I remember way back in elementary school, I already had this grand idea of college in my head as being a place where I could take whatever classes I wanted and learn whatever I wanted to learn. Sometimes a passion just cannot be snuffed, no matter how hard you try.
It can be especially hard when you leave high school thinking, “Now I get to do what I want with my education!” But everyone expects you leave your four- or five-year college stint with a useful skill. And sometimes what you want to learn doesn’t coincide with “something useful.”
I struggled with this issue myself in my senior year of high school. I desperately wanted to be a science major, but I didn’t want to do anything with it in the traditional sense.
I didn’t want to go into research or become a doctor. I wanted to be a journalist.
Luckily, I was able to find a way to combine my passion with my skill, and now I’m able to take the classes I want (science) and work for a goal that requires a lot of experience. Now, when I tell people I write for a newspaper, and they ask, “Oh, so you’re a journalism major?” I reply, “No, biology,” and they give me weird looks.
I’m not trying to get all Disney here, but if you honestly have no idea what you want to do with your life, just follow some kind of interest, and you might be able to find a way to make it useful to your future. For instance, my brother has been obsessed with bugs all his life, and even though he’s taking classes in food science, he keeps going back to entomology. I just hope he decides to open an insect-centered restaurant someday. Some people already know at the start — if people want to be doctors, they’ll probably be human physiology or biology majors. If they want to be engineers, an engineering major is probably the best option. But some people just have an interest and not necessarily a career goal.
Adam Unger is a graduate of the University with a major in political science and almost a major in biochemistry. He works in chemistry professor Victoria De Rose’s lab and he hopes to get into Lewis & Clark Law School. Back when he was a freshman, Unger had planned on majoring in political science, but didn’t know what he wanted to do with it at first. To satisfy his general education science credit, Unger took a conceptual physics class at Lane Community College.
Little did Unger know that conceptual physics class would ignite an interest in him that he never even considered before.
It was his professor’s first time teaching, and she brought the science down to a world we encounter on a daily basis, explaining phenomena like why the sky is blue, the sunset red and why your pencil looks bent when you put it in a glass of water.
Suddenly, science became an interest that couldn’t be dampened, and Unger signed up for science class after science class, adding a biochemistry major alongside political science. There were years he didn’t even take a political science class, focusing all his time on science. His lab skills became well-known in the department, and he got a job in the De Rose Lab studying RNA biochemistry. After five years — and almost finishing both his political science and biochemistry major — Unger decided that law school would be his next step. He started to research how he could combine his vast background in science with his intentions to lawyer and discovered a field of law termed intellectual property. It basically deals with patents, copyrights and trademarks. Unger wants to work in a tech transfer office, which helps the University’s raw innovations become useful to the public.
“I don’t have the investigative mind to ask the big (research) questions,” Unger said. “(In intellectual properties), you have to be able to understand what the new idea is, but you don’t have to be creating the new idea.”
Throughout my conversation with Unger, I was surprised at how similar the two of us were — in that we loved science but had no interest in pursuing a career in the hard sciences — and I wonder how many of us are out there. How many people are wondering how to combine their pleasure with their work? So here’s what I have to say to those people, and I’m going to say it in the most sappy, cringe-worthy, sugar-coated way possible: Follow your dreams, and you will find a way to shine.
When choosing between practicality and pleasure, go the pleasure route. That way, your valuable time and money won’t be wasted on classes you’d rather skip than attend. Chances are, somewhere down the road, you’ll be able to find a way to turn that pleasurable interest into a budding career.
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Wendel: Enjoyment key to personal success
Daily Emerald
March 7, 2011
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