Advice: How did you decide what you wanted to be when you grow up?

Try to get some internships or co-ops so that you can be sure you don't want to be an engineer. Who likes taking classes anyway? If that were the case, everyone would choose psych./business/history majors. Even if you finish an engineering degree, you can still apply to med school (w/ some pre-reqs). They're more inclined to take non-bio majors these days.

Theoretical engineering is way different from real world engineering.

 

Take a poll in a p*rn chat room. That's what I did.

 

One of the biggest mistakes I made when I was a senior in high school was that I thought that I had to choose a major right then!

There is nothing wrong with not knowing what you want to do; however, you don't want to be in school 4 years down the road still not knowing what to get your degree in unless you don't have a problem spending the money on the classes.

I thought that I wanted to be an engineer, too, a chemical one to boot. So, I enrolled at Tennessee Tech with about 10 other guys from my high school. Even though I was good at math and science (history was actually my favorite subject), I hated drafting and all the engineering stuff. I just didn't think I had the mechanical aptitude to be an engineer, so after a month, I had already dropped out of the program.

At the time, I didn't know what to do, but I did know not to change my whole class schedule around. I was very interested in taking calculus, so I changed my major to math. It is sort of a long story, but I transferred from Tech after one semester to MTSU. I made 3 A's in my calculus classes and an A in differential equations. I had thought about majoring in chemistry since I had made 2 A's in freshman chemistry and a B in the 1st part of Organic, but I hated chem labs with a passion.

Math was about the only thing that I was consistently getting A's in, so I majored in it. Now, I had no intention of teaching it except maybe on a junior college or community college level like my mother, but it didn't work out.

Now, I work for pretty much an engineering company in the finance department (talk about ironies!).

If you get a degree in a field like math or physics or chemistry or biology or even some liberal arts, you will still find opportunities (normally considering if the economy is going good) out there regardless of what your major is. I really think that a lot of companies hire people to do jobs that have nothing to do with their majors simply because those hires have proven to that company that they can be trained to do anything.

That is the key...are you trainable? If you are, then don't worry about what the major is, just get the degree.

I'll never use calculus, D.E., or linear algebra in my job, but that is okay because they know they can teach me how to do other things for the company.

 

My career path:

Junior high - interested in biology. Thought about various fields within biology. Reconsidered after some summer program experiences when I realized that field work was tough... also wrestling with the science vs. religion debate and feeling like I was going into a field that ignored the spiritual side of life.

Thought of other things I liked, for instance, all those little demographic studies which give statistics about what percentage of people are doing what. In high school, thought about intended "majors" that would help achieve this end: political science? sociology? statistics, maybe? Some combination?

End of high school/ beginning of college: directed into engineering by my dad. Many of y'all have been there. He thought I might want to be an Industrial Engineer. I liked the idea of corporate troubleshooting, but wanted to get a more technical background. Decided I would double major in electrical engineering and mathematical science in college. (This is one of those things that are a lot easier said and done, and you realize you don't have a snowball's chance of actually doing them.)

Summer internship made me realize I didn't want to live out a "Dilbert" comic strip for the rest of my life. Dropped the industrial engineering plan; wanted to do electrical circuits and wiring. Finally got into my major courses in my sophomore year. From that point, I lasted about seven weeks.

Decided Electrical Engineering was horribly difficult and, if I was going to suffer, it should be for something I enjoyed more than this. (Also, something that was easier to picture than current, voltage, imaginary numbers, and all those other i's and j's.) Dropped it like a hot potato and decided not to "decide" anything until I spent some time thinking about what I really wanted to do... within reason, of course. The reality is that it's not too easy to get paid to do certain fun things, like playing music. Better to get something that pays that's at least fairly pleasant, and pursue the other stuff on ths side.

"What classes from freshman year do I miss?", I thought. The answer was... Chemistry. I had never thought about being a chemist before. Materials Science interested me somewhat too and was along the engineering track, so I followed a plan that would let me choose either of those. I finally picked Chemistry, where my heart was now for some strange reason, but was still interested in materials-type applications, so I did that for undergrad research.

It wasn't easy catching up to the other chemistry majors when I hadn't spent that much time planning for it, but I somehow got through school. (I went to Rice, and surviving any science/engineering program there is NOT easy.... well, maybe for some people it is. ) Didn't want to go straight to grad school and found out the hard way that I didn't have the right personality for the chemical industry, but got on board with a great job doing medical research.

Went to grad school in Biochemistry for practical reasons... it leaves you more options. Managed to get back to teaching Chemistry instead once I got out with my doctorate. So, not bad... I like the field I work in, though I'm being overworked right now. Faculty jobs are totally nuts. Maybe it will get better after a few more years of experience. I've always sort of wanted to teach community college, and may still if it works out better for family reasons or if I just find the additional burdens of research, etc. too much to handle. But there are additional perks to teaching at a four-year school. Just as long as you don't value your sleep.

 

Just don't follow my path.

I went off to college not sure of what I wanted to do. I had taken both accounting and journalism in high school and liked either one okay, but I wasn't passionate about either of them.

Add in the family concerns about making a lot of money (my family credo: "It's all about the Benjamins"), and I went off to undergrad thinking Pre-Law.

Well, Pre-Law is entirely too unstructured for someone who doesn't so much know what they want to do, especially at Texas Tech circa 1989. So, because of my accounting background, I decided I would follow the accounting program while staying a Pre-Law major.

After a while, though, I realized that it was placing quite a burden on my young family (did I mention I was married at this time?) to be considering four years of undergrad (really three because of summer school, CLEP, etc) and then another three years of law school. So since I was already on the accounting track, I switched over to accounting and got that cool BBA in Accounting.

And then I went off to Baylor for the Master of Tax program. And I was about as unhappy as a person could be. I started interviewing at accounting firms and realized that not only did I not want to do what these people were doing, I didn't really want to even be friends with other accountants. I knew I was staring at a lifetime of sorrow, so I dropped out of the MTax program.

And then I flailed around wildly for a few years (the divorce didn't help matters, by the by. That was as much a problem as anything). I went back to school and got some journalism and some more marketing and whatever else. I had soem jobs (including one at a Spanish Language newspaper, believe it or not).

It's only been recently that I've really found what I really love. And I still don't make a living doing that (Filmmaking for one, and Marketing Communications for another). Of course, I knew I loved filmmaking and have been working toward it for years, but with my meek nature (believe it or not), it took me a long time to get the confidence to really get it going properly.

So now it's roughly 14 years later, and I'm about to get another degree (in Advertising) in a field I really like but which is appearing to be incredibly difficult to break in to (I've had more trouble getting job interviews at Ad firms than I have in getting folks at big film companies to talk to me. I actually think it's easier to become a professional filmmaker than it is to become a copywriter at an ad agency).

So, think of me as a cautionary tale.

(I'm pretty sure I had a point when I started, but I think I went haywire there).

 

HAHAHAHA

 

Had to laugh at that one. That's how I felt in school about engineers. As time has gone on some of my best friends are engineers.


Hey Franchise 3, if you can't even stand to be friends with the other engineering students, you must exit, now!!

 

Graduated high school (honours) with good marks in pretty much everything. I went off to university with the intention of majoring in Computer Science because I "liked computers". First year was okay because it was mostly just general studies. I got an A on the only Computer Science course I took and did fair on everything else. Second year, however, was a b****. I was just getting into the thick of the Computer Science program, so that meant lots of courses in programming and math. At this point, I reached two conclusions:

1. The name "Computer Science" is misleading because it doesn't really involve working hands on with computers -- it's more coding than anything else.

2. I hated coding with a passion. I hated advanced math, too.

Needless to say, I did very poorly. I failed about half of the courses I took that year and did very poorly on the rest, coming very close to flunking out of university. I would have in fact flunked out, except I managed to convince my COBOL teacher to raise my final grade from 35% to 40%, which would boost my overall average just enough to not get kicked out (COBOL sucks, by the way). The crowning achievement of this period was a grade of 5% in Calculus (instead of dropping the course, I just blew it off all semester -- stupid!).

Anyway, after my disastrous second year, I decided a change was in order (duh!) so I took a couple of English courses, a philosophy course and a Computer Science course that I had originally failed (I decided to make Computer Science my minor and to major in something else). Well, I did great in my two English courses and passed everything else, so things started to turn around for the better. I dropped Computer Science altogether (good riddance!) and formally declared a major in English and a minor in History (without ever taking a History course!).

The next three years were great academically. The bulk of my course load was English and History, rounded out with electives in Philosophy, Religious Studies, Geography and Anthropology. I really enjoyed the things I was learning about, and I am pleased to say that since I turned things around after second year, I never got anything lower than a B. I ended up graduating a year late, but I did it and have a framed BA on my wall to prove it.

I knew that the BA was just the first step in my education, but the trouble was that I didn't know what to do next. IT? Forestry? Education? Masters in English? I had no clue, so I literally picked something at random from a career booklet -- Real Estate Appraisal. Well, I completed the course with great marks, but I had trouble finding someone to mentor me for a year (one of the requirements to become certified). This, coupled with the fact that the Institute would be charging me $1500 a year for various insurances even if I wasn't working turned me from this field pretty quickly.

So after chucking Real Estate Appraisal I still had no idea what I wanted to do, so I decided to take a break from school and work for a year to save up some money. I was hired full time at the poultry processing plant (my summer job for the previous 5 years) making $11 an hour packing up chicken. It was a pretty good time; decent wages and a nice crew to work with, but from the start I knew it was just a temporary solution for me.

It was during my time at the chicken plant when one of my co-workers left to join the Air Force. I soon became intrigued with the idea of joining the forces because it was something that I had never considered before. I did a lot of research and spoke with my local recruiter and eventually decided to join the Navy as a Maritime Officer driving ships. I submitted an application, completed the physical/medical/aptitude tests and interview, and am now waiting to hear back from the Officer Selection Board which meets late this month. I should get an answer in the first week of May. If I don't get into the Regular Force, I plan on entering the Reserves for a year or so and then trying to get a transfer to the Regs.

The idea of being a Naval Officer really appeals to me. For the first time in my life, I feel like this is something that I really want to do. For now, though, I have to play the waiting game. Hoping for positive news in May!

This post went way longer than I had planned. I guess the moral is:

- don't waste time learning something that you don't like or won't use

- don't be afraid to take some time off to work while you figure out what you want to do

Good luck.