In many senses, this is what one could consider the second part to my post about my paths in life. This is probably not the final portion, but it is a continuation, of sorts.
My overall progress towards pinpointing where I should be headed has actually headed in a negative direction. I’m no longer sure about anything at all. Sample questions that have been running circles through my head might be:
Do I want to do something in English? Writing? What kind of writing? Creative? Books? News? Editorials?
Do I want to do something involving communication? Commucation theory? Media?
What kind of media? Modeling and rendering? Image manipulation? Web design?
What about computers? Computer science? Game design? Software development?
I can’t help but wish that through all this, I had some kind of guiding motivation. In some kind of weird way, I wish something bad would happen to me that drove me to a specific career. This brings me to wishing these times of ours were more exciting. One could argue that there’s nothing more exciting than carbon nanotubes and cloning (even if it was faked), but recently, that stuff just doesn’t interest me.
This train of thought brings me back to a belief I once had in elementary school. I was thoroughly convinced that I had been born in the wrong century. In specific, I was really meant to be a chivalrous knight of old, fighting for the honour (I’ve taken to spelling that with a ‘u’ – I read a quote that went something like “I put the U in honour because it seems to be missing these days”) of…something. Needless to say, I had some issues with reality back in the day.
The point here is to say, I don’t have a direction. I spent an hour today staring at prospective colleges, not because I’m worried, but to get some kind of inspiration from their lists of majors and minors. The trouble is, when I think of any one profession I might like, I see huge blocks that would severely hamper my enjoyment. Examples:
Computer science (being my original choice) is still a viable option at this point, because I do enjoy programming. The problems here are that I don’t know if I enjoy it THAT much, but really, the killer is the math. Supposedly, I’ll need lots of math. I don’t enjoy math enough to spend my life doing that. Is there a compromise?
Engineering, I suppose, is still on the table. I don’t like the vast majority of fields in engineering, and this pretty much leads me straight back to computer science. What I do know, however, is that I do NOT want to be a computer engineer.
The most obvious combination of the above two is Software Engineering, which may just be the solution to the problem. Software engineers are lovingly known as “code monkeys”, mostly for their ignorance of elegant and robust technique. This is the main problem with software engineering – I do not want lesser training. I, like Will Wright, am very fond of the algorithm, and would thoroughly enjoy applying elegant solutions to complex problems. Could I do this with software engineering? I have no idea.
Journalism is just kind of a random thing that sounded cool. Potential issues I see mostly involve the content of what I would write. I could see myself writing for some website (preferable) or newspaper (not so preferable), but I definitely don’t want to write about politics or sports.
More thoughts out loud. I submitted a question to /. that probably won’t get answered, and I’ll submit another one tomorrow regarding the mathematical difference between SE and CS. Comment, please.
(also, I fixed the javascript to work for Opera)