What to choose - Interests or talents?

College Majors
1

<p>I'm trying to decide between a few fields for a major: Public Health, Applied Math, Computer Science, Neuroscience, and Behavioral Biology. </p>

<p>The Public Health major would be good because I plan on pursuing a career in clinical medicine, or in Public Health if that doesn't work out. However, that major is filled with all sorts of Humanities and Social Science requirements. In the past, I've struggled greatly with lecture and reading-heavy classes. The courses interest me, but I'm cringing when I think about all the reading and listening I'll have to do, and I feel like my GPA will suffer if I major in this.</p>

<p>I really want to study Applied Math or Computer Science because I love problem-solving and I learn best by doing problems and projects and experiments. I'm a real hands-on learner, and I feel like these subjects would come naturally to me. However, I'm set on pursuing a health-related career post-graduation, and am not really interested in non-health applications of these fields.</p>

<p>The last two might have the best of both worlds, but they aren't very marketable majors, and grading might be more intense because of the number of pre-med majors there too.</p>

<p>I wish I could have an STEM major and a Humanities minor, but Public Health, Neuroscience, and Behavioral Biology are majors only. But I don't feel like a STEM minor will be enough... And yet, all these degrees are so demanding, I don't know if I'll be able to double major.</p>

<p>Any advice? Thanks.</p>

2

<p>Can you double major or do a major+minor? For me, I’m doing Japanese and CompSci with a lot of Fine Arts electives and I only have to stay a year more. You could pick the best two from both worlds and do that.</p>

<p>Or dual degree if you’re really ambitious.</p>

3

<p>Your stated interests basically fall into two broad clusters: math and biosciences/health. You should consider a double major in math (with coursework in computer science and statistics) and in a bioscience. You can always do public health as a graduate program. A math background would be especially relevant if you had an interest in the biostatistics and epidemiology subspecialties of public health. Math is also relevant to clinical medicine. See my post in this thread: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/science-majors/1014614-statistics-could-excellent-major-pre-med-major.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/science-majors/1014614-statistics-could-excellent-major-pre-med-major.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>You also could consider a major in a hybrid field such as bioinformatics or computational biology.</p>

4

<p>Thanks for the replies, guys. I’ll definitely look into those options. And that’s a cool article, zapfino. Making the healthcare system more efficient and transparent is definitely something I’m interested in :D</p>