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I'm surprised that you were able to decide to major in physics your junior year. At my school, if you didn't take physics your first year, you simply could not

I'm surprised that you were able to decide to major in physics your junior year. At my school, if you didn't take physics your first year, you simply could not graduate as a physics major in four years (at least without getting a special exception to double up on courses, which would require you to be nearly super-human). Perhaps this phenomenon contributes to the low numbers of science majors, as well. Lots of people don't figure out what to major in until they are a year or two into college, which rules out a lot of STEM possibilities if you happened not to take the correct courses in your first year.

spodek 15y ago
Exactly. I had to double up on classes and take some subjects on my own over the summer. Two classes one semester literally overlapped by about fifteen minutes and I had to get special permission to show up late for it. I got a passing grade for it, but finished it afterward. It wasn't a matter of being super-human, just loving the subject. I agree, though, that if your passion isn't overwhelming, you can't do it. You can with many non-STEM majors. The first couple years of graduate school were brutal. I had taken twenty math and science classes undergrad. Typical Russian and Chinese classmates had taken thirty to fifty and they blew me out of the water. The one guy in the program who took nineteen courses dropped out, so I was right on the border.