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]

Editing? As in "Oh, you've forgotten a semicolon here!" editing? I don't think I could ever commit my life to the study of where a colon is supposed to go or the way to internally cite an essay. I mean, I understand they're important to the field of English as a whole, but the basic purpose of literature, I've always thought, is the ideas that are expressed in between the letters and punctuation marks, you know. Like that one e.e. cummings poem. It's not the syntax of things that matter as much as the content.

And I used to be dead set on having a virtually useless major until recently, really; . Basically the things I'm most good at are the things that don't necessarily have a basic, fundamental purpose that is absolutely essential to the survival of mankind, albeit they are enormous parts of everyone's lives, and the most beautiful ones, at that- you know, literature and writing, art, the study of history, things like that. I don't really think it's the intelligence level that determines whether you go into the liberal arts or not, just whether you like it or not. It's just a matter of preference. Some people like aeronautical engineering. Good for them, I can't stand that stuff. I'll stick to my passion for social problems and people.