<p>David- you really should talk to an adviser. Part of his/her role is not just to rubber stamp your course selection, but really help you be both broad and deep in your intellectual exploration. That’s hard to do just by flipping through a course catalog. You will continue to ask these questions your whole life, but the more you learn about your chosen field, the less irrelevant your education will feel to you.</p>
<p>OP, I will just tell you what I told my son when he asked similar questions. First off, there are at least two different perspectives you should consider on what is important:
(1) what is important to you as an individual directly; and
(2) what is important to society and then to you indirectly as a member of the society.
What decisions you make in your life will always be important under (1), while they may or may not be important under (2).</p>
<p>Then with regard to the limits of human knowledge, remember that all we have in our minds are models of the universe we live in and experience, models which we share and build with others we can communicate with, and those models are finite and of limited complexity while they are designed to represent something unbounded in complexity, so they must always be gross approximations and woefully incomplete. However, we have them because they are useful in allowing us to survive as we inherited them from those who did manage to survive. All we can do is improve those models as best we can to improve our chances for survival and our quality of life.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>Get some friends together and go play some miniature golf. That’s my advice.</p>
<p>You sound like a kid whose college dreams didn’t come true. All of your life you will have to choose what games you will or won’t pay. Whether its applying to top colleges, sucking up to a boss for a promotion or taking a girl to a restaurant you really cant afford to win her interest. That’s the game of life. You choose how to play it.</p>
<p>First of all, I second talking to an adviser about your proposed schedule. I think you need to find some balance in your life. Take a course that allows you to actually enjoy what you are learning. My D took the History of Rock, and she loved it … same with Modern Architecture. Both exposed her to information that she had no idea she would enjoy so much. Senior year, when she only had one required course left, she took a class that looked at tourism in Nashville … she had a blast. And this is a serious student.</p>
<p>My 20 year old son sounds like you at times. I get it … you are trying to make sense of things, to figure it all out. What you will eventually discover is that it doesn’t make sense. We do certain things just because, and that’s okay. It all adds up to what it needs to be. I worked my rear off to get a degree at a very tough school. I had a very good career. When my first child was born, I decided to stay home. I never felt that I had wasted my time. Everything I had learned, everything I had done made me who I was … helped me to live my life in the way I wanted to live it … I like being intelligent, and my education (and the balancing act involved in getting through college) made me who I am.</p>
<p>Don’t dwell on the negative. Instead, concentrate on making the most of the experiences that present themselves to you.</p>
<p>My work is saving the world - one glass of water at a time. And I love it! (And it took me almost 60 years, and a lot of serendipity, to get there. And I learned A LOT along the way…)</p>
<p>My grandmother gave me some great advice when I was younger, probably around your age, and always asking the “big” questions.</p>
<p>She said, “keep on asking the big questions. There is nothing in the world that is more important than the big questions. In the meantime, keep doing what is right in front of you, cooking dinner, going to work, school, changing the oil in your car. There is nothing in the world that is more important than doing the work that is right in front of you.”</p>
<p>What she might have, or might not have known, she was smarter than she looked, and might have actually “known” this, was that it is while we are doing the stuff that is right in front of us that we will actually arrive at the answers to the big quesitons that are stuck in our head.</p>
<p>This is folksy version of what quantmech said, Keep a notebook.</p>
<p>Yo, dave, like you stated, in so many words, formal higher education engages a well-defined process. As you know, not everyone thrives in this environment. Highly structured professional programs such as legal, medicine and engineering have to get their products “up to spec” in a limited period of time because there are more units at the other end of the factory waiting to be processed. As an individual, you can make the choice not to be processed in this manner because this artificial method, though effective in many ways, is not for everyone. If you “step off the conveyer belt” however, the path to whatever it may be that you’re trying to get to will tend to be more difficult in some ways, and also much less predictable, but also less boring, or at least, less routinely boring. It’s easy to find trailblazers by a Google of “famous drop-outs”, but you won’t find the names of people who got lost in the wilderness and died (Donner Party, excepted, woo-hoo). Some people enjoy that near death thrill and uncertainty, and live off of it. Certain liberal arts colleges allow more experimentation with respect to avoiding the usual social indoctrinations, but the process is still highly regimented and standardized. Some students seek an out by experimentation with drugs, which I do not recommend. Others take up the bass guitar, and get chicks. Others take a year off, work on a fishing boat, or something, or go on a vision quest, hike through Siberia. In any event, you sound like you want to unplug from the Matrix. There’s nothing stopping you, actually. And there’s some real horror in the freedom. Can get high on it, too.</p>
<p>Hell, I’m going to post Robert Frost:</p>
<p>“The Road Not Taken”</p>
<p>Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;</p>
<p>Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,</p>
<p>And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.</p>
<p>I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Nobody pays attention to this part. Also, nobody who has failed to listen to Frost read this poem, realizes he said the last with great irony.</p>
<p>There is no path less taken. It makes no difference.</p>
<p>You can set out to pursue your life as an autodidact either with or without a basic education, but nobody will be ruined by a basic education, by learning some ways to think about ideas, and nobody who really loves learning ever stops, anyway. So what is four years? A blink of an eye.</p>
<p>Go to all the lectures of famous people. Go study abroad. When the students put on a play, go and see it. Take a few art classes. Learn to cook. The great Charles Simic would tell you that is the “real” secret to happiness. </p>
<p>An education need not get in the way of your learning about things. ;)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>No, humans are creatures who take information they know and apply it to find the answer to another problem whose answer they do not know. Humans are amazing!</p>
<p>David,</p>
<p>Like others said, the journey is just beginning, not ending. I think it is normal to feel kind of let down looking at the impending end of HS, and the looming summer and departure for college. I think this is normal whether you are going to the school of your dreams or just another school. The unknown is not comfortable. It is somewhat of an anticlimax to the whole of your education to date to have this decision made, and that there really are no hoops to jump through for a short while.</p>
<p>Don’t expect that you will necessarily get really into a subject in undergrad education. I don’t think there is enough time to really delve into one area. If you find what you want to really study, then it is good and you can really concentrate on it in grad school. A lot of undergrad is to explore areas that you might want to get to know better. Don’t overload your schedule. Have fun. Make friends too.</p>
<p>Good luck.</p>
<p>With deepest apologies to Robert Frost, I have always wanted to write something like this:</p>
<p>Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And happy that I could travel both,
Yet be one photon, as I should,
I raced down one as well as I could
To where it bent due to the curvature of spacetime;</p>
<p>And took the other, just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because the refractive index was lower a hair;
Though as for that, the dielectric properties there
Affected them both about the same,</p>
<p>And both that morning ahead of me lay
With equal dielectric permittivity,
Oh, I took them both the other day!
Yet doubted I’d ever come back that way,
Lacking a mirror with perfect reflectivity.</p>
<p>I shall be telling this with a psi
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took them both to travel by
And the phase difference has caused all the interference.</p>
<p>To return to the issue at hand: David, you seem to me like someone who has the natural inclinations of a scientist, and perhaps a theoretician.</p>
<p>I greatly admire the humanitarian work that mini does. But I know that I personally would be lousy at it, despite my good intentions.</p>
<p>When the time comes for you, David, to embark on a career, I think that if you pursue science with energy and seriousness of purpose, you have the opportunity to make an impact on the world, even if your work is not directly related to human health/environmental science. To give an example, the Braggs (father and son team) studied the diffraction of X-rays by salt crystals. The immediate outcome of their work was knowledge of the location of the Na+ and Cl- centers in salt–interesting, but not exactly the kind of impact that a person might hope for. However, a great deal of what we know about the structure of the molecules that are central to living beings now comes from X-ray diffraction studies. To give one example, we know the structures of the molecules responsible for blood clotting. To give another example, we know the structure of DNA itself because Rosalind Franklin took X-ray photos of it, and Francis Crick knew enough to recognize the diffraction signature of a (double) helix when Maurice Wilkins showed him Rosalind’s X-ray films. To give another example, we have information on the structures of a number of biomolecules that haven’t been crystallized yet, because Purcell and Pound developed nuclear magnetic resonance techniques, while thinking about the fundamental physics of nuclear spin. I think that if you follow your own best inclinations, you are likely to be able to “help people” in a significant way–even if there have to be intermediary discoveries and applications along the way. And you may be more effective than you would be by trying to take the more direct helpful route, if you are not well suited to it.</p>
<p>When I was a bit older than you are now, David, I wondered whether the key question that faced my age cohort might be this: how to bring about the dissolution of the Soviet Union. For me, this just illustrates how wrong one can be about the key problems of the age.</p>
<p>Oh Quantmech, go out and buy “Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology” by Albert Goldbarth. You will love him.</p>
<p>Thanks for the recommendation poetgrl–I think you are right–will let you know when I’ve read Goldbarth.</p>
<p>Do let me know, he’s one of my favorites.</p>
<p>QuantMech – I made a concerted prejudicial effort to dislike your poem-variant but was unsuccessful. I must now award you +10 points for audacity and an additional +2 points for Hard Mode: Effective Revision of Poem Already Posted.</p>
<p>“Looking back at what I learned in high school… I know nothing. We are all filled with this delusion that we learn so much in school, but that’s just feeding the lie. It’s just all smoke and mirrors.”</p>
<p>If you think HS is childish and stupid, it means that you’re paying attention (or that you’re Ferris Bueller). All that matters is that you got through it, and now you get to go on to the next thing, which is almost always better than HS because HS blows. Hurray!</p>
<p>David, learning that you are just an itty-bitty part of a great, big world is part of growing up and finding your place. It’s about realizing that you are not, in fact, the center of the universe. That can be a great thing and you are clearly bright and insightful. Best of luck to you on your journey. I hope it takes you to some amazing places.</p>
<p>I <3 QuantMech for that.</p>