Choosing a Major
So when I applied to UC Berkeley, I chose Undeclared/Intended Business as my choice for a major. At UC Berkeley, you have to apply to the business school to major in business, hence the “undeclared/intended.” The reason I chose Business is because I spent my high school years watching The Apprentice, and I absolutely loved that show; I used to get goose bumps when the theme song played. I would watch the show on Thursday nights and do my Chemistry homework during commercial breaks. Then I figured if the business major didn’t work out, that I would major in something that would lead me to go to medical school to become a doctor; which was my goal probably since the 9th grade. I took a class called College Skills for Success, and the class had an assignment to interview someone in a career field of interest. So I called a couple of doctors, specifically cardiologists, and scheduled an interview with one. When I went to this doctor’s office, I showed up on time, but he had me wait because he was busy. I only had scheduled a 30 minute interview, and by the time he came out, it was past the 30 minutes. So he said sorry for being busy, that he was on his way to perform a surgery, and asked if I wanted to join him. I said sure, we walked out, he asked my stepmom, and we walked across the street to the hospital, and I watch him surgically implant a pacemaker. From then on, my goal was to be a doctor… until I watched The Apprentice, then becoming a doctor was a backup plan.
Anyway, so I didn’t really do any other research on careers, when starting college, all I really knew about were doctors, lawyers, businessman, journalists, and architects, and mathematicians and stuff like that, but my main focus was business or medical. I kept on receiving things in the mail for the engineering and math programs, but I didn’t really think much of it. I actually didn’t even really know what engineering was, I didn’t put much thought into it. Then one day I was hanging out at the dorms and this girl tells me that I should be an engineer, that they get a lot of respect. And I thought, “really?” So I did some research and realized that there are all kinds of engineers, including civil engineers, which I thought was solely an architect. Civil engineering was something that I could easily relate to since I had been doing construction for years already. So from then on, I followed up with those letters for engineering and math programs and started to pursue a major in civil engineering.