College Kiwis: On Dealing With Major Regret.

[AFAB Transwoman]

So, recently I’ve switched from STEM to elementary education.

I wish I could tell you my thought process behind that but I’m severely regretting my choice.

I’d love to go back but, honestly, I am FAR behind on math (was originally on track to be some kind of engineer but to be honest it was to impress my family, for once).

I am about two semesters away from graduating and I don’t think the classes I’ve taken amount to anything more than “General Studies”.

I am scared to admit this to my family, though.

What do I do now??

 

[KittyGremlin]

I wish I knew, though I've graduated engineering, just don't enjoy engineering jobs.

 

[Internet Wizard]

I’d love to go back but, honestly, I am FAR behind on math (was originally on track to be some kind of engineer but to be honest it was to impress my family, for once).

Live for yourself, it will pay off in that you will enjoy what you do instead of being a bugman-tier slave to your superiors until you rot and die
I can't tell you how much I hate people that majored in STEM just for the money, though it's wasted energy given they'll probably off themselves or change career paths anyways
I was also scared to admit my major (Geography) to my family, until my uncle (an Accountant) told me he wished he could've done it in college. He basically shilled for me to my mom and since then she's been fine with it, but honestly the bigger part was in me being confident in what I was doing. Find something you love and stick by it, and eventually they will to.
What are they worried about, money? Plan your own future on your terms and stand by it, again

 

[Syntaxion]

How old are you?

Could go back to school after graduating. I did that, finish a trade in one field, went to college in another field. Pretty glad I did that.

 

[R00T]

Ummmm… talk to your guidance counselor and sort yourself. You probably are close to *something* and might be able to do *something* with it, but they can also help you determine a course of action if there is a bigger change you need to make. College is often not 4 years and done. Many people have to take additional time. It might mean getting a job doing something you don’t want to do while you complete classes part time. The college wants your money and will work with you so you’re able to accomplish what *you* want.

 

[Jewthulhu]

What do you WANT to do? Do you want to work in elementary education (I'm assuming that means being a teacher?)? Were there any classes that you took that you particularly enjoyed?

 

[Neo-Nazi Rich Evans]

What do you WANT to do? Do you want to work in elementary education (I'm assuming that means being a teacher?)? Were there any classes that you took that you particularly enjoyed?

my advice would depend on the answer here.
if you want to be in elementary education then dont worry about switching back to stem. the real concern would be to see if what you studied and done will land you a job doing what you want.
if you want a stem degree, then the question i have is why do you think you cant switch back? is it a question of finance or a question of you think you are too old to spend more time in college?

 

[Flatline]

Elementary education? In this economy? If your heart's not one hundred percent in it, you're in for a world of hurt.

 

[MrTroll]

Just relax and take a deep breath. Yes, you majored in something retarded that will never pay you a nickel, but at least you have a huge trust fund from your rich parents to fall back on, plus a generous allowance to make up for the pittance you can expect to earn in your chosen field.

.... You do have a trust fund and allowance, right??

 

[Bassomatic]

Just change. If you're not going to be happy or able to be successful change. Eat it and move on.

Talk to your consulers. In most colleges they are good unlike highschools.

I started as a history major lol WTF , 5 degrees later I have a PhD and love my career and education.

My best advice find something you can do as a job and understand how long you're willing to go. You won't really get shit being a BS shrink need for example.

 

[Toji Suzuhara]

Just relax and take a deep breath. Yes, you majored in something retarded that will never pay you a nickel, but at least you have a huge trust fund from your rich parents to fall back on, plus a generous allowance to make up for the pittance you can expect to earn in your chosen field.

.... You do have a trust fund and allowance, right??

You can still fail even if you have a trust fund

 

[Adrenochrome Dreams]

This isn't the worst degree in the world.

In the worst case scenario, you've got a degree for a career with extremely good job security that is respected and will always be in demand.

I would say suck it up, gradate, get your job, and take online classes on the side in an area of STEM you're actually interested in.

 

[MrTroll]

In the worst case scenario, you've got a degree for a career with extremely good job security that is respected and will always be in demand.

[insert lazy joke about Onlyfans here]

 

[Frank(en) Castle]

I was going to be a psychologist. Got the degree and everything, honors track to prepare me for grad school. Then... I didn't get in (and some other bullshit I won't TMI about). Next thing I know I'm working I.T. with literally no experience past, 'I own a computer' because my Summer Job boss had faith in my general abilities while I wait to apply to grad school again, and then I didn't. Because it turned out I was really good at I.T. and more importantly, I LIKED doing it. Next thing after that I'm at a trade school learning all this I.T. stuff and now I'm an I.T. person specializing in databases.
Now, sometimes I have regrets wondering about paths not taken. But that's life, you're always going to have something you regret not having done. But you cannot dwell on it. I also got lucky because someone gave me a chance simply because they liked and trusted me.
This is going to sound super phenomenally gay, but some of the best life advice I ever got was from a Star Wars book titled Traitor. In it, a character named Vergere gives advice to Jacen Solo in the form of a simple mantra "Choose. And act." This was to get Jacen to stop agonizing over every single decision he had to make (something I personally struggle with). Some decisions require lots of thought, but some don't. And as I've grown up I realize that (again as gay as it sounds) your heart, soul, brain, whatever you want is really good at telling you when you're doing something you don't like or shouldn't be.

As people above me have said. What do you want to do? Do not set your life path to impress or appease others. I had a friend who did that and it made him miserable and drove him to a complete mental breakdown in college to the point he had to get medicated and therapized.

I am scared to admit this to my family, though.

Just be straight up about. Don't pussyfoot around and make it obvious you're having doubts (even if you are). That leaves you open to peer pressure. If your parents are reasonable humans I think they'll be happy you got any degree at all. Remember lots of people don't even make it past first semester college.

I wish I could tell you my thought process behind that but I’m severely regretting my choice.

Sounds like your heart/soul/brain knew you were on the wrong path.

 

[Rudy Coleman]

i regret going to welding school instead of becoming a productive member of society

 

[RollingRock2]

Tell your parents you weren't smart enough for the math in an engineering degree so you switched majors. Lots of people find their chosen degree too hard and switch to something easier. It's not a freak occurrence. Just make sure you lock in with someone you can actually graduate with before you tell them.

 

[Kier]

I'm not long out of college and was an assistant professor for a little while, so I'm speaking more from recently in your spot. There are some (embarrassing) chimp outs from me wanting to change majors or drop out in some threads they didn't need to be in on this site, I've been there. I finished my engineering program after changing out of it to business for a bit, and I'm glad I did.

I liked engineering, I loathed engineering school, and there is a huge difference between the two. I came around to it once I found the subfield of it that I did enjoy, I won't powerlevel too much about what I do, but I found a middle ground and enjoy it.

Engineering classes have basically fuck all to do with the experience of being an actual engineer. The club projects available to you are far more representative of the day in the life than "intro to power systems" is. I LOATHED, the classes, but enjoyed the projects. My job has more I'm common with a club project than any class I took. I almost never have to know the math; I have to know that the math exists and where to find it. The job is about knowing how to approach and tackle a problem, pooling resources to find a solution with constraints, it is not spouting math off the top of your head.

My experience is that engineers who hate being engineers make for awful engineering students, awful lab partners, and even worse new hire employees. Your heart has to be in it, or your output will stink. There are plenty of middling engineering jobs that will pay the bills damn well and you can be mediocre and get by. And I don't mean by education, best engineer on our team went to the worst college on our team and got shit grades in it too. The students I had to deal with, that did not want to be there had all their work take four times as long and get half as good results and wanted to kill themselves doing it.

I disagree with calling it "not smart enough" for the major, either you like it and your good at it or you don't and you're not. I don't mean in some new age bullshit way "everyone's special" participation trophy way, both things must be true to be successful and not miserable. I'd say I'm dumber than many far worse engineers.

I would never feel embarrassed taking a longer time, retaking a math course (especially calc 2 or DiffEq), or changing majors all together. It's a different story where money is involved of course. I actually wish I retook calc2 even though I passed it, my foundation wasn't good enough. Last thing I want to do is skew you one way or another, it's your life decision. But I would strongly consider what the day in the life is of the job you might get.

 

[Alex Yiik]

I liked engineering, I loathed engineering school, and there is a huge difference between the two.

This and a lot of the rest of your post sum up what I've realized after graduation. I personally hate academia and couldn't wait to be through with it. It took me years after graduating high school to drag myself back to college, and once I got into it I was back to wanting it to be over as soon as possible.

Going to school to learn about a concept is nothing like working in an industry focused on that concept. In school you learn about what something is, but you get very little experience actually using that information to do something. If your entire focus is whether or not you like studying this subject, you're missing the bigger picture of whether or not you're going to like whatever it is you're actually going to do for the years or decades after graduating. A degree is just a means to an end, what you do after that is what you want to focus on.

Spoiler: personal anecdote

I'll put it this way. I really like math, and the most fun I had in college was in my math classes. I genuinely wanted to take higher level classes to learn about more advanced fields of mathematics that my freshman and sophomore level classes didn't get into. But I had to change my focus once it became time to declare a major, because I didn't want to do the things that a math degree would enable me to do. I have no interest in being a professor or researcher. No career I got after graduating would be the thing I liked, because the thing I liked was being a math student.

On the other hand, I also like programming. Not learning about programming, but actually doing it. So I majored in computer science. And let me tell you, a good chunk of upper level CS classes are some real bullshit. The feel I got through most of my classes was that we were all just LARPing, pretending to be designing some system or implementing some solution, but it was all made up. A few of my classes actually tasked me with really doing something and creating a tangible end product (as tangible as software can be). Those reminded me that I was working toward doing something, and it wasn't all going to be like this forever.

I've been working as a software engineer for a couple years now, and it's so much different than school was. My entire job is to do my job. No pretending, just doing. And while the industry is obviously not perfect, and my job is still a job and thus not fun all the time, I still like what I do. More than I liked studying it.

So I'll echo the rest of the thread and ask OP, what is it that you actually want to do? Do you actually want to teach kids? Have you done mock classroom sessions to practice that? Have you shadowed a real teacher and gotten a feel for how they run a classroom? Does any of this interest you? I don't know what an elementary education degree teaches you while you're still a student, but would challenge you to think about what happens once you're done.

You don't have to know exactly what you want to do, but if you look at where you're heading and decide that you don't want to do that, you can head in a different direction. It's not easy to change, but you're nowhere near irreversibly committed at this point.

 

[Rekeita's Kidneys]

I've got the opposite problem where I feel like I am too fucking old to go. I'm kinda wanting to enter telecommunications since job security seems decent (jeets cannot do it).

Should I just go or should I certmaxx?

 

[Spooky Dogwood]

Don't worry, because you'll probably be stuck teaching/tutoring anyway even if you did get an engineering degree. It's been the best case scenario for every single millennial graduate in my experience. The only exception are medical degrees.