Major Change

In my last post, I mentioned that I changed my major. I suppose I can talk about it. 

(Ok, before I start that I have to talk about how Blogger is annoying me right now. There are only 6 fonts, the one I like doesn't stay between posts. Same thing with size. And whose dick do I have to suck to get a line spacing button? I may need to switch to WordPress.)

During the Spring Semester, I started to get deeper into the program. I had all the heavy math classes and math adjacent general ed classes too. I got very stressed out. I dropped one class and it didn't really help. It got to the point that I was questioning my degree program. 

Now, this wasn't the first time I had questioned it. But I did finally analyze why I picked Math in the first place. And there were a couple of reasons. None of them were about me or what I wanted to do or what I'm good at. 

I originally picked that major because I wanted to make the biggest impact. Service to the community. For one, there are a lot of bad Math teachers out there. They may know how to calculate stuff, but they have no idea how to teach. I think this is a big reason why kids hate math. If they have no confidence in their ability, they will struggle and hate it. Also, we need more women in STEM. It might help if girls had more STEM teachers that are women, it might help.

The other reason I picked Math is that I have been trying to prove I'm as good as the boys my whole life. Part of this is how my mom treated me and dressed me before my brother was born. She raised me kind of boyish. There were girls that tried to make me prove I was a girl because I always had boy clothes on. Of course that all changed when my brother was born. Then I was told to wear more dresses and he was the favorite. Now she wonders why he does nothing and expects handouts.

So for the longest time, I suppressed everything girly. Slowly I've shed most of that nonsense. The last to go was vocation. 

I bought into the idea that the hard sciences are masculine and the soft sciences are feminine. Which is nonsense since men have been trying to keep us out of all of them for generations, and women were the 1st coders. And who cares if I do something girly anyway. We need to stop gendering jobs.

Once I unpacked that I realized that I  missed writing papers. Getting a grade for my opinion is pretty great really. And while Math concepts are interesting, I really don't care about the computation. 

I am, however, still very interested in Astronomy and am doing independent research studying Seyfert Galaxies. Let me know in the comments if you want me to write for days about Active Galactive Nuclei. And we still need people to report on science if we're ever going to get the public to value it again.