I’m a Junior in high school right now and I’m in that phase that everyone goes through where people are trying to find out their major for college. I’ve heard tons and tonsssss of talks from people that say that you need to already know what you’re going to pursue and have your EC’s revolve around that “passion” or whatever to get into competitive colleges but I don’t know where I’m headed at this point. (My dream school btw is MIT, not because of the technological background, but because of the atmosphere the campus has and its environment is just awesome.) I have a lot of interests and my EC’s do revolve around them but it’s REALLY all over the place.
I love music since it helps me avoid all the academic stress I’m going thru, so I’m involved with Marching Band and Wind Ensemble (section leader for the saxophone section).
Academically, I love chemistry and I really want to help people in the medical field which is why I’m in Health Occupations Students of America (HOSA) - Future Health Professionals (President) and American Chemical Society (ACS) (President)
OTHER THAN THAT (LOL) I do math as a hobby, which is why I’m in Mu Alpha Theta and also why I have math awards like AIME or AMC 12 Distinction stuff.
BEFORE I started to be interested in the medical field, I was interested in computer science (and still am).
I took part of picoCTF, CyberPatriots, and am also a co-founder of the HackEDU program at our school. I also made a ctf with my friend and am planning to launch it this summer.
So there’s the breakdown of my “interesting” EC’s.
Honestly, you can pretty much rule out music and math since those are considered my hobbies, but career-wise, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I like all of technology, chemistry, and medicine, but it’s come to the point where I need to make a decision now. People told me I should try and see if I could combine these things but I can’t really think of any.
Any advice? Anything would be sooooooooooo helpful! 
Thank you!
Yeah the atmosphere at MIT is SO awesome when I visited I was like “tf is this a college?” lmao
Maybe consider chemical engineering or petroleum engineering (which pays A LOT and requires no grad school) since you like chemistry.
If you are truly interested in Computer Science, go for it. Hackers are in high demand i presume.
Good luck
This doesn’t answer your question, but I wanted to give a friendly reminder: you don’t actually need to know exactly where you’re headed or what you want to do. Plenty of people go into college thinking that they want to do something, switch majors in college, and end up in a completely different job. Your ECs are clustered in STEM-y fields because you like them, and that’s wonderful.
The “passion” that people talk about is typically not something that is mused on, decided on, and carefully laid out-- the word invokes a sort of spontaneity and connection. Of course, there are “spikes” (terminology taken directly from some college book that repeats “be alike but spike”) which are sometimes thought our and can help get into college. A spike is achieved by layering activities and taken opportunities in a specific field. Do you have to end up spending the rest of your life in the same area that your spike is in? No way. And you do /not/ /need/ a spike to get into college.
It’s okay to not know. It’s okay to be lead by the things you’re interested in. At some point (likely a point in college), technology or chemistry or medicine might pull ahead on your list for some reason or another, most likely because a class you took showed you that it was something you really want to spend the rest of your life doing. Or maybe not! This period of exploration is healthy and wonderful, and it seems like you have learned a lot about things you find interesting.
Bump.
@pseudoprimal Thanks for the input! That made me feel a whole lot better
@0br0123 LOOOOL DUDE IKR MIT IS THE BEST
Any other suggestions would be awesome :3
Is there a reason you say math and music are only hobbies and you are not considering majoring in either one?
@DatOneKorean I’m interested in CS, do you know of any other computer science related extracurriculars/program s/competitions? Thanks!
I agree with what is said above. You don’t need to know exactly what you want your career to be right this moment. The fact that you know you STEM is very good. What about something like Biomedical Engineering or Computational Medicine? You could also consider going to a college that would let you design an interdisciplinary major so you could incorporate all of your interests and explore career options in all of them.
first off I love MIT for the same reasons you do!!! Also the admissions blogs are awesome!
you should check out bioinformatics/computational bio (im kinda biased though cause I want to do this lol). But it combines like practically everything into one amazing field. Sounds like a combination of everything you love- math, computer science, medical stuff, and bio/chem.It’s like solving problems in medicine and stuff in a really cool way. And don’t forget DNA!!! Or if bioinformatics isn’t your thing, you could go into another biotech/pharmaceutical specialty. Especially since you like MIT and Cambridge is basically biotech heaven.