The Expectations of Others

Yesterday my Godsister/little cousin came to visit campus for an all-day outreach/recruitment event. I walked around with her on a tour of campus, ate lunch with her at one of the food halls, and went to a special engineering meeting/tour. She's interested in aeronautical engineering, architecture, and dance. She's stuck between art and math, like me, so I feel her pain. That was actually most of what we talked about that day--how to choose. But she's only a junior in high school, so she's got plenty of time to figure out what she wants to do. Basically I just told her to go with her heart (because she's phenomenal at both art/dance and math/science), and if she finds out she doesn't like it anymore, she can always change her mind. That's what I did.

While we were at the engineering meeting, we ran into an advisor for one of the clubs I am vice president of. I said hi and complimented him on his suit, and introduced him to my little cousin. Later that day, after I had left her to run across the street to see the new Harry Potter movie (I tried to get her a ticket but it was sold out), she told me that she ran into my advisor again and they talked about me. She said he "Told me he was :( bc u are so good at math and u left it for english."

:/

Well, that pretty much makes me feel like crap.


I do miss science and math and engineering. I miss the rhythmic number crunching and and graphing and analyzing data, dealing with real-world problems and creating realistic solutions for them. Studying how the world works, and being able to predict its behavior. I know I would have made a phenomenal physicist, an excellent engineer. And I may have loved it, too. I could have done so much, could have really made an impact in society, regardless of how small it was.

And yet I left it all. For what? For words. For the promise of paychecks one-third in value. For a degree in something I would have done in my spare time anyways. I can do the math but it makes me tired and frustrated. I gave up, and came to this. Yes, obviously I love this, and I love what I'm studying, and I love what I'm doing, and I love the potential there is to be a teacher, an editor, an author. But. I can't help but wonder.

Did I make the right choice?

I loved physics and robotics, too.

Like I told my cousin, one can always change their mind. I did it once. I'm sure I could do it again, if need be. If I missed it enough.

I might.