How I Studied Three Degrees in Three Years...

This title was definitely click-bait... I didn't exactly study three degrees in three years, but I did change my major every year of my three-year degree.

When I finished high school, I was really unsure about what career I wanted to pursue (and to be honest, I'm still not sure what I want to do when I graduate at the end of this year), but I felt like I was under a lot of pressure to choose a degree. I had no idea what I wanted to study, but I had a pretty clear idea of what I did NOT want to study. I had completed a bunch of aptitude tests during the course of my high school career & they all came out with roughly the same result: I could do anything... Which sounds great right? Except I really needed the help narrowing down my options. I ultimately decided to study a Bachelor of Science degree in Theoretical Physics (this decision may or may not have been heavily influenced by my favourite tv show, The Big Bang Theory).

In my first year, I took math, physics, computer science, applied math and probability theory & statistics modules. I really loved my first year, but I started to question whether I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing physics. At the end of my first year, I decided to change my degree to a pure mathematics degree. Luckily theoretical physics is offered under the mathematics department at my university, so switching to a math degree was really easy & I didn't even have to make up any credits.

Most of my second year was online (thanks to COVID). I really struggled to adapt to online learning. I'm the kind of student that sits at the front of the lecture hall and asks waaaay too many questions, so not being able to engage with my lecturers and having to self-study had me loving my degree a little less. Math has always been my favourite subject and it seemed like the obvious choice for me to study a mathematics degree, but I also took computer science as one of my majors. I hadn't taken computer science in high school and so it wasn't an obvious option for me to study computer science, but after doing it for a couple of years, I realised that I was pretty good at coding (although I did spend a lot of time crying about my coding projects).

At the end of my second year, I decided to change degrees one more time... I am now a computer science student! Luckily computer science is also a mathematics degree and so all I really did was change majors. I also took all of the computer science modules that I could in my first and second year, so I won't have to make up any credits. My degree is a three year degree and so, if all goes according to plan, I should be graduating in December 2021!

I'm incredibly lucky. I had a very open-ended degree which made it easy for me to change majors when I gained a better understanding of the skills that I wanted to pursue. If, like me, you don't know what you want to study or what you want to be, I would definitely recommend looking for degrees that give you the flexibility to change direction once you've had a chance to properly explore your options.