS and focus on something like machine learning (it tends to use a lot of statistics).</p>