I spent the first week of college contemplating my subject list. All sorts of questions ran into my mind, “Will the universities I want to go to accept my subject combination?”, “Am I missing out by not taking this subject?”, “Am I capable of taking this subject?”, “What the hell do I really want?”. And so on and so forth.
Tomorrow I will be going to college for the second week; and it feels like I’ve been enrolled there for quite a while. Everytime somebody calls me up or messages me on Facebook asking me “How is college OMG?!”, I just tell them what I honestly think every morning as I sit on the toilet : it scares me everyday.
I spent four days contemplating the books in my bedroom and what is it that I actually want and what I can actually do. This is going to sound super lame, but the hardest part I suppose was letting go of science subjects. I am definitely set on taking Economics and Maths as two A Level subjects, but the third subject combination took me a lot of thought and time. The choice was psychology or physics.
Honestly, if you know me well enough, you would know that I really like physics. I like all the calculations and the logic; I like using words like vectors and motion, optics and matter; electrons and the whole shebang. But if you know me well enough to know my academic results for the past two years; I’m not too good at the subject. And that’s putting it lightly.
It would’ve been a no-brainer then to go on to take psychology without question. Though me being over-exuberant and naive and so childishly stupid as you can imagine, when met with my psychology lecturer for the first time during the subject briefing, asked her far too many questions about the subject and whether it would be “coherent” if I wanted to go on to study economics, and if good universities will look at it as worthy.
Honestly, I am going to constantly remind myself to not step on the toes of academicians. I think my questions (which were spun out of good intentions and anxiety) must’ve offended her to think that I was going to psychology as a last resort and not as a choice.
Honestly, I don’t know what I want.
Staring at the bookshelf in my room, I can trace back my long list of passionate subjects past, and even the point in time that I went through the phases I went through. There is of course the years of ardent passion about architecture, evident in my sketchbooks and books about buildings. The letter I wrote six years ago to an aging architect in Connecticut; safely lodged between the pages of his book.
There were the years that I engulfed myself in natural history. The years that I swore to myself that only a career in science would do, the years that I bought myself a 12-inch skeleton and a hardcover of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection. The years that I bought the New Scientist every other week. I still have those magazines.
I have to say I also flirted with mathematics and physics. There is a soviet-union math olympiad book which I wrapped but never really attempted to finish; various introductory books to quantum physics, a book on the origins of geometry…
So that is why after going to see the student counsellor, another lady for an aptitude test, various seniors; and long discussions with my parents: I sat down at the sofa and cried.
I guess this is what my economics lecturer would call “opportunity costs”. It’s when you have to give up something, because you’ve made a decision for something else. All the other alternatives have to be sacrificed because you made that one big call to choose something else.
I hate hindsight. I hate it when people look back and say where they went wrong in life, and they continue to harp and feel completely despondent when they think about how things would’ve turned out if they did something else.
I hate the fact that I’m a victim of hindsight. That short bursts of regret would pepper my thoughts, and the ever present human err to ask “what if?” happen to be a challenge that I have woken up to for a good part of my life.
The counsellor gave me a good piece of advice:Â whatever you choose, you stick with it, and don’t look back.
Jangan pandang belakang.