The Scene staff
Like many students, I had a hardtime choosing a college major.
I enrolled at Forest Park after high school without a clue about what I wanted to do, but no one seemed to think it was a problem.
“You’ll eventually figure it out,” my parents said. Then after three semesters, that became “Have you figured it out, yet?”
I considered several majors, including sociology, philosophy and English literature. It would have been hard to accuse me of being a pragmatist.
When I started writing for The Scene a few semesters back, I became convinced that journalism was for me. Getting paid to write and inform the public sounded like a dream.
I was set to study journalism at Webster University last fall, then I received my financial aid package, or lack thereof. I would need $15,000 in student loans just for the first year, a prospect that made me break out in a sweat.
Two weeks before classes started, I could no longer convince myself that accruing $30,000 in debt for two years of schooling was worth it.
Back to the drawing board.
As I considered other universities, I began re-considering journalism. Was I really OK with long hours, low pay and a job market as secure as a game of Jenga?
Would I have to work a menial-labor job, like the one I already had at the time, just to make ends meet?
The romantic notion of struggling for my passion began to seem like a real sacrifice with frightening consequences. The fear grew with every toilet I cleaned as a gas-station cashier.
Yet every practical major sounded boring, and every fun career seemed like a fast track to couch-surfing into my 30s.
After doing an obsessive amount of reading on different majors, I found myself seriously considering economics. I took a microeconomics course, did fairly well and I was awfully interested in the subject.
However, I couldn’t shake the mental image of my economics professor nodding his head “yes” when asked if economics required a lot of math, a subject that I disdained.
I began to wonder whether I truly disliked math, or if I just hadn’t been paying enough attention in class or taken enough time to learn it.
I watched basic algebra videos at Khan Academy online to refresh my skills. I was studying 20 hours a week. I knew it would benefit me in the long run, so I found it incredibly fun and interesting.
In the spring, I completed my first semester at University of Missouri-St. Louis as an economics major.
Looking back, I can’t imagine doing anything else. I ended up with great grades, but I also had a blast, and I am convinced these are directly
correlated.
As Stephen Levit, co-author of the “Freakonomics” book series, said, “Loving what you do is such a completely unfair advantage to anyone you are competing with.”
To students at Forest Park still trying to pick a major, I will offer my not-so-sage advice. I’ll skip the “do-what-you-love” cliché and go straight to what I view as a misconception about hard work vs. natural proclivity.
One last anecdote to illustrate my point: I have played guitar for about a decade, with a few of those years involving tons and tons of practice.
When I started to show progress, my dad would say he wasn’t sure where I got the “musical gene,” because he wasn’t any good at music.
At first, this made me feel special and talented.
However, after countless hours of practice, I began to feel cheated by the notion of innate skill.
Sure, some people are better than others at certain things in the beginning, but I’ve found this hardly explains what happens down the road.
If you think some majors aren’t for you just because you don’t have a knack for them, I’d urge you to reconsider.
Too many people allow their perception of natural talent to outweigh the importance of hard work.
Think less about what you are good at and more about what you are willing to do every day, even if it sounds difficult.
After all, if I was dead set on doing what I am naturally best at, I’m afraid my sole career option would be binge television watching.