Hey all, I’m a sophomore in ChemE and I’ll be a junior this coming fall semester. For a while I’ve been thinking that engineering is maybe not for me… honestly the only reason I chose it was that my stepdad recommended it to me because he is a chemical engineer. I probably should’ve gave it more thoughts but oh well.
Last semester my GPA was 3.0 and this semester it dropped to 2.78 and it’ll probably go down again in the future considering I haven’t even really started taking real engineering classes, only a couple that are pretty broad. And I didn’t do too good in them either (B- and a C-.) At this point I just really don’t know what to do, I think switching my major would be good for me in the long run but I’m honestly a little scared to be committed to something new and different. I’ve been thinking forensic science and criminology as alternatives, I might find some others that I’m interested in but I just don’t know now. I took bio this semester and some of the labs were about DNA fingerprinting and all that forensic science stuff in general and I found it really interesting (although, I took it online so I didn’t get to actually experience it…) Criminology is something that my friend suggested. I think it’d be fun, but I feel like it’s too different from engineering, being humanities/sociology. I like the science classes that I’ve taken so far so I was thinking maybe I could at least stay with them. Another one that I’ve been thinking is nursing, but I’m not too sure about going to a community college to get an associate’s and becoming a registered nurse, I feel like that’s too easy compared to engineering.
I like that engineering is challenging, but I’m just not passionate about it. People told me if I didn’t like the classes my sophomore year I’m gonna hate my junior year, and I think that might be right but I’ve also wanted to wait until junior year to take some more classes and see if I really don’t like them or not. But I think it’d be too late to change my major junior year and this is something my advisor told me as well. I haven’t talked to him about switching out though and I should probably do that pretty soon.
My freshman year I was also trying to decide b/w chemistry and ChemE and I ended up going with ChemE. I don’t think there’s a forensic science major at my school so I’m thinking maybe chemistry major w/ forensic science minor. I want to do something that I’m interested in but I also want it to be something with good job prospects. I probably sound real naive. But, nursing or forensic science? Or something else? What kind of jobs would I be able to get? I’m really lost so any help would be nice, thank you.