My entire life I have been indecisive on most things. The only way I have been able to make it this far in life is because I have developed habits that have gotten me through and required almost no thinking. For almost my entire grade school career, I had a bowl of Cocoa Puffs and a bagel with plain cream cheese every day for breakfast, and a bologna-cheese-mustard-ketchup sandwich for lunch. No Cheerios, no toast, no turkey sandwich, nothing different. Because if given the opportunity to choose what I want, I would spend so much time thinking and waffling I wouldn't be able to get anything in my stomach before the bus showed up for school. You can probably imagine how bad I am ordering food at a restaurant with more than three items on the menu.
The point I am trying to get across is that it is totally okay to be indecisive. It can be a scary thing to have to decide (in high school!) what you will spend the rest of your life doing. Some people know right away what they want to do. My sister knew she wanted to be a grade school teacher. So that's what she applied as, and for her, every day at her school now is a joy because she knows this is what her calling is.
As for me, all through junior high and high school I knew I wanted to be an architect. After seeing IIT and seeing what could be done with architecture, I was infatuated with the idea that one day I could be an architect. My first year of architecture convinced me that architecture was most certainly what I didn't want to be doing. So I switched to Architectural Engineering the next year. But sometimes I am not sure, and that is not because of anything any departments are doing wrong, but because I don't feel like I am ready to commit to anything quite yet.
Then I went and toured Greenlee with some friends of mine. It was organized by the CAE department and ASME, and a whole busload of us visited their office in Rockford, IL to see what kinds of things engineers can do. A lot, as it turns out. One of the things the president made sure to tell us was that a lot of times people might not get a job based specifically around their majors. You might get your degree in Mechanical Engineering, but you might get a job in Marketing for an engineering firm because you took a couple of business classes along the way to your degree. If all depends on circumstance, especially your ability to network and make connections with people.
It was incredibly comforting to hear that I don't necessarily have to be set on what I want to do quite yet. And if you do know exactly what you want to do, that's great! It definitely makes it easier to figure out course schedules and the like. And if you don't? That's fine too. Take a class that isn't a part of your major's curriculum and see if it's something you like. If it is, you can take some more classes in that area and get a minor, and that might come in handy in the future when you are looking for a job after you graduate.
So to all of you in high school still deciding what you want to do: if you have questions, ask us! We've been down that road before, we may have some answers! So please, give us a call at IIT, shoot us an email. We were in your shoes once. The least we can do is point you in the right direction.
