EPTfirst of all some good jams
now I wasn't sure what exactly to title this but the gist of it is that I'm in a difficult situation concerning my choice of major where I'm not even sure if my major is important to begin with. for starters I'm a rising college sophomore currently on the chemistry track. I liked chemistry best out of the natural sciences based on my high school courses and I still enjoy it—everyone bitches about orgo but I do enjoy the challenge and think reaction mechanisms are interesting, etc. so when I got to school I figured it would be a good choice to start with as my intended major.
WITH THAT SAID my primary extracurricular interest has been in birds for many years. I'm not one of those people who saw a song sparrow when they were six and were hooked for life. I'll write up my bird life story in another blog as I once promised, but I saw my hook bird when I was ten and it had to be a damn cool one to get me interested (short-eared owl). I do love birds and would say that I am absolutely more passionate about them than anything else, but after middle school I was never supremely confident that I wanted to do birds as a career. so I toyed with the idea, meeting some bird people, going to bird camps and doing a part-time bird internship one summer at the smithsonian. (with song sparrows, actually. they're quite interesting especially when you get down to subspecies!) and I actually lucked into another one with a place overseas that does captive breeding of threatened birds right now.
so long story short, I really like birds and there is not much I can see myself doing for 8 hours a day happily at this stage in my life that does not have to do with birds. I like chemistry but I don't think I want to be in a lab for 8 hours a day unless I have extremely hilarious and interesting labmates (like high school
) or something. unfortunately for my freshman year I had pretty much given up on the idea of birds as a career. the main reason was that I ended up going to a small liberal arts college that has a single bird professor, instead of another school that had a big lab of ornithology. I am very very happy at my school and am overall really glad that I go to a small school but somehow I didn't see any path to a career in birds from this school. (nobody really goes into birds until grad school but I was pretty crestfallen at the time of the decision and all I could see was that there was no simple door labeled "birds".) intro biology at my school is over two semesters, fall being cellular and molecular and spring being organismal. I wasn't fond of memorizing lots of cell stuff in high school bio so I wasn't too intent on starting on the bio track. the second reason was that biology was not even an option, because my dad really wanted me to take arabic which had two sections, and each conflicted with either chem or bio. so I did not take any bio my first year—even the spring course, which I would have liked to take so I could take the bird professor's course (animal behavior).
hope you're still following—basically at the time chemistry appeared to be a more viable choice as opposed to bio, careerwise and coursewise.
NOW THINGS GET DIRTY
MY PLAN WAS THIS:
major in chemistry
keep taking computer science for potential major/minor (not rly important here)
take organismal intro bio sophomore spring
take animal behavior as a junior and enjoy doing bird stuff. maybe bio minor and keep the bird dream alive?
two things are making me reevaluate this failproof plan:
1) I increasingly want to pursue birds as a career again and the only way to do so seems to be a bio major
2) course conflicts mean sticking with chem would prevent me from ever taking animal behavior (found this out today)
alrighty so:
1) most of this is explained above, birds are my "thing" more than anything else and I want to have my dream job! my dad's a businessman so my parents kind of drilled the whole "make big money and spend free time with birds" but I don't want to spend 70% of my waking hours at a job I don't like, if I have the power to get one I do like. I have felt more confident that I can pull off the bird career path every day, after doing a lot of personal evaluation after reading some motivational book. (it's a good one with lots of concrete ideas, trust me.) that said all of the researchers have bachelor's degrees in bio, which is necessary for all the higher degrees they all seem to have. keep in mind that though researchers are obviously only a small fraction of the people who work with (wild) birds, I really like fieldwork and they get to answer the cool questions.
but the gist of it is that even though I've read some things that say that your major really doesn't matter much, for something as specific as birds I don't see how I can manage with anything other than a biology degree. everyone in the field I've read about so far has one.
2) because chemistry is dumb I have to take one course a semester in a strictly ordered sequence, so I can't really take a semester off without dropping the whole major. sophomore year I also have to take a year of physics for junior year physical chem. since the sequence is so rigid I have to take physics this year to have a viable chemistry major. however physics conflicts with intro bio! which means I can't take intro bio and by extension animal behavior and by extension there go what chances I still had at a "conventional" bird career. it looks really unlikely that I will be able to work this out by taking courses at other colleges, etc. so let's pretend for now that there's no way around it.
so I feel that I either stick with chemistry, which I sort of like but am not passionate about, and almost certainly end up not working with birds, or drop chemistry (and hence give up on my intended major not having even taken any college biology yet) and take a big risk on liking biology enough to get through all the eddications to become an ornithologist and have the freedom to work with birds exclusively.
I wrote this all in one session without much revision, so I hope it wasn't too terrible to follow. I mostly wanted to get it all off my back because I'm suddenly decently stressed about the course conflict which I just found out about. would love any advice and/or stories from any of you who had a choice to take a risk on what you thought you were passionate about and whether you regret your decision or not.
