With spring registration coming up fast, many first and second-year students are faced with an important question: Should I change my major? Most students doubt what they are studying, and stress about their futures within a certain degree. At such an engineering/computer science focused school, there is immense pressure to stay within these high ranking degrees. However, life has many pathways, and a lot of times engineers and computer science majors don’t even end up in fields directly relevant to their degrees. This is why it is important to assess your passions, what career you want to pursue, and what you actually have to do to get there.
During my first semester at Stevens, I was an engineering major, and I ended the semester with a 3.8 GPA. This is seen as pretty good, but throughout the semester, I encountered many red flags that alerted me to the fact that engineering was not a good fit for me. For one, I didn’t really look forward to any particular class, every day was a drag, and I wasn’t super interested in the content. Additionally, the classes caused immense mental stress, and most of my life revolved around this week’s design lab or next week’s chemistry test. This is not to say that you should give up when the curriculum gets hard, but rather that if nothing excites you, it may be time to reassess. I know so many students at Stevens who hate their engineering major and don’t even want to be engineers, but are experiencing immense pressure from family or peers to stick it out because eventually it gets “easier.” The truth: nothing gets easier if you don’t like what you are doing.
Stevens has a ton of interdisciplinary majors with applied tech focuses. As a student population, we tend to make fun of business and HASS majors, however these programs receive a far more well-rounded education than a lot of the more traditional majors here at Stevens. The Business and Technology major has many concentrations, including Information Systems or Data Analytics, both very valuable in today’s workforce. After my first semester at Stevens, I switched into Quantitative Social Science (QSS), an integrated computer science, data science, statistics, and social science degree. In this curriculum, I learn how to use computational thinking to solve real world problems. The social science background gives me the proper base to fully understand the social, political, and psychological implications of all forms of decision making. HASS degrees get made fun of for being easy, but I take the same calculus as everyone else, multiple computer science classes, statistics, and data science courses. As far as careers go, I can do anything involving data and strategy, which encompasses a large proportion of careers.
The most important thing is that I am far happier now. Previously, every day felt like a fight to get to the weekend, and now I am studying something that I am extremely passionate about. If I had not listened to my gut in the first semester, and identified my personal red flags with engineering, then I would not be living the enriched life I am living today. I am a research assistant in a field I love (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), and I am working towards securing an internship somewhere in the political field for the summer. I will STILL MAKE MONEY — the preconceived notion that any HASS major will be poor and destitute for the rest of their lives is extremely outdated, especially since all of the degrees at Stevens are technologically integrated. The moral of the story is: don’t remain stagnant and unhappy to satisfy other people or the norm, and seek out passion and happiness with your college studies.
