By Tyler Ruth ’16

I am not excited for college. I am really only going for the purpose of getting a job. To top that off, I am not even pursuing my passion as my major. All my life I have loved history but there are really no jobs that come with that major, so as it stands right now, I am pursuing a computer science degree. I am entering the void that is college and I have no idea what to expect except that it will be hard and I am unprepared.

These past four years I have gotten nothing but good grades. I participated in extra-curricular activities, did some volunteer work, and scored decently on the SAT. I am the cookie cutter goody-two-shoes successful student. But I do not feel like that success will transfer over in college. I only ever studied for tests so that I would not have to try on the exam at the end of the semester, my hours of student service learning were just so I could graduate, and the extracurriculars that I joined were just so I could “set myself apart” from my peers.

College requires a lot of work and I am not sure I can commit myself to another four years, on top of the last 13 years, of putrid school. But alas, I now find myself staring at the gate of college with the words “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” inscribed on it. To make things worse, I am already committed to this college whose gates I am staring at, unsure if I really want to go there, questioning my major, and wondering if I’ll even be able to get a job.

If I take away getting a job as the pure reason of going to college, I would sure as hell be getting a history degree. I love history. The Romans, the Neolithic era, the Crusades, World War II, that all excites me and I want to learn it all. So surely I would get a history degree if I really loved it that much, right? No. I’ll end up as a barista at Starbucks if I pursued history. So I am going into America’s lovechild field: STEM. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

I am not paying for my college education. My parents are. They have openly said that if I do not follow a major that guarantees a job (i.e. STEM, business, accounting, etc.) they will not pay for my education. So my options are to get a degree that lands me a job, or go to college for something I love but end up with a half a lifetime worth of debt. For the romantics it seems like an easy choice, to “follow your heart” and “pursue your dreams,” but for the realists, like me, the decision is a little more difficult than that. Right now my brain is telling me to take the free education and land a job, no matter how much unhappiness it takes. At least in the end maybe I’ll have money and a well-paying job.

I do not want to be defined by my major. I do not want to lock myself into a profession for the rest of my life, especially one like computer science where the field evolves so quickly the engineers and programmers have to keep up or be replaced by a new class of college graduates. I just want to be happy. History would give me happiness for the four years I educate myself, but then what? No job and no money and no happiness. Hopefully, things work out in the end, maybe I change my mind and become a history major, maybe I am making mountains out of molehills, maybe a recent editorial in the Washington Post is right and “critical thinking is … the only way to protect American jobs” and I can prove to employers that a history major is worth hiring.