I honestly feel like I’m in the worst position ever. I fiercely love and am good at both botany and history. And it has to be either one or the other: natural history or the history of botany or whatever sound so boring. I’ll never finish my bachelor’s if I don’t choose. I’ve been in school off and on for 3 years now and it’s beyond frustrating. I volunteer at the campus conservatory and it makes for some of the best moments of my week, and I thoroughly enjoy lectures and labs. I do local African American history research in my spare time and inhale 1 book per week (not assigned) on AA history,and I ace all my history courses with flying colors. Why couldn’t I have been born in, like, the 1800s, when people were generalists who studied multiple fields?
Just double major or get a major in one and minor in the other.
If you are interested in natural history, I recomend you get your botany degree and go into paleontology- the study of the history of life. finnish your botany degree and try to do masters and pHd in paleontology. It is a good combination og botany and history.
Most people are interested in multiple things, probably interested enough that they could’ve majored in something else and been perfectly content. I majored in psychology, but I love reading about history and could’ve been really happy majoring in that, too (and probably 3 or 4 other things). At some point…you just have to pick one.
Really, you could flip a coin and let that make your decision if it’s so difficult. It doesn’t mean that you can’t study the other field and continue to read your one book per week, or do the research in your spare time, or volunteer in the conservatory. You can do all of those things regardless of what major you pick.
But yeah, why don’t you double major? This is one of the classic cases for double majoring.
**I also wouldn’t necessarily advocate for getting a PhD in paleontology. First of all, because that’s for a very specific kind of career path that you have to be interested in. Second of all, you said that you’re not really interested in natural history, and paleontology is natural history. Thirdly, you usually study paleontology in another degree program, like geosciences or Earth sciences.
However, that does spark a different idea. Are you potentially interested in how humans and plants co-exist? There are some programs for that, too - environmental science comes to mind, but also geology/the geosciences/earth science and geography.