A Different Direction

When I started looking at colleges, it took me a lot longer to figure out what direction I wanted to go in major-wise than it did to find the school I wanted to attend. I never had a job I really wanted to do growing up. You sometimes hear of kids saying that they really want to be a nurse or a teacher, but that was never me.

For the longest time I had no clue what I wanted to do. I started looking at my strengths, and I have always been really strong at math, so I thought that maybe I would do something math related. Calculus was, after all, my favorite subject in high school. Ha!

But I also didn't just want to be a mathematician. You can major in math, but what on earth are you going to do with that? There were a lot of things I learned my senior year of high school in BC Calculus that I had no idea why it was relevant to anything. So I thought I should go into something that had a little bit of a math foundation, but that would actually get me a job once I graduated.

That's how I wound up with business. There are a lot of aspects of business that are math oriented, but it's not just sitting down and solving differential equations all day ;)

Then I got accepted into KBS, which is a business honors program, and that pretty much sealed the deal.

I also had no idea what I wanted to major in within the college of business. So I picked finance. Why? Because I like math, and finance seemed more math focused than most of the other majors. Basically, I had no reason for picking finance other than the fact that I felt like I should pick something.

I still have yet to take a finance course, but over the past year, I've pretty much figured out that finance is not me. Whenever someone would ask me my major, I always felt stupid saying finance because deep down, I had absolutely no connection to it. The other finance majors in my KBS class talk about how much they love following the stock market. They discuss IRAs and venture capitalists. And I honestly have no interest in that stuff. Do I have money invested in the stock market? Yes. Do I think it's important to start saving money early for retirement? Absolutely. Do I want to talk about this kind of stuff for the rest of my life? No thank you.

So a few weeks ago I made an appointment with my advisor and changed my major to Operations Management.

via

There were several reasons why I decided to go with OM. For one, the head of the OM department came into one of my freshman classes and talked about the major. She described the type of person who typically majors in OM, and I felt like she was talking about me. They are typically the type of people who like to plan and organize things. They're the list makers who sometimes write things on their to-do lists after they've done them just to have the satisfaction of crossing it off. That's totally me.

I also had to do a career assessment test for business majors. It asked you a bunch of questions based on your interests and strengths, and it came back saying that my interests and strengths best matched up with Operations Management.

So apparently my personality matches up well with the major. And I can actually see myself doing well at that kind of job. OM majors typically take jobs managing supply chains and organizing business processes in a way that maximizes efficiency and minimizes costs.

Right now I'm an OM major. I have no idea whether I'll actually graduate with a degree in Operations Management, but I feel like I have at least taken one more step in the right direction......

.....and for now, I'm happy with that.