- #1
mysterytome
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How do I determine what I want to do with my future?
I recently finished a BS in aerospace engineering. Long story short, I realized during my undergrad that it was not something I wanted to pursue as a career but didn't come up with any concrete plans on what I did want to study and ended up sticking it out until graduation. My grades weren't great, and I attribute this primarily to my lack of interest and excess amount of time spent on other things (programming projects, some independent and some with teams, none of which turned into anything significant).
Lately I've been looking at grad school, but my grades and lack of research make that possibility extremely unlikely, at least for now, so I've turned my attention to a second bachelor's degree to improve my profile. The problem I'm having is that while initially I was certain about what I wanted to pursue (material science), after spending a lot of time investigating my options I'm much more uncertain than when I started.
How can I determine what I really want to study?
Material science/chemistry:
Chemistry was my favorite subject in high school. I'm really interested in a lot of the stuff covered on http://www.sixtysymbols.com/index.html" , and I'm particularly interested in semiconductors (their use in integrated circuits) and future advances in those areas when we eventually reach the limits of silicon.
I don't have a reason for not studying chemistry as an undergrad, other than maybe the perception that I'd be stuck becoming a chemistry teacher. As for material science, it's just not something I was aware even existed until late in my undergrad studies. I'm also somewhat concerned that my goals wrt material science are too narrow and that if I fail to meet them, which is always a possibility, I'll be stuck doing something that I really do not enjoy like strength testing or less glamorous non-electrical material research.
Computer science:
Computer science has always been somewhat of an obsession of mine. I learned many programming languages, both high and low-level, in my own time during high school. I realize programming is not computer science, but I have always had an understanding of logic and have spent a lot of time reading about theory over the past few years (lambda calculus, curry-howard correspondence) and am currently working on developing a functional programming language on the side.
My main reason for not studying CS was because I viewed it as something that was too easy (I could easily ace any undergrad CS course) and as something where I'd just be another programmer on a huge uninteresting project which is just rehashing the same old design principles we've been using for 20+ years without any true innovation or breakthroughs, and which will be forgotten in 5 years when everyone moves on to someone else's software.
Computer engineering:
This would seem to combine some of my interests in computer science and electrical engineering. I've spent a fair amount of time building digital circuits as a hobby and it's something that's interesting to me, though I don't know that it's something I enjoy enough to pursue as a career, especially if it's on projects that aren't very glamorous (i.e. that aren't CPUs or cutting-edge network hardware).
Other:
I've been interested in just about everything at some point, from anthropology to oceanography to particle physics. The more I think about pursuing a specific line or work the harder it is to accept that I'll be giving up all of the other possibilities. As a side question, how do you deal with this?
I recently finished a BS in aerospace engineering. Long story short, I realized during my undergrad that it was not something I wanted to pursue as a career but didn't come up with any concrete plans on what I did want to study and ended up sticking it out until graduation. My grades weren't great, and I attribute this primarily to my lack of interest and excess amount of time spent on other things (programming projects, some independent and some with teams, none of which turned into anything significant).
Lately I've been looking at grad school, but my grades and lack of research make that possibility extremely unlikely, at least for now, so I've turned my attention to a second bachelor's degree to improve my profile. The problem I'm having is that while initially I was certain about what I wanted to pursue (material science), after spending a lot of time investigating my options I'm much more uncertain than when I started.
How can I determine what I really want to study?
Material science/chemistry:
Chemistry was my favorite subject in high school. I'm really interested in a lot of the stuff covered on http://www.sixtysymbols.com/index.html" , and I'm particularly interested in semiconductors (their use in integrated circuits) and future advances in those areas when we eventually reach the limits of silicon.
I don't have a reason for not studying chemistry as an undergrad, other than maybe the perception that I'd be stuck becoming a chemistry teacher. As for material science, it's just not something I was aware even existed until late in my undergrad studies. I'm also somewhat concerned that my goals wrt material science are too narrow and that if I fail to meet them, which is always a possibility, I'll be stuck doing something that I really do not enjoy like strength testing or less glamorous non-electrical material research.
Computer science:
Computer science has always been somewhat of an obsession of mine. I learned many programming languages, both high and low-level, in my own time during high school. I realize programming is not computer science, but I have always had an understanding of logic and have spent a lot of time reading about theory over the past few years (lambda calculus, curry-howard correspondence) and am currently working on developing a functional programming language on the side.
My main reason for not studying CS was because I viewed it as something that was too easy (I could easily ace any undergrad CS course) and as something where I'd just be another programmer on a huge uninteresting project which is just rehashing the same old design principles we've been using for 20+ years without any true innovation or breakthroughs, and which will be forgotten in 5 years when everyone moves on to someone else's software.
Computer engineering:
This would seem to combine some of my interests in computer science and electrical engineering. I've spent a fair amount of time building digital circuits as a hobby and it's something that's interesting to me, though I don't know that it's something I enjoy enough to pursue as a career, especially if it's on projects that aren't very glamorous (i.e. that aren't CPUs or cutting-edge network hardware).
Other:
I've been interested in just about everything at some point, from anthropology to oceanography to particle physics. The more I think about pursuing a specific line or work the harder it is to accept that I'll be giving up all of the other possibilities. As a side question, how do you deal with this?
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