#whoops i thought it had been long enough but i remembered that particular anxiety obsession for too long jeez i'm good at freaking myself o

[serialreblogger]

I know you don't talk about school much, so feel very free to just pass this ask by, but how did you... make a decision for a degree and everything?

whooof a good question! short answer is, there’s a reason i don’t talk much about school, and that’s because i straightup don’t have a clue what i’m doing. but for the record: nobody? does?

there’s this idea that as soon as you hit grade 11 you need to get started planning the rest of your life out, and once you graduate high school you have to have like a ten-year career plan. but nobody, really, does. if you have a ten-year career plan in grade twelve, the only thing that guarantees is that you’ll be doing something dramatically different in ten years (and probably have at least one major identity crisis two to five years in).

because here’s the thing: it’s really, really unfair to put that kind of expectation on teenagers, to start with. you literally don’t have the necessary experience to make that kind of decision. you aren’t capable yet of making informed choices about the direction of your life, just because you haven’t LIVED enough, you don’t have enough information to draw from. and really, you’re also still a kid. you’ve been entirely dependent on your parents for survival up to now, and for a disproportionately high number of teens, that means accepting abuse, micromanagement, neglect and/or general unhealthy circumstances as a fact of life. none of that equips you to make any kind of balanced choice about the direction you want your life to take.

all of this is to say, first of all, if you’re planning to go to university just after high school, don’t hold yourself to an all-or-nothing standard when it comes to your course of study.

when you’re starting an undergrad, especially if you’re doing so within a year or two of finishing high school, don’t worry as much about picking a major that will serve your career path (look, i’m going to be honest with you, there’s seriously no undergrad degree that gives you a significant leg up in the job market at this point, and that includes the sciences. english majors + chemistry majors = equal difficulty finding work after graduating without either a master’s degree or some kind of nepotism. the only exception is maybe business majors, but they don’t really count because nobody trusts business majors). don’t worry about what you “should” be majoring in or whether the subjects that interest you are “practical.” None of the courses in university are practical.

That’s what I did, anyway. i didn’t declare my own major until halfway through my third year (and still graduated in four). My university had a whole bunch of core required courses for every major regardless of your field of study, which made that easier; i took an introductory course on plant biology, an english course where we studied dracula, a philosophy course, a course on “history of the Western World” (which was essentially colonialist propaganda + the black plague), and a theology class from the Catholic college partnered to my university. I don’t know if you know this about me, but i forkin adored every minute of that semester. That’s the second thing: if you hate high school, that is ABSOLUTELY not a guarantee you’ll hate university. In uni i finally got to learn about things that actually interested me, got to choose courses and drop ones i didn’t want to deal with, and was not only allowed but encouraged to engage critically with what i was being taught. it was brilliantly freeing.

So: if you’re looking for advice on how to pick your major when you first start college or university, i guess my main advice is don’t. Not that you shouldn’t declare a major if you have a pretty solid idea of what you genuinely want to do, but like. if you don’t have a solid idea. that’s OKAY. 90% of people don’t, because you just don’t have the necessary context to determine what you really enjoy and what you want to learn more about (let alone what you want to do for the rest of your life).

sign up for the things that interest you. drop the things that don’t. see where that takes you, and go from there.

(also, if after your first semester you think university just genuinely isn’t something that appeals to you, maybe take some time off. like i said, going to university doesn’t by any means guarantee a career. you can figure out who you are and who you want to be in settings that aren’t the suffocatingly stressful, high-stakes conditions of academia. i, personally, am overall glad i went to uni and value the ideas and facts and ways of thinking i learned there; but the fact remains that it took my anxiety from “bad enough to spawn eating disorder” to “i can’t bear being alive and also resonate way too hard with descartes’ ‘does anything even exist’ crisis oh god oh help” levels. also: student loans. if you find that learning for its own sake isn’t exciting or fun for you, take a break!! find something that IS exciting and fun, and try doing that for a bit instead. never feel like you have to put yourself through something that’s taking more from you than it gives.)