How did you/will you pick your major?

Student Lounge College Life
1

<p>Wasn't sure where to post this...</p>

<p>Anyways, I'm a junior and am looking at colleges. Now, I don't want to waste my money or my parent's money, and I am really unsure on how to pick a major. Everyone says, go for your strengths! Go for what you enjoy! But what about pay? There's so many factors, and as a HS junior I don't really know if I have the tools to make a decision that will affect THE REST OF MY LIFE. I'm thinking electrical engineering, but I know very little about the field. My dad is an engineer and I know engineering is a good career, that's basically it. He's pushing me to go into medicine, haha...</p>

<p>Maybe I'm just not informed enough? Should I get out and volunteer more? It's hard with sports and schoolwork and jobs...</p>

<p>I guess I'm nervous and scared to make the wrong decision. I really don't want to switch majors and spend more money and time at school.</p>

2

<p>In all sincerity, it’ll just happen. As a HS junior you should definitely be thinking about it, but don’t worry about sketching it out in stone and then signing with your blood. You have time to figure it out!</p>

<p>Personally, I knew from the get-go that I wanted to go into writing, so I searched schools accordingly. It turned out that the university nearest to my home had one of the best programs in the country for a specific kind of writing program, and since they also gave out fantastic financial aid and merit awards, I chose to do that.</p>

<p>Initially, I went in as a Writing and Rhetoric and Math double-major because I was told I was good at math and that they needed more female mathematicians in the world.</p>

<p>Where do I stand now? I stand as a Writing and Rhetoric and French Language and Literature double-major. I dropped Calc 1 my first semester because I realized it wasn’t really what I wanted to do, and I likewise fell in love with French after taking a course to fulfill a requirement. I then proceeded to talk to my professors about my performance and future avenues, and after getting swooped away by the notion of studying abroad and talking to even more professors in the French Department, I officially declared my second major.</p>

<p>Sometimes you just have to go with your heart. See what interests you and what you enjoy. If you still like it when you finally arrive to college, then stick with it. If after your first year or two you realize that you don’t like it anymore or that you can’t see yourself doing it for the rest of your life, then change. Soul search and find out what it is that makes you tick and makes you smile.</p>

<p>As even a senior in HS, I NEVER would have thought I’d be studying French and studying abroad. French was just a silly little elective that no one took seriously. But my life changed and I went with the flow, and here I am. As one who’s double-majoring in two humanities subjects I’m of course not in the safest position for landing a job, but that’s a choice that I made. I’m good at what I study and I have sincere passions for them, so that alone drives me to do my best. That feeling should hopefully carry over into whatever you end up doing in life, so take that into consideration when you choose.</p>

<p>Good luck!</p>

3

<p>Thanks, that’s really helpful and well thought-out!</p>

4

<p>I wasn’t academically the strongest in mathematics. I’m still not. However, I do as about as good as the best of them at my university. I’m lazy by nature, though. Let me preface with this by saying I am a first generation college student. So, no one in my family besides me has ever gone to college. I didn’t really have anyone that I could seek advice on what to do. My parents were never very encouraging of me in getting an education. They assumed I would enlist in the military.</p>

<p>I think in high school I had aspirations of becoming a journalist or doing creative writing in college. I wanted to enroll at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces (where almost everyone I knew in high school ended up going). Well, that didn’t happen because I transferred high schools when my dad decided 22 years of the Air Force was enough and we moved to California so he could work at Lockheed Martin. </p>

<p>I didn’t have any friends. I was pretty much a loner. </p>

<p>I had a miserable experience in Algebra II. I just didn’t “get it”. Same thing went for geometry. I didn’t get it. So, I got C’s in those classes. I swore after I finished Algebra II as a junior that I’d never take a mathematics class ever again in my life. Then, I started to miss mathematics. I don’t know why that happened, but I started to teach myself a bit of trigonometry. It was really confusing to me. Then, I gave up. I thought I’d never be able to do mathematics. </p>

<p>Well, I read a physics book by a very popular physicist one day after I had wanted to go to the library and bury my head in some books as an aspiring English major. That totally rocked my world and after I graduated I had every intention of becoming a physicist. I had to take a gap year, but I went to the community college with my father about an hour away (the only one close to me) and took their placement exam. I got a perfect score on the verbal portion and I scored into Pre-Algebra. I tried to argue with the counselor, but he said I would have to start at the lowest level offered at the community college. I came away from that very discouraged and basically wasted the rest of the year playing video games and just generally doing nothing with my life. I couldn’t find work. I had applied to over 35 jobs with no success. Still, I loved mathematics and physics and wanted to pursue it. I started studying it on my own. I found Khan Academy when it wasn’t popular and went through all of his math videos. I looked for every possible resource out there to kill that placement test. I did so many problems I was obsessed. I did problems on my way the second time my dad took me! I was so nervous. I thought “What if I failed again?”</p>

<p>I entered into the testing center and I told him I’d need to just retake the math portion. He gave me scratch paper and I got to work. 4 hours later, I had placed into Calculus.</p>

<p>When I came out, I handed my scratch paper to the guy at the testing center and my dad said “That took you long enough! The guy said it would take you thirty minutes at most!” Apparently, only 3% at the community college tested into College Algebra. We had a good laugh about that and I went to the counselor the next time armed with my new placement scores. He didn’t remember me, but I remembered him. He congratulated me and I decided to enroll in Trigonometry, Precalculus, and Statistics because I had never taken those classes before so I could be prepared for Calculus. I got straight A’s and got into the honors program at my community college. I decided that I no longer wanted to be a physics major. I wanted to be a math major! I remember the first day of my Calculus class. Someone turned to me in the front and said “How many more math classes do you have to take?” And I replied with a smile, “I’m going all the way!”</p>

<p>Then, I met some people from high school that were a bad influence on me and totally derailed all of the success I had. I never tried in any of my classes, I always skipped class, I was honestly a terrible student, and I eventually got kicked out of the honors program. I had wanted to go to UCLA or UC Berkeley. That dream was gone. </p>

<p>The so-called friends I had were drug addicts and they all dropped out of community college. Last I heard they’re drug dealers. That was a really dark point in my life. While at the time it was fun to be carefree and wild, I entirely regret wasting potential. When they left, I had no friends again, but I realized I really needed to do well to transfer. I took some W’s and got a good amount of A’s, B’s and C’s those bad years. I pulled my grades up my third year of community college to mostly A’s, made supportive friends in my classes, got study groups going, and was back on the right track. My dad ran into some real financial trouble so I couldn’t afford to go to a UC, so I ended up coming to Cal Poly Pomona. </p>

<p>I struggled my first quarter as a math major. By second quarter, I was ready to give up and switch into Political Science or Physics. By third quarter of my junior year, I found out I had a knack for proofs and everything just started to click in my Applied Math classes. I’ve been kicking butt ever since without really trying too hard (just hard enough, though) and so my GPA has continued to climb. I’ve seen many students struggle and fail many classes in my major, especially with the hardest ones. Weirdly enough, I did the best in the hardest ones. </p>

<p>I’m graduating in June. This is my last quarter and will be my easiest quarter. I’m just rounding out my degree with statistics classes since I’ve taken my theoretical classes and I’m trying to get into a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering program (fingers crossed). </p>

<p>So that’s how I became a math major.</p>

5

<p>As a freshman in high school, I took a class in biology and loved every minute of it. It got me interested in biological research. I started college with a major in molecular, cell, and developmental biology. In my first year, I actually only took one class remotely related to my major (the rest were GE and math), and it was the first of a four-term life sciences survey class sequence. It was about evolution, ecology, and biodiversity.</p>

<p>I hated college and was bored out of my mind in all of my classes, no matter how easy or how difficult. The one thing I never stopped enjoying was writing code, which I had been doing in my free time for years. So I thought “what if I could write code and do schoolwork at the same time?” Which got me thinking about studying computer science.</p>

<p>After researching education options and career options for CS majors, I decided that it truly looked like the most appealing option for me. Taking CS classes with programming assignments confirmed my suspicion that the opportunity to write code was the push I needed in order to become motivated in school. And as my classes became more and more theoretical, I enjoyed them even more.</p>

<p>I stuck with CS because it is interesting, I enjoy the work, the job outlook and pay are some of the best for any area of study, and the field of software development has high upward mobility. I love the DIY ethic embedded into the computer science and software development culture. The experts and celebrities are not the people who went to elite schools and work at elite companies, but the people who experiment with new and exciting technology and write open source software in their free time. My brain is wired to be a part of that culture.</p>

6

<p>I’m surprised at the deep responses, thank you for sharing!</p>

7

<p>All throughout High School I wanted to be an Engineer. I got accepted into Penn State as an Engineering major. Then during orientation, the summer before my Freshman year, I had a change of heart decided to do Finance. I had to transfer to being undecided because there was a 3.5 GPA requirement to be accepted into the business school and also Finance (I currently didn’t have a GPA because I didn’t start classes yet). During the Fall semester my Econ professor was so inspirational and the subject just clicked with me. I enjoyed Econ so much that I choose another Econ class and that professor was my favorite and so on. I decided to major in Economics because my favorite professors were Economics professors. The subject is also fascinating to me. </p>

8

<p>When I was initially doing my college search, I wanted to do one thing - make medicine. So what I needed to do was find a degree that would teach me that. After talking to people in biochem, pharmaceutical science and engineering, I intended on doing chemical engineering. This was late in my junior year. </p>

<p>Fast forward to senior year. I chose my college because it has a general first year engineering program. I still wasn’t sure if biological or chemical engineering would get me where I wanted to go. </p>

<p>After my first year of college, I knew that I still liked chemistry and wanted to make medicine. The idea of discovering something new intrigued me. </p>

<p>Second semester sophomore year came and plot twist… I was unhappy as a chemical engineer. It was just a lot of theory and math. I had no idea what was going on and couldn’t see where this degree was taking me. Ochem bored me, and that’s the basis of pharmaceuticals so I was lost. </p>

<p>My college has a program in Agricultural engineering that had a ton of interesting sounding classes. I chose the environmental and natural resources track, and I’ve never been happier in college. I’m still graduating on time thanks to an 18 credit semester in the fall and classes last summer. </p>

<p>Now I’m looking at a summer internship at a public garden and potentially graduate school. Basically, the summation of this whole posut is that major in what you think you’d like and if you don’t like it, you can change it. There’s no shame in that. Dreams change. </p>

9

<p>I grew up on a steady diet of Crocodile Hunter and Kratt brothers. My dad was in the medical field so science was always encouraged. Some kids’ parents let them stay up late to watch a sporting event. Mine let me stay up late only to watch documentaries about space or dinosaurs.</p>

<p>I got jobbed in middle school. My music teacher kept giving me C’s because I wouldn’t participate in talent day. Scornful but determined, I promised myself I would be be valedictorian in high-school, and I did it! But at great cost. I forwent my social life and was viewed as a nerd. One day I was talking about superficiality with my pops and he mentioned epigenetics–and how you could alter the expression of your genome. It was only tangentially related, but I became enthralled and thought it would be a pretty cool thing to study.</p>

<p>So now I’m a genetics major, but I actually do some environmental sciences stuff on the side.</p>

<p>Basically, I’m all about bringing the woolly mammoth back to life and making designer babies a thing.</p>

10

<p>I knew I wanted a “brain-related” major because I thought I was going to be a neurosurgeon, so I planned on going to JHU as a Cognitive Science major. But I had a crisis before freshman year of college even started. My parents had been <em>telling</em> me that I would be “the next Ben Carson,” but I finally started to realize that maybe I couldn’t be a doctor, and maybe I didn’t want to. After hours and days and weeks of obsessing, I decided that I would take things one step at a time, and pick fall courses to explore different areas and see what majors I really liked.</p>

<p>Fall semester, I took a Public Health course, an Anthropology class (about children, to potentially create my own Child Development major), an Applied Math class, and a Computer Science course. Realized PH and Anthropology were too broad and history-politics-cultural for me. Loved my AM course. I did well in the CS course, but I realized programming is time-consuming and requires a lot of patience I do not have. I tailored my major ideas to more math and science-related ones. I realized I still wanted to major in something brain-related</p>

<p>Intersession, I took a Music Cognition course and a Medical Imaging course. Realized CogSci and Neuroscience bored me to deathhhh (I realized I don’t care how people learn or process information, nor could I talk about the parts of the brain and their connections for two hours). Medical Imaging was a little too much Physics, too much CS, not enough math. </p>

<p>JHU has a Neuroscience major, Psych major, Cognitive Science major, and Behavioral Biology major, so I was lucky enough to have more brain-related options. Decided to do pre-med (for), so BB was my best chance to do pre-med requirements <em>and</em> take interesting Psych classes. I was really sad about giving up the Applied Math, though, until my advisor told me I could squish it in! </p>

<p>Final Choice: Behavioral Biology and Applied Math</p>

<p>Next Step: Pre-med or not? </p>

<p>Advice: The best way to figure out what you want to do is try out a bunch of stuff. You really learn what you do and do not like, which interests are not important enough to pursue further and which are. Unfortunately, advisors tell you that you can explore for, like, a year before you actually make a choice. But the longer you take, you really <em>will</em> be worse off. </p>

<p>Drawbacks:

  1. You can’t take as many electives later (which is fine with me; I’m content to take only math, science, and psych courses for the next three years).
  2. If you’re pre-med, like me potentially, and don’t have much AP credit, you’ll have to squeeze things like Chem, Physics, Orgo, etc. together in scary ways, like I will… @-) </p>
11

<p>I am not sure yet! This is a good question though. You can check out my post on this forum if you like.</p>