Hi everyone! I’m an incoming senior at my local high school and for the past several months I’ve been researching colleges and possible majors that interest me the most. As of right now I’m leaning toward majoring in the sciences (specifically in biological sciences) and then going to med school and specializing in either Rheumatology or Dermatology (as of right now).
I’ve visited several colleges in the Boston area this summer including Tufts University, Boston University, and Northeastern University. Also, my family and I plan on traveling to Toronto and Montreal to tour the University of Toronto and McGill University.
Just to get back to the topic at hand, I was wondering if it would be better to major in the sciences, business, or in computer science/engineering. I would love to become a doctor but I’m not sure if the many of years of schooling and then residency would be worth it as compared to getting a master’s degree in the business or computer science/engineering field.
I know my question may sound a bit vague but I’m mainly talking about…
Lifestyle (Work hours, vacation time, etc.)
Salary
Job Opportunities
Work Environment (Are potential careers engaging/fun?)
I’m just trying to find a major/career that I’ll truly enjoy and quite frankly will never want to retire from. To be honest, I’m interested in all three different career paths with sciences/medical being on the top of my list. I would greatly appreciate honest feedback/opinions and I’ll definitely respond back if any clarifications need to be made, thank you!
College is enough different than secondary school, and your opportunities for substantive internships is so much greater, that imo you are best off giving yourself some time to learn more about these subjects- and more about what suits you.
Don’t worry about majoring in business: it is one of the easiest majors to fulfill. Meeting the pre-med reqs is one of the harder ones, so keep adding those classes into your schedule until you are sure that is not your path. Ditto CS. So, sign up for a lab science (bio, chem or physics) and cs first term first year and see how they go. Second term start looking for internships in either CS or Health sciences. Most likely you will discover that one path or the other is more interesting to you.
Most people end up changing their minds at least once about what they are going to major in between Junior year of HS and second year of college. Keep your options open and let it play out.
I don’t know if there are any careers that people never want to retire from, and even if there were, there’s no way to predict that now. Something you really love at 22 might be super boring by the time you are 32 - it’s a reason why people change careers so often these days (among others). I was just talking about this the other day with other working professionals, and we basically said that the idea that you have to “do what you love” is one of the more detrimental beliefs about careers and working life for young adults. Even if you love your job, when you wake up, it’s still work. And some people are just meh about their jobs, but they love the lifestyle their job affords them.
That said, majors don’t give you a certain lifestyle, salary, opportunities, etc. - jobs/careers do. Most undergrad majors do not lead directly into a career or even a set of careers - you can do a wide variety of things with them. My undergrad major is psychology and I make much more than the average salary of a graduate degree holder in my field. I know people who have parlayed stereotypically “worthless” majors into great jobs right out of college. Even within a field, salary and lifestyle can vary widely depending on the firm - for example, there are strategy consultants that make six figures and travel 100% of the time and there are strategy consultants that make in the mid-to-high five figures and don’t travel much at all. Whether particular careers are engaging depends on you. The idea of coding all day long sounds like torture to me, but software developers enjoy it. On the other hand, I love staring at spreadsheets and analyzing data and a lot of people would rather cut off their hand than do that all day.
So there’s no “better” - there’s only what you really like, and want to study, for the next four years. You can be a physician with a business or computer science major; you can go into business with a biology or chemistry major; there are even folks who have managed to make the switch from a life science major to engineering (with some extra leg work). I also chatted with a couple of people who went through engineering and ended up hating it and switched to other fields.