Heyy, thank you for reading this, here’s my dilemma explained in a short grammarless paragraph:
I am a junior with an unweighted 3.7 GPA (I spent freshman year fooling around in non-honor courses - I still regret it), in order to make this up I spent my summer cramming for both the sat and the ACT. I took them a couple of weeks ago and I got perfect score for the SAT and a 34 for the ACT. I am the president and Founder of the Ethiopian - Eritrean Student association, and am the president of our schools MUN, and am active in many other clubs. Sophomore year, with the help of my Tech Savvy friend (I’m more economics/business wired) we created a website that offers homework help to students at a monthly subscription. While business has been a lot slower than we thought it would be, We currently have 3 full-time employees and have made quite a lot in profit. Although I have done all this, I still have no idea on what I want to major on, or even where I want to go. All I’ve figured out is that although Im good at what I do, I don’t want to go into a business related field. Both my parents are pressuring me, (the news of the ethiopian student that created a skin cancer healing soap does not help) to either go into economics or medicine (my brothers in med school).
At this point i’m on the verge of a breakdown, I don’t know what to do, or why I’m even trying this hard…
It’s hard to say what you’d enjoy as a major or career because you don’t really give any insight into that! You say that you’re more “economics and business wired” than some friends but that you also don’t want to go into business. Your (impressive) experience setting up a business does beg the question to me on why not - there are lots of concentrations within business to consider and it seems to me to be a somewhat softer and more well rounded avenue that can be hireable. But I’ll take you at your word on that.
Lots of general avenues beg questions here - do you prefer harder and more black/white numbers? Or more that you want to help people? But obviously what you need to consider is - what do you like? What high school classes have been most interesting to you? I’ve always told my kids and mentees that whatever you choose to do, if you work hard and make yourself indispensable - you can usually go far.
You can be an economics major pre-med in college.
However, do you think you actually have an interest in economics or medicine?
Hi, sorry I was very vague in my description. I spent alot of time working on this website last school year, allowing it to generate around 80k in profit by about june. Thinking back on it I spent way to much late nights and weekends and pretty much whatever free time I had into it, leaving me feeling generally exhausted in every other field. I think this is what shaped my desire to not work in business related fields, since sophomore year, anything to do with profits/revenue/microeconomics I have lost so much passion for. I am a very number oriented person, but at the same time to work in a field that I can cooperate with many people and be very social. On which classes intrest me, other than biology, most of the classes I do take I don’t pay attention, I have very strict african parents that forced me to take an intro for every subject in the summer, so that what we learned in school was just review.
On the other hand, Biology and robotics has been so far my favorite classes this year, although I am not very great in memorizing definitions and biological systems or creating large intricate technological designs, both of these class have Definity challenged me in a way where I am so fascinated with everything I learn, I spend hours reading and taking notes just for the fun of it. I feel like its way too late to try to shift my attention to stem related, as I have spent the last couple of years delved so deep in the business world.
First of all, relax. You are doing well.
A perfect score on the SAT is impressive. I was a math major at MIT, so I did know lots of students who got perfect scores on the math part of the regular SAT exam. However, I do not know if I have ever even met anyone who got a perfect score on the overall SAT or on the English part of the SAT.
Your successful business is similarly impressive. One thing to think about: What part of this process do you enjoy the most?
MOST students change their major after they start university. This is very common. Personally, as a math major, at the point where I graduated from university I still had no idea what I wanted to do with my career or my life. I figured it out over time, with the help of a few jobs in various fields. Most people who end up successful try a bit of this and a bit of that before they figure out what they want to do.
Quite a few high school students know what they want to do. Then six months later they have changed their mind and want to do something else. Then they get to university and take a few classes and change their mind again. Then years later they find that it all worked out just fine in spite of the fact that they changed their mind a few times.
Your freshman year of high school will be much less important compared to your sophomore and junior years. Some universities do not even consider your grades from your freshman year (the various Universities of California and as far as I know all universities in Canada come to mind as some examples). Even at universities that do consider your freshman year grades, improvement over time in grades and/or improvement over time in the rigor of the courses that you take will help your university admissions quite a bit.
I think that you might want to read the “applying sideways” blog on the MIT admissions web site. The point of the blog, as I understand it, is that you should do what is right for you, and do it well. If you belong at MIT this is likely to help you get into MIT. If you belong somewhere else (the vast majority of strong students belong somewhere else) then doing what is right for you will still help you get accepted into a university that is a good fit for you.
You should also keep in mind that there are hundreds of very good universities and colleges in the US. You do not need to attend MIT or Harvard to do well in life. You also do not need to get a bachelor’s degree from a highly ranked or famous university to get accepted to a strong graduate program. If you look at the various students enrolled in highly ranked graduate programs, you will find that they got their bachelor’s degree at a very wide range of universities. Finding a university that is a good fit for you and that you can afford is important. Attending a big name school for your bachelor’s degree is not.
Students do very well with degrees in a wide range of fields. I have mostly worked in high tech, so I mostly know people who majored in computer science, engineering, or mathematics. However, I know successful people with degrees in multiple other fields.
By the way, I do have a daughter who works in biotech, and who has done cancer research. An MIT researcher once defined research as “you might fail”. Research takes a lot of patience. Thomas Edison when he was working to try to invent the light bulb said that he hadn’t failed some large number of times, he had just successfully identified a lot of approaches that do not work. Cancer researchers similarly spend most of their time successfully identifying approaches that do not work. Biotech research can be a good career for some people. It might be the right career for a daughter. It would never have been the right career for me. We each contribute to the world in different ways.
My biotech daughter started university as a languages major. She switched her major after one year. Having a year with a different major did not stop her from doing well in biotech.
As a math major, I knew several students who were also math majors who changed their career path after getting their bachelor’s degrees. One went into acoustics. The last that I heard he was working to make European cars quieter. Another went to law school. Lots of people change their main focus at several points in their careers.
For now, get some sleep. Relax. You are doing well. Over the next few years (including four years of university) you will be exposed to a lot of options. You will figure out over time what is the right option for you.
No, it is not too late. Are you on-track to get as far as pre-calculus while still in high school? Will you have two science classes by the time that you graduate high school? If so then you are on track. Jumping ahead is not needed to do well in STEM fields.
Being fascinated by everything that you learn sounds like someone who could do well in a STEM field.
Again this sounds like someone who could do well in a STEM field, if that is what you decide that you want to do.
You are still young. If there is some student somewhere who is one year ahead of you in math, that does not matter. You have plenty of time to catch up. Life is not a sprint. Life is a marathon.
I know multiple people who have been very successful. As far as I know, none of them took the shortest path to get from wherever they started to being successful. They tried a bit of this and a bit of that, and eventually figured it out. You will figure it out also.
Since you love biology and robotics, what about bioengineering?
Many students, even in college, aren’t sure what they want to study. It’s OK! Maybe look at LACs or universities where you don’t have to declare your major until second semester sophomore year, and where it’s easy to change majors. There are plenty of schools where that will be possible.
Adding to this…many many many college students switch majors and some multiple times.
Avoid schools for which you have to apply as a specific major, or those where it’s difficult to enter a major of interest if you’re not admitted in that major to begin with. Most colleges do not require students to declare a major till the end of sophomore year. Look for flexible options in general studies requirements that allow you to pick classes that interest you across various disciplines. You’re supposed to experiment and try new things – you might have some ideas about your interests, but as a high school junior (even as a very accomplished one) you don’t even know what you don’t know about potential areas of study. So be patient and explore. That’s what you’re supposed to do.
Just to put this in the plainest possible terms:
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Apply to a selection of affordable “arts and sciences” schools that you can see yourself enjoying. Such a school will have both Economics and also Biology and other science majors, and it will be where the pre-med kids are located too. This could be the whole college, or a subdivision of a college, but just make sure that the Arts & Sciences unit has general admissions (meaning it doesn’t admit by major and you actually declare later);
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Although I am a parent myself so this is sort of violating the code–tell your parents the closest thing to the truth that will allow this to happen;
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Once you are there, explore your interests and career options, and then declare whatever major you like.
The bottom line is this is your life, and your parents should not be trying to micromanage it.
You are at most 17. You do not need to have chosen your life’s work by 11th grade. Study what you like, now, and in the first year or two of college. Go to a big university with lots of majors, so you can explore.
Among biology, business, economics, and robotics, robotics is the toughest major or minor to find as an undergraduate.
Consider:
Carnegie Mellon University (also has an outstanding undergraduate business major)
Stanford University
Caltech (California Institute of Technology)
Cornell University offers a robotics program during the Summer
University of Washington at Seattle
Colorado School of Mines
Oregon State University
If you decide that robotics is not your primary area of interest, then look at schools with strong business programs as almost all colleges & universities offer biology & economics.
Life is about choices, not options.
Please don’t stress. You are doing exactly what you should be doing at your age. There is no reason you need to have chosen what you want to study right now. Hopefully, in three years, you will be ready to choose a major. Until then, just keep your grades up and enjoy your teen years. They go by quickly!
In other words, a perfectly normal HS junior.
The saying goes that the biggest major for incoming college students is: “Undecided”.
And even among those who enter with a major, a large percentage will switch majors by the second year of college - so they just didn’t realize/admit that they too had been “Undecided”.
Once people take courses in college, and hear about fields of studies by their peers, they often find themselves attracted to a completely different field than they would have ever imagined - or even heard about in high school. This happens all the time - and this might be your path, a perfectly normal and expected path.
In fact, maybe because you are able to excel in many areas, it might be particularly difficult to discern which topic or two to concentrate on, without having more in-person experiences at university.
Yes, large universities, or most liberal arts colleges, that will happily welcome the “honestly undecided” students ought to be a good home for you.
Definitely don’t have to choose a major now, but I understand wanting to. DD’19 was always thinking about it then.
If you do want to poke around at some ideas, go to some colleges’ websites and read through the list of majors. When one sounds interesting, go to their catalog and read the course descriptions for that major. See if it still seems interesting then. It helped DD. Then she went to a college that had every major she had considered, though she was pretty set on hers by the time she arrived. It was one she hadn’t even considered until I was reading random majors off a postcard her future school had sent.
I went to a small liberal arts college. A friend and I entered as non-STEM majors and took the same intro to biology class geared for non-STEM types.
Well, she loved it. And switched her major to biology. And went on to get a graduate degree in plant biology. And still works in the field decades later.
So, no, it isn’t too late to switch to STEM. And it is okay to be undecided.
As a high school teacher, I think I understand how you feel. You’ve dedicated great effort in your business and it is successful. I would suggest that you put it down and look around, for a little while. You can let the business coast for a couple of weeks and it will be fine.
Take 2-3 days NOT focusing on any work beyond normal school work, use this time to observe what other students do and what other opportunities exist in your community. Try to picture yourself participating in those activities, and estimate how you might feel, then pick 2-3 that you may like.
Spend the next several days participating in some activities you may like, or with the people you like to hang out with, then imaging doing these things as intensely as you did with your business. You should also locate a couple of people who have dedicated great efforts in what they do and share your experiences with each other.
I have seen many students who have spent all their spare time and energy on basketball (golf, robotics, dance, debate, science bowl, piano, etc.) to the extend that they felt exhausted and wanted a change. After taking a break, most of the times they returned to the activity that exhausted them. I think it has something to do with the positive feedback and satisfaction they receive. Those who did not return to the original activity/EC, based on my observation, were kids who did it because “my mom told me to”.
so, take a break. you’re only 1/4 into your junior year. you have plenty of time to think about what you want to study. many students change major in college, and many people in workforce change their careers, that’s what creative people do.
I laughed when I read this, partly because it is entirely correct, and partly because exactly this happened with my younger daughter. She could have almost written the original post 7 or 8 years ago.
I know one single person who knew that they wanted to do as a junior in high school, and stuck with it through university, and stuck with it through their career. Other that this one person, there appears to be two types of high school juniors: Ones who do not know what they want to do, and ones who do know but who are going to change their mind.
So my younger daughter in high school had no idea what she wanted to do with her life. As a junior in high school she did express concern to me that her friends knew what they wanted to do, but she had no idea. I pointed out that her friends might know what they want to do, but in six months or a year they will change their mind, and we all work it out over time. This daughter applied to universities not knowing what she wanted to do, but applied as a languages major. After one year she switched to be a biology major. However, this required that she take four lab courses at the same time. The obvious thought is: Is this crazy? Four lab courses at once??? She discovered that she loves lab work and is very good at it. She went on to take as many lab courses as she possibly could for the rest of university, graduated, and right now as I type this she is in a biotech lab doing cancer research.
She did not figure this out until she was part way through university. That is probably earlier than most people figure it out.
@mara.k you too will figure this out over time. To me it sounds like you are doing very well, and are thinking about issues that very intelligent and thoughtful students will think about from time to time.
My daughter went from Costume /theater design to Cultural Anthropology with a poli Sci minor to applying for Speech Pathology graduate school. Not everyone’s paths are linear.
For the op. All great advise above.
Take a few of your interests and Google the words together. Play around with this. You will be amazed at the types of careers that come up. See if those interests you.
Maybe creating start ups or companies is your own thing. You can hire people to look after the day to day issues. But at this point you are learning. Learning how to create a business and interact with people, customers etc. Solve problems as you go. Sounds like STEM to me.
Good Luck.
You’re feelings are totally valid and normal. I think your biggest hurdle will be to convince your parents that you don’t need to have your life planned out at 17.
From your post, the one thing that jumped out at me is that it sounds like you might enjoy biomedical engineering. Not only does it combine numbers and biology, but there are also many business opportunities as well.
Perhaps check out WPI’s website. See what majors interest you. It is a very collaborative school that requires projects at are interdisciplinary, has a fairly open curriculum and requires internships. While I’m not saying that’s the perfect school for you, I think it might give you some ideas of how different disciplines can work together and what opportunities are available in certain areas of study. It would not be unusual for someone to study robotics, biomedical engineering and business. Or delve into financial technology, entrepreneurship, or economics. Everything is a possibility, just look for schools where either you don’t have to pick a major or it is easy to change and that offers things that interest you.