<p>I think freshmen have it good here. I didn't come in as one, I came in as a transfer student. I always see people that look a few years younger than I am smiling and happily talking about things going on in their lives. I'm just sort of there.</p>
<p>It's not like I don't have any friends. Someone I am friends with transferred with me, but we don't have the type of friendship where we hangout on the weekends. He has to go back home for work on the weekends and during the week he stays at his apartment the next town over. He's pretty busy doing homework during the week because he's an engineering major, but we hangout most of the week in school and talk about physics. We go to the seminars together. He is pretty much the only person I hangout with outside of class.</p>
<p>I'm friends with another engineering major, but the guy has two jobs and commutes an hour away so our friendship is just confined to the classroom. His girlfriend takes up most of his spare time anyways. </p>
<p>I joined a few clubs, but the meetings aren't very often and I just sit in there listening to the people around me. I honestly don't know what to say to people because even though I'm a math major I don't really like talking about math in math club. I like physics a lot, but I can't really change my major without delaying graduation a year or two. Things have just gotten stale in my math classes after I transferred. Sure, sometimes the work is interesting solving proofs and whatnot. A lot of it is just boring. My physics classes I am doing the best in and I am genuinely interested every time I come to the lecture. I guess I just sort of hate the atmosphere of math classes because in a lot of my physics classes we've been allowed to discuss our ideas on problems with each other or the concepts. A lot of group work before we go home and attempt the problems ourselves. All of my math classes are just pretty much listening to the instructor and passive. I don't really benefit from passive learning. It's like riding in the back seat of a car and not paying attention to where I'm going or what I'm doing. </p>
<p>All in all, for some reason I feel like college is a big waste of time to me right now. As an applied math major I feel like I'm being directed to go into some type of engineering by the practicality of my courses. I have no interest in engineering or anything business-related. Not even computer programming, although I'm good at it. The only thing I can think about frequently is physics, but my girlfriend (lives 2.5K miles away right now) confided in me in tears that money is important to her since her family has struggled financially all her life. I've also faced financial struggles. It dictated my small list of colleges I applied to. I feel like something inside me is directing me to physics, but I feel like I can't pursue it without a huge financial risk. And just thinking about graduation I feel like being stuck at some company is just going to suck. </p>
<p>I don't know how I'm going to make it through the rest of my degree, but I can't quit now since my parents invested the money to actually make this happen when it was a very small possibility that I'd be attending college from the beginning. </p>
<p>Is there a way I can move on to physics in graduate school from this major and pull in a big paycheck? Is there anything I can do to just make me "pretend" that what I'm learning is interesting in my math classes? Anything I can do to make it feel like I'm not wasting my time in college when I hit the job market in the next two years?</p>