Changing majors Options

[Melissa]

This is kind of hard for me. All my life, I've been told that I was going to be a doctor. Yeah, I enjoyed anatomy class in high school, I really liked interning for an ENT, I would live an excellent life as a doctor, it sounded like a good plan so I went with it.

The thing is, I'm not really interested in it. I hate chemistry, biology, AND physics. I'm trying to be a Neuroscience and Behavior major because I thought I would be interested in psychology and because its requirements overlap with the premed requirements. And yeah, I do like psych, except it isn't enough to make me actually want to go to class. I have no motivation for it whatsoever.

I was thinking about this through the span of the year and feel that I really ... don't want to be a doctor. I'm more interested in writing and studying human rights, sociology, maybe even political science. The problem is that ALL of my classes I took this entire year go toward the premed/psych path and I'm not sure if it would be wise to switch at this point.

I'm going to email my dean about this and see if it would work out, but then there's the parents to worry about. My mom is crazy and I highly doubt she'll pay my tuition if I decide not to be premed. The one time I brought it up, she bitched at me, saying that if I wanted to "waste my life," I should've just gone to Baylor (I got a full ride there, but seriously... BAYLOR??) instead of choosing Columbia, which is expensive as f**k.

I just know that if I look ten years into my life, I see myself as a journalist, an author, something that has to do with writing and debating. Maybe even a lawyer. I DON'T see me working in an operating room and being on-call nearly 24/7. It's just not me.

I don't know. This is sort of a rant... and me wanting encouragement. I'm not sure how I'll work through this.

[fig]

I can totally relate to this topic. Except, well, the opposite.

At the moment I'm signed up as an English major for when I start my freshman year in August. And I love writing. I think it's a beautiful thing to be able to transfer commonplace ideas into strings of words that sound wonderful together; I like when a mere sentence can send chills down my spine. But there aren't that many careers you can have with a English major. Perhaps I haven't done enough research, but I think my choices are: a) being a starving writer living on those old cans of lima beans and vegetables everyone donates because they don't want them, or b) be a teacher- and I'm just about the least verbally articulate on the planet. I've thought about publishing, but I don't know enough about it to pursue it seriously.

Lately (lately as in the past few months) I've really been thinking about what I want to do with myself in the future, and I want to help people. Don't laugh at how ridiculously naive and idealistic this is: I want to double major in biology and sociology and after med school I want to go to Africa, make things happen, save lives. Perhaps I'm just going through a phase, but nothing in the world sounds like a more fulfilling, meaningful life at the moment.