Hello aska!
Weeeellll here’s the thing. I love history. I did it in highschool, and i plan to specialize in it in university. And I also want to be a teacher. However I’m also good at math, so I’ve heard being an engineer is good for this economy. So I was wondering, if it’s not too personal, if you’ve been through the same conundrum. Whether you’d have to fight society, your pressures, and all that in order to do what you love.
A person in my mom’s work had even told me that learning Philosophy was for rich people’s children who don’t need their degree, and that there are too many teachers. A relative told me that Uni was expensive so I best do the degree most likely to leave me a job in the end. But I love history – but I don’t like wasting $$$.
So, I’m asking, any thoughts/personal stories/go-seek-your-guidance…councillor?
Lots of tickles,
[name redacted]
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hey there,
whoa nelly, have i got war stories related to this. as it happens, my entire life so far has basically been an embarrassingly cliched back and forth between things i WANTED to do and things i thought i SHOULD do. however my life isn’t super-awesome now or anything, so don’t do everything i did just because i did it. i’ll just give you my two cents and then you can think about that and everything your parents/teachers/peers have said, and you make your own decision, yeah? make sense? alright, cool. so here we go.
in high school, i was good at math. and science. and everything. alright i’ll say it: I WAS GOOD AT EVERYTHING. i think i graduated with a 92% average, and i’d taken calculus, the three sciences and english – that’s not to brag, just to give you someone you can compare yourself to. i went into a life science program for first year and finished that year with an 82%. that’s not that bad, right? i could’ve easily continued on in the program and done reasonably well.
WRONG. see, this is the thing. i hated my first year. HATED it. and that’s not because i was unintelligent or too stupid to realize that science and math aren’t interesting (because they are) or because i was too selfish to think about what really matters – the money. i had an uncontrollable, visceral reaction to what i was studying, and it made me less inclined to study, and that made me MEDIOCRE. see, the thing people don’t realize is that you don’t study what you’re interested in because you are a selfish prick or a moron who doesn’t realize that you need to somehow get a job out of university; you study what you’re interested in because it’s a SURVIVAL TECHNIQUE.
if you go into a program you’re lukewarm about, you’re not going to do as well in it as the people who love it. that’s just true. it is in your best interest to pursue the thing you adore, the thing you obsess over, because that is your one fighting chance to be outstanding, and in this economy, as we all know, employers will not accept anything less than outstanding.
now, i don’t want to sugar-coat things: if you try to become a history teacher, it won’t be easy. you may have to move countries, more than once maybe. you will not have a great starting salary. maybe you’ll have to do jobs out of college like flower-arranging or selling shoes. but i’d say that doing poorly or even mediocre-ly in, say, engineering, because you just can’t produce the passion for it that would make you remarkable, is gonna produce the same result: employers won’t hire you. they’ll hire that guy who can’t STOP TALKING about fulcrums and shizzle that you don’t give two hoots about.
so yes. i have made the decision to pursue what i love instead of what i “should do.” but i would argue that that decision was a much wiser choice, economically and financially speaking, because now i actually might be able to do really notable things with my career. it’ll still be hard work, but i want to do it now, which means i’m outstripping those “rich people’s children” who are just in it for the lawls. and i think if you consider the logic carefully, you’ll find that the same is true for you.
right, i’ma get off my soap box now. i hope that helped.
see ya l8rs,
aska
2 Comments
Anon
Important note: The things you are passionate about in high school can be very different from the things you are passionate about in university. Very few people in high school are genuinely passionate about maths and sciences, partially because maths and sciences are very dryly taught in most secondary schools and nobody cares about writing a good textbook. High school humanities courses can seem really interesting on the other hand, because well, the course material is just that much more fun for teachers to teach and usually the people in your programs are really nice because let’s be honest, when’s the last time you ever heard of someone being pressured by their peers or parents into a humanities program? (If you haven’t before, now you have: I got peer-pressured into almost doing a Classics minor.)
In university, you are more likely to meet people who genuinely love science and technology, and they might inspire you. Conversely, many people who feel obliged by society to attend university go into humanities or social science programs just because the maths and sciences are too hard/not suited to them, and it’s a very different classroom experience than humanities classes in high school.
You say you are good at math, but don’t mention whether you love or hate it. If you don’t hate it, I would take a flexible first year where you are taking prereqs for both a history and [something mathy or sciencey or whatever looks nice on the course calendar, there’s lots of stuff you may not know about; engineering is pretty all-or-nothing at U of T at least, but computer science is another very fun, very career-yay math-is-helpful field where you would also actually have time to take non-CS courses like history, I dunno what you’re interested in though].
In short, follow your passion, but understand that you are constantly learning new things about yourself and your passions. Don’t burn your bridges yet.
aska
very good points! i completely forgot to mention about first year – that’s one of the reasons uoft is so good for those who are unsure. learn as broadly as you can; that way you can figure out as soon as possible what it is you are most interested in.