<p>I'm only a senior in high school, but I'm considering what kind of classes I want to take/what I want to major in. I love science, I'm generally very good at it (particularly Physics and Chemistry), but I absolutely hate labs. I would honestly rather take a test or a pop quiz in a science class than do a lab, even without a writeup. Is it even plausible to be a science major and enjoy it in college while hating labs?</p>
<p>You will have a lot of labs if you are a science major. My daughter is a freshman science major - so far (3 semesters including next fall) she has averaged 2 2-3 hour labs a week.</p>
<p>Look at the schools you're considering and see what the requirements for various majors are and whether you can live with them. Something like astronomy, where experiments are hard and a lot of what has to be done is observation, might be better (although there's a lot of physics to be done).</p>
<p>Or possibly philosophy with an emphasis on philosophy of science. (You'd want to check out the department for this one: you'd be looking for at least one professor who lists philosophy of science as an area of specialization (AOS) and a couple more who list philosophy of science as an area of competence (AOC). It might also be worth contacting professors with an AOS of philosophy of science and asking how far you can go in that particular subdiscipline at that school.) No labs.</p>
<p>The problem is that <em>doing</em> science is not about learning other people's theories and experiments (which is what it always seemed to me to be through high school), but about developing your own theories and hypotheses and trying to falsify them.</p>
<p>Perhaps you really only hate how they do labs at your high school? By the time I was done with AP chem I was seriously hating chem & questioning which major to be.</p>
<p>But in the end, I was a chem major, and there were a LOT of lab classes. I still didn't love them, but they were better than the pointless ones from high school. I only had two quarters of my undergraduate education without having chem lab. (And typically labs were two 3hr sessions per week). The good news is that once you're done you can leave so if you come prepared you can finish really quickly.</p>
<p>Sometimes the lab is part of the lecture class (like in general chem), those labs can be boring because they are so simple.</p>
<p>Other times the lab is a separate class (no lecture), you still have a midterm & final based on the labs you've done so far. So generally the tests are a piece of cake because you've done the whole write up & remember the lab. Other times your grade is only based on your lab writeups.</p>
<p>In the labs past general chem there tends to be more camaraderie between students, so people will help eachother out if someone is confused or doesn't understand how to do something. (At that point you'll generally be working alone instead of in groups so you don't have to worry about being partnered with an idiot). I found the more advanced labs more interesting & helpful in the long run because I had to actually figure out how to interpret the data, how to do the calculations to find what I needed to etc..</p>
<p>You may want to consider engineering if you find the science labs boring, because engineering labs are applied to projects that are done in real life, which makes it more interesting.</p>
<p>College labs are different from high school labs. I hated HS ones, but I actually almost love going to college labs. It has better equipment, less repetitive experiments, and sometimes they actually help me better understand what we are doing in class (it's not completely random like in HS). You need to give a college lab class a chance before you say you hate labs.</p>
<p>What is it about the labs that you don't like? Is it the time, repetition, lab partner experience, lack of understanding, or that you cannot seem to get the ideal results?</p>
<p>Agreed: College labs are definitely different from high school ones. Try out a lab course your first year (many schools let you pass/fail your first class towards a major) and if you absolutely hate it, you can look at other majors. My friends don't mind the labs themselves, but they often complain about the time slots: ususally early in the morning, late at night, and/or on Fridays.</p>
<p>I basically just don't like the element of time limits, and trying to perform tasks correctly, in the right order, etc. It's a little too "messy" for me, so to speak. I actually sometimes enjoy doing post-lab analysis in physics, for example, because I get to try figure out concepts. It's just actually doing the lab that's frustrating.</p>
<p>"engineering labs are applied to projects that are done in real life, which makes it more interesting."</p>
<p>Real life engineering stuff is kind of boring to me, actually. I much prefer theory. I'd love to be a philosophy major, but my parents really don't want me to.</p>
<p>Why not look into doing computational work? If you enjoy math or computer science in any way, then you could do a degree in a traditional science, but try to take as many modeling and theoretical classes as possible.</p>
<p>If you're interested in doing pure theoretical work, then you'll probably need to follow up your undergrad work with graduate study where you can actually do pure theoretical research and never have to actually set foot into a physical lab.</p>
<p>Personally I don't understand how someone could love science and hate labs at the same time. I also consider myself a "theory" person, but I also think that, confirming theory through experimentation is half the beauty. After all, science is a model for physical systems; it's hard to appreciate theory if it isn't anchored to real life. I see how labs can be annoying, though, especially if they're physically hard to perform. I remember once in lab we were exploring collisions on a virtually frictionless surface, and we had to repeat a certain step like 20 times to get two objects to collide at the right angle. That was frustrating. But anyway, maybe you should look into something like pure math or computer science?</p>