Would you mind telling me what’s your major, and what did you plan to do with it career-wise? Also, do you have any regrets? There are so many options, but only one choice.
I majored in psychology in college. (I graduated from college 8.5 years ago, so I have some hindsight to share. LOL.) I originally intended to major in political science and then sociology, but the classes for both of those weren’t super interesting to me, although sociology came close. So I took General Psychology for Majors the next semester. I loved it and decided to be a psychology major that semester. I considered a math minor, but I dropped it 2-3 classes in because I decided I didn’t want to do problem sets. I had a professor try to convince me to major in computer science, but I turned it down.
I still originally planned to go to law school. Then I started volunteering in schools, and I changed my mind and decided I wanted to be a high school guidance counselor. So when I saw an ad in the department to be a research assistant for a developmental psychologist, I decided to do it, 1) because I thought it would give me some interesting experience to go on my application for M.Ed programs in counseling and 2) because it paid money and I needed money.
Well, I got hooked on that too - I loved doing research and changed my mind and decided to be a researcher for a living! I was interested in education research, when two things happened. One, I got into a fellowship program for undergraduates that focused on mental health. Around the same time, I saw a poster in my dorm that proclaimed that black women were 23 times more likely to get HIV than white women. That shocked me - I’m black. So I got interested in doing HIV research and I decided I wanted to become a public health researcher for the federal government, focusing on HIV. I applied to public health programs in my senior year and got into a public health + social psychology PhD program, which I started right after college.
How my career plans shifted over the 6 years of my PhD program and the one year postdoctoral fellowship I did is pretty complicated - but long story short, let’s just say that I got a bit disillusioned and bored with the way research was conducted in academia and to a certain extent within the federal government. Most of all, I wanted a fast-paced environment where I could do research that had immediate impact. While in grad school, I did a six-month internship at a market research firm, researching video game sales. I’ve been playing video games since I was a kid, so that was really interesting to me. That was pretty cool - I liked the work, the work style, the corporate life, my cubicle, pretty much all of it. That pretty much directly led to me deciding to go into corporate tech research, which is what I do now - I work as a user researcher for a big video game company in a big tech company. It’s still mostly psychology, just applied and not in public health.
So let’s break this down into constituent parts:
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Often what leads you to your major and your career is random, not necessarily ordered neatly. I can make my career sound like a nice story that I planned, but in reality it was little things happening (like seeing that poster) that led from one thing to the next. For the sake of length I omitted a lot of the other careers I considered in college, but there were more of them. Even once I thought I was settled, I still thought of them - I considered applying for law school all the way up to the fall of my senior year, and even got an application from Emory before I decided against it. Even now that I am in a career I really like, there’s no guarantees I’ll stay in this one forever.
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I mostly followed my interests, and let them lead me into majors and careers, not the other way around. Not that I wasn’t focused on practicality to a certain extent, but I was unwilling to sacrifice doing something I at least liked just to pursue something more remunerative.
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You’ll change your mind a lot and that’s okay. You’ll even change your mind after you’ve started your career. Most people switch careers several times during their life. I actually worked in public health for a year before I decided not to anymore.
Do I have regrets? No, not really. I like the way my life and my career turned out. I think there were things I would do differently, with the benefit of hindsight. I think I would’ve minored in computer science, and learned to code, or at least kept that math minor. I think I would’ve gone to work after college instead of getting a PhD, and I think I would’ve gotten a master’s in human-computer interaction or statistics instead of getting a PhD. But that’s all just hindsight. I made the best choices I could with the information that I had at the time, given my interests and where the world was.
For example - I started college in 2004, after the dot-com bubble but before most of the social media you use even existed and before computer science was the hot new career. Computer science back then meant working for a productivity company on something probably obscure and boring - or at least that’s how many people imagined it. That’s why I turned down the computer science major. Few people could’ve predicted it would’ve blown up the way it did.
So that’s really all you can do - make the best decisions you can with the information you have at the time. You can’t live your life wondering if you’ll regret your next step or not. Maybe you will, but I don’t know anyone who doesn’t at least wish they did one thing in their past differently.
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My parent forced me to take my major. I hated it from the first week or so, but I couldn’t get out of it. The course of study was so intense that if I changed majors I’d have to make up credits. I think I had gotten my feet under me to challenge this like end of first semester. Again, because it was intensive, I would have had to make up several other courses by that time. That would mean another year of school, which I could not afford. No, my parent wasn’t paying a dime toward my schooling. In fact I was helping parent pay for electrical bills to keep the lights on. Even so, I had no choice but to continue in this major. I spent the rest of my life thus far attempting to get out of the disciplne but the discipline is so rare, that sadly that’s my most employable asset. I still hate what I do. every day I go to work hating what I do. Every day I feel like a charlatan. Everyone around me thinks what I do is really cool. I hate it and have hated it for 30 years. As soon as my child graduates IN A MAJOR THAT SHE LOVES I will quit my job forever.
Never ever ever force your child into something that they hate. This is their LIFE. Let them find their passion.
@Dustyfeathers what did you major in?
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For me I cross referenced things I enjoy working in with the types of salaries those majors tend to enjoy. I didn’t want to have a tiny salary but I also didn’t want to work in a job I hated
The reason for this is that having a higher salary would make it easier for me to do things that I enjoy with my life outside of working. Things such as traveling, having multiple expensive cars, eating fancy food often, having a nice house.