The Process of Choosing
I, personally, am encountering problems while trying to pick a major. I'm just interested in too much, I want to take too many classes, and I have absolutely no career direction. I thought that perhaps if I talked to some other students about how they picked their majors, I could learn a valuable lesson - some sort of esoteric knowledge (though not esoteric to everyone else, obviously - only to me) about how to discover one's most deep and inner longings.
Though statistics suggest that most freshmen enter college without knowing what they want to do, and that they will change their major at least once during their undergraduate studies, almost everyone I talked to felt set in their major path. Even beyond this, most had some idea of what they wanted to do after graduation! (Perhaps we want to achieve too much here at Case Western?)
My skewed study reads as follows:
Subject #1 has already changed his major once. He knew that he wanted to study neurology and thought that BME (Biomedical Engineering) might make a good major. This would allow him to do "fun" things like "correct diseases" and "make [his] own women". However, after looking at the sample schedule for BME, he realized that there wasn't room for him to take classes outside of his BME requirements. He felt that exploration should play an important roll in his undergraduate education, and changed his major to a double major in Cognitive Science and Biology, while keeping his original interests intact.
Subject #2 knew that he liked chemistry and science in high school, and decided that he wanted to be an engineer. He "explored" this option while still in high school while talking to some engineers about what they did.
Subject #3 tells me that her major (social-sciences-something-or-other) was easy to pick. "Studying human behavior through science is the only way to go".
Subject #4 picked his major(s) (political science and economics) by staring at a wall (not kidding) for a few hours until he figured it out. (While listening to The Wall, incidentally.)
None of the students (that I talked to) used sources outside of themselves to help them discover what they wanted to do - no one utilized the Career Center, used course websites, or did much outside research on the topics they chose - they simply followed their interests.
I know what I like! What makes me different from the students who know? It seems the key factor that those set in their major-ways have that I lack is conviction. Once these students decided what they wanted, they ran with it. Perhaps the only thing standing between me and a lifetime of happiness is the guts to "just do it".
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