Pretty much the same as many have said. I was EXTREMELY lazy throughout high school, college, and law school. In college, I ended up in PolSci, after dropping out from the school of business - which I detested. I ruled out sciences/engineering off the bat, b/c I was too lazy to do the science and math. PolSci was easy, and I found it interesting. Besides, I always planned on going to law school - because talking and writing (and test-taking) came easily to me.
PolSci - and the rest of LAS - was all stuff I could’ve picked up later through reading on my own. I realize what really interests me is science - especially biology. I wish I had perceived that at the time. Then, even if I went to law school, I might have had a career in something that was of minimal interest or provided minimal satisfaction. But it is A LOT harder to just pick up science and math on your own through independent study - while starting a family and career.
I can’t object too much, b/c my choices supported a comfortable lifestyle w/ no heavy lifting and no overtime. And I met my wife in law school. But it would be nice to look back at 35-40 years of a career and see something other than boring paper pushing.
I think there’s also a fundamental lack of information for most people between the subject matter that’s studied in a field of study, and what the actual jobs entail when they get out.
And I’m not talking about philosophy majors asking about fries; I mean not knowing what a career in tech might actually look like for your average graduate. Or what being an engineer actually is in real life. Or that certain fields of study have very few actual jobs at the undergrad level, etc…
It’s all sort of a giant murky mess when you’re a freshman/sophomore, and there’s nobody really trying to help you- the degree plan people are more concerned about making sure you’re not dead weight on the department, or that you’re not counted as attrition because you dropped out. The career center is generally tightly focused on getting jobs for upcoming/recent graduates, not counseling first/second year students about their majors.
And there’s little guidance about navigating the “Do something that makes money/has jobs, even if you don’t like it” and “Do what you love and the money will come”. Both are bullshit, and can easily make people dissatisfied with their degrees once they graduate and get out into the world.
So it’s not at all surprising that people get out of school and find out that they hate what they do, or that they don’t have the lifestyle they want because their chosen career isn’t as lucrative as they’d like.
That said, I don’t regret mine, although I think there’s a certain “what if?” thought that pops up periodically if I’d gone a slightly different path (civil engineering instead of computer science), mostly because the company I interned with and was offered a job at has turned into a BIG engineering firm, and I suspect my life trajectory would be considerably different.
A significant percentage of male pharmacists started out as engineering majors, and switched to other majors (yes, including pharmacy) when they couldn’t handle the higher maths required for that field, and/or found out what an engineering job really entails.
No regrets about my degree in Geography. Right out of college I was able to work in City Planning, which led to about a 10 year span working as a map-maker with the nascent digital map companies in Silicon Valley - the maps used in navigation systems in cars (which are now ubiquitous). It was all new stuff and very entrepreneurial, so it was an exciting time, and I was satisfied that my degree led me to those jobs and that part of my career.
However, seeking more transferable skills, I moved into Project Management, which I have been doing ever since, which is a career known as “The Accidental Profession”, given how people generally drift into it (like me) rather than start-out in it… My current job that I have been doing for a long, long time has nothing at all to do with mapping or geography in general (altho, it pays sufficiently and has enabled me to provide for my family). So, if I were to regret anything, it would be not remaining in the field of my college major, that I initially found so interesting and rewarding.
I’m regularly shocked at the number of young folk who say they intend to go to law school, but clearly show no understanding of what the practice of law is like, the current job market, and show no clear “passion” for being a lawyer (whatever the hell that might be.) In return, they have a good chance of making a decent living, but there is also a good chance that their career will not really be stimulating, fulfilling, etc. So I guess there could be worse choices.
And that is if they are pretty bright. If they are just kinda average bright, they will likely have a tough slog ahead of them with unsure prospects.
Obviously, YMMV, but I’ve had a great career as a lawyer. It’s been fun and challenging. I really enjoy court room work, which is not something I could have predicted when I was in law school. I thought I would do more solicitor type work.
I found it very helpful to visit a college and sit in on a few classes. This helped me assess both majors and goodness of fit through observation and chatting with the students in that class. As faculty, I’ve always allowed visits from prospective students unless the class’s content was confidential or the whole class meeting was video, guest, or student presentations.
Out of my group of college friends (which was also my college Dungeons & Dragons group), there were three people who went on to law school; all three of them earned their law degrees, passed the bar, and practiced law for a time.
But, none of them did so for particularly long (none for more than a decade), as they did all discover that it wasn’t exactly what they enjoyed doing, and they then pursued other fields. One of the three stayed within the legal sphere (he got his PhD, and is now a law professor); the other two are doing completely unrelated work now.
I needed a major where my ability to skim, summarize, and analyze would get me through a degree program. History and Political Science worked. I didn’t really want to go to college, so I took the path of least resistance. After a couple of years floundering I got my MLS, which I parlayed into an interesting and varied library career.
Yes, totally. I have an English Lit degree, and I don’t regret it. However, my career was in IT (it was still called DP when I started – I’m old), and I made a good living. I know I’d have changed majors if I had a STEM major. I enjoyed the sciencey classes I took, but it’s not my jam. I learned to program mostly by making mistakes.
There are always exceptions. Or you could be the sort who flourishes in law. And things may be different in Canada than the US.
Back when I used to pay attention to such things, the percentage of young US lawyers who were dissatisfied with their careers was pretty shockingly high. I highly doubt a majority of US lawyers would describe it as “fun.”
No regrets here. I did a double major, Maths and Computer Science. I thought I was going to be a mathematician and the CS would be an easy add on since I already knew programming. But I ended up in a career in software development, which turns out to suit me very well.
I was already a learner, but I feel this one very much. I love to learn and it has allowed me to reshape my career a few times. My BA degree is in Journalism with an emphasis on Advertising. And I did land that advertising job, only to discover that I really didn’t like being a advertising copywriter because you often had to stretch the truth too much. I could have gone through the Business school or even English to get where I thought I wanted to be.
I also have a Tech College degree in Supermarket Management, something I never used professionally. When I realized this wasn’t what I wanted to do, I was not far from graduating, so I completed it.
If I could have a do-over, I would probably pick a double major and not spend 32 hours a week working during the school year. But I did what was necessary and graduated with only one student loan. I would also go on to grad school. If wishes were fishes…
At age 18 I was effectively an orphan- my mother had just died, and my father was completely out of the picture. I didn’t get to even graduate from high school, so between suddenly being on my own and having no money, I didn’t get to go to college. Eventually I took a few courses, but did so on my own dime (no loans for me).
As far as my career has gone, I don’t regret never having gotten a degree. I make very good money, in a field which wasn’t even an option when I would’ve gone to college. However, I’m trying to get my Canadian citizenship, and I lose a lot of points by not having an education. Having no degree is going to make things a lot more difficult in that regard.
If I’d stayed in the US, this would never have come up.
This was me. When I was 18, because of a combination of the way my high school’s curriculum was, the influence of certain family members, and the fact that I was innately somewhat prone to being a lazy, unambitious dreamer, I felt that the purpose of life was to just sit around reading good books and philosophizing like Plato about the nature of The Good, The True, The Beautiful, etc. I didn’t really want to get a real job, didn’t want to have to make a career choice, and wanted to go to college just to learn for the sake of learning. I went to a liberal arts college with the vague idea that spending four years sitting around philosophizing and reading the Great Books of Western Civilization would help me figure out what to do with my life. I majored in music, just because that was something I felt like learning more about. But I wasn’t good enough to make a living as a performer, and while I thought about going to grad school for music theory or music history, after perusing a few applications I felt I wasn’t even qualified to do that.
So like your friend, I spent most of the rest of my twenties floundering and just had to go back to school in a STEM field in order to get a “real” job. If I could do it over, I’d major in a STEM field that would put me on a path toward a real job the first time through. My idealistic, head-in-the-clouds 18-year old self would be shocked and dismayed to hear his future self say that, but hey, reality bites.
My trajectory was sort of a combination of Qadgop’s and silenus’, starting with apparently getting about two thirds through the same program as the distinguished Mercotan until (in hindsight) not having been really ready to go straight into college from the emotional/mental health side caught up with me; then wandering for many years with short time restarts and restops at various places until I got myself figured out and finally completing a “Liberal Studies” major at a place that would work with me on assembling the accumulated credits – I figured, “might as well have something to show for all of this.” The way the lived experience worked out it actually fits with what I’d been doing all along and I never have to explain “why are you not doing…”
