No Regrets, Coyote

[mhuzzell]

My whole life, I wanted to be a zoologist. I mean, always. My mum likes to tell people how when I was six, she once told me I could be a model with my long legs. I had huffed and asked how I could possibly be a model when I was going to be working in the rainforest with dirt under my fingernails? This transmuted into veterinary ambitions for a few years (until I volunteered at our pets' vet and found out what that job actually entails), but mostly I just wanted to be [like] Jane Goodall.

It's not that I wasn't interested in other things, but science was, generally speaking, my passion. One afternoon, when I was maybe 10, I read our history textbook cover to cover. At the same time, I would spend hours and hours poring over field guides, biological textbooks, and every book on reptiles I could get my hands on. Raleigh has a History museum, an Art museum and a Natural History museum--guess which one I always wanted to visit? And, though I went to ungraded schools, guess which subjects came most easily for me? Even High School Chemistry, though it was boring as hell, was easier than the Humanities.

Given this, lately I've been wondering just how the hell I ended up studying an Arts degree. I mean, I know how. First, I developed a healthy hatred of mircobiology when I studied it in high school, and naively didn't realise that every subject I took would have some boring prerequisites that I'd have to slog through before I could study the interesting things (I hate moral philosophy a hell of a lot more than I hated microbiology...). I also didn't realise that UK universities let students specialise much earlier than US universities, so I wouldn't even have had to do so much.

More importantly, I went to a very Arts-focused school, with all of my humanities teachers encouraging me to go into their subject areas, and my science teachers not really showing much interest. But the clincher was the ACT. 20-or-so pages of data, 25 questions, 30 minutes. I didn't even finish the damn test. 25/36 -- not bad, but compared to 35/36 English and 36/36 'Reading Comprehension' (and with a paltry 28 or something in Maths), how could I possibly apply for a science degree? How could I possibly?

Now here I am, nearly four years later, wondering what I could possibly do with a degree in Philsophy. Philosophy? Fucking Philosophy? What was I thinking? Oh, yeah. Logic. I had wanted to do more of that. Well, I got what I fucking wished for. I've reached the limit of my logical abilities, I think. I'm slipping behind in this class, and clawing and scraping just to keep from slipping further. I haven't done any of the exercises I was supposed to turn in this afternoon. I can't concentrate. My head feels like it's in a vice.

Meanwhile, I'm supposed to be writing an essay for Philosophy of Language. But I can't even seem to get started. I've been getting increasingly frustrated with the whole topic--the whole subject, hell, the whole discipline, even. It's just so much fucking tail-chasing. I can't take it anymore, but it's far too late to switch to something else.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

shit, huh?

my plan's to go back and do more degrees, but as they'll be my second/third degrees I won't have to focus so much on getting the good grades, just learning the stuff I want to learn.

It's just 'the system'. Don't let it bum you out x

[ragsix-bold.livejournal.com]

btw, that was me

[mhuzzell.livejournal.com]

Yarr. And lucky you to live in a country that allows that kind of thing (for now; they're pushing your fees up and up on the American model, the capitalist cunts). While overseas-student fees here are comprable to American university fees, they're still far too high to let me take another degree, or even change to a degree that would require me to repeat any years.

Maybe I can apply for citizenship--but even then, I'd have to wait until I'd been resident for 5 years before I could be eligible for home-student [lack of] tuition fees, so I couldn't even start a second degree until a full year after I graduate here. And 29 is awfully old to be beginning a career in zoology.

::gloom::

[waxing-gibbous.livejournal.com]

I hate to pull out the Grad School card, but that's always an option. Bryn Mawr has a one-year program for women who didn't major in sciences to get all the prereqs for Med School, if that's something you want to do. And my friend Micah graduated in Philosophy and is now getting a law degree . . .

[mhuzzell.livejournal.com]

Nah, philosophy undergrad --> law school is an entirely normal route, and one to which I am entirely unsuited. I could never, ever, ever be a lawyer. Similarly, I most emphatically wouldn't want to go to med school, or be any kind of doctor, for all the same reasons that turned me away from veterinary stuff.

My problem is that all the stuff I want to do (zoological research) is precisely the stuff that just requires a simple undergraduate degree in biology or zoology, or a master's degree in the same--which, in turn, requires an undergraduate degree in biology.

[kiss-cassia.livejournal.com]

come back to the states. :]

Logic??

[ducakedhare.livejournal.com]

Yes, philosophy is all about logical reasoning. And about playing with words to infer anything you want. It's called Rhetoric, an old discipline that was superceded by the less overtly pretentious Philosophy.

I loved science too and of course all my best exam grades were in history, human geography and English...

But I stuck with it and went for computing - one thing I did not do at school, ergo was untainted by bad teachers and negative preconceptions (unlike my old piano teacher who scarred me from music academia for life).

If it's any relief, I got a third (courtesy of too much booze and guitar. and booze.) and am now in high profile company with a good pay.........

So play that rhetoric card and argue your way back to science!