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So, why did you choose your major?
Many of us are in college or have gone through college, so it seems like a fair question. Of course, if you're in high school and have made your decision, your opinion matters just as the rest
Anyway, I was wondering after yesteday's conversation in Updates, why did people choose the majors they decided to study here? Was it because of their skills? Preferences? Goals? etc etc
Comments
I'm mostly choosing to pursue acting because I love to do it, and I've been told by many people that I'm good at it, including my last director, who told me that I should go to school to get a BFA in it.
It's not exactly going to be easy to get a job in acting in the real world, but if it's what I love, and I'm at least moderately talented, I feel like I should go for it.
Plus, I suppose that I can use it to get a job teaching theater or somesuch, which I think I would enjoy.
Can I see a citation on that? That sounds interesting...
Then, one day, while conlanging, I stopped, and I realized: I had finally found my calling.
I finally found a career I could pursue. Fuck, I was so happy that day....
Little did I know that that idea completely missed the point.
I also minored in biology because I was good at biology. Well, back in high school at least.
After some time in college, I gradually realized that I wanted something more on a macro level, something that had...well, at the time, the best phrasing I could muster was "a more direct impact on people". This sounds really silly, but what I felt at the time was that my focus in my major--specifically, bioprocess engineering in chem e.--seemed very distant from, well, the world around me. I know, I know, there are a ton of things we do, products we use, technologies we depend on, and more that derive from chemical engineering, bioprocess engineering, pharmaceuticals, biotech, and stuff. I know that. That wasn't the issue. At the time I just couldn't crystallize why I felt dissatisfied into words.
Not to mention I got a lot of flak from my parents. Chemical engineers are some of the best-paid among engineers. Biotech is a rapidly growing industry. Why was I so fucking stupid to give up a promising career in a lucrative field.
Well, for starters I didn't think it was promising. I felt out of touch with my major, and neither of the two huge industries that made a lot of use of chem engineers--biotech/pharma and hydrocarbons/oil/gas--piqued my interest. I felt that, yeah, I could make do with a job, but I didn't even know where to start with a job search in my field, not to mention my trouble at feigning enthusiasm about getting such a job, and after I'd get that job, I believed it would be a punch-clock role to me (rather than something I honestly would love doing), possibly to the point of not even being motivated toward career advancement.
That said, some days I still wonder whether I was remiss in not pursuing the major regardless. After leaving chem e., I later went to a few of the meetings and events of the AIChE club at the place where I later got my master's. Some of the concepts that once seemed so burdensome and complex seemed to have clarified themselves to me, after I basically let them settle and neglected them for years. I do remember one of my TAs once commenting that she didn't really understand what chem e. was all about until after she graduated.
So instead, I got a near-useless degree in earth science. Then I went onto get a master's degree. A slightly less useless one, in my opinion; slightly more useless in my mom's opinion because it went even further away from my science/engineering base.
Though, on the other hand, sometimes I think that perhaps I should instead have done some combination of psychology, economics, and computer science/engineering.
Went with Engineering Physics because I thought physics was cool, but wanted the practical application of engineering. And my math and science grades were really good, so why not? I had interest in some of the humanities such as philosophy (and in retrospect, maybe sociology), but I didn't see the point in getting a degree for those subjects. And I don't think my rigid science-y brain could handle so much artsy thinking anyway.
(just a heads-up: University physics is a very different beast from high school physics. Calculators are either only for the most basic of calculations or utterly useless)
So how are the questions/calculations? How long do they take?
Would you happen to have an example of them? Even though I'm no majoring in it, I'd still like to see just what uni-level physics is like.
Because I like corrupting justice.
"So how are the questions/calculations? How long do they take?"
About 30 minutes each. Figuring out how to actually do them can take much longer.
Would you happen to have an example of them? Even though I'm no majoring in it, I'd still like to see just what uni-level physics is like."
A classic relativity problem involves a hypothetical train travelling at the speed of light. You can read about it on the Wikipedia page.
Electrodynamics stuff is even more convoluted since it's all about visualizing the vectors. In fact, it's mostly equations and variables steeped in vector calculus; if actual numbers show up, it's just simple substitution. Though to be honest, that's the essence of most engineering questions anyway.
So sort of on a whim I clicked the EE over to Computer Science. It was something I always wanted to do and picked up enough preliminary course work on it through electives to skip most of the first two years altogether and end up about at the same level of progress I would've been for EE. The Physics background gives me a really solid base in math and simulation, and that wound up being the clincher for my game programming internship.
(just a heads-up: University physics is a very different beast from high
school physics. Calculators are either only for the most basic of
calculations or utterly useless)
I...didn't find this at all. I mean yeah the calculator was there to do tedious calculations and approximations once you had the framework hammered out by hand, but that was exactly what I was doing in high school too, so yeah.
Electrodynamics problems were like 90% how well you visualized it and whether you saw the critical step that would make everything telescope really fast. If you did, you could crank one of them in about 10 minutes at the most -- if you didn't, you'd be writing in circles for the whole exam. Classical mechanics were a bit more tedious (especially tensors, no real way to make that not take a while), but for the most part along the same lines.
For a sense of scale, the day after the exam my professors would usually walk through the whole test beginning to end, and it would rarely take more than about half an hour.
And if you didn't you'd be lost for hours on end. I learned very early on that physics was a school of finesse :P
Typically the test would have one ballbuster-math question just to show that we could do it, but for the most part they were like "look, if you got this far we know you know how to whack things with the algebra hammer."
I made the switch. My grades are still mediocre but... I feel happy
Although there is one class that I'm doing fairly well at as its mostly writing in class papers and I am good at BSing that
I've had a few documentary ideas, but most of them are a little too expansive for me. T_T
Thing is, I'd want it to be extremely holistic, looking at both European and Asian styles, and then having a crack at deciphering what little we can about African and Middle Eastern styles. All in all, it'd probably need to be a four-parter, with the final part being a study of all the common factors that run across every style.
Funnily enough, the head honchos at my fightschool have actually made a study of over 2500 historical examples of fencing, be they complete manuals (in the case of European and Chinese examples) or even just single pictures (such as in the case of Egyptian and Saracen artwork). They've found that almost every single historical culture they've drawn from uses the same pool of biomechanical movements to inform the core of their swordplay, and most unique biomechanical movements serve to enable peripheral advanced techniques unique to the context of their fighting.
^^, ^ I wish we could combine our powers.