Finding the future

By Isabella Pham

When people asked me if I had siblings, I responded with the same reply, “Yes, an older and younger sister!” But I didn’t see a point in telling them I had a younger sister because she was attached to me all the time and always went out with me when my friends and I made plans. On the other hand, my older sister, Amanda, who’s 24-years old, sets about in her own path doing whatever she wants whenever she wants.

Pre-covid and at the beginning of quarantine, I never really talked or made any interactions with my older sister because she was always in and out of the house and only came home to sleep. I didn’t have the same close connection with her as I did with my younger sister. Because of this disconnection, I never really knew what she always did in her time or where she always went. 

It wasn’t until the middle of quarantine, one day, when I saw my sister preparing a speech for one of her classes. She told me that she had to do a speech online for her class. It had me wondering what type of classes do students take in college? What will I do after high school? What is my sister majoring in in college?

Amanda: Originally, I was even sure what I wanted to major in going into college and I thought I enjoyed physics in high school, so I just chose physics just to have a major when I went into college, but that really changed because I was struggling a lot with the math classes. 

According to the DA (District Admission), 41% of high school students felt unprepared to make a career choice or declare a college major at graduation from a group of students from 2019 to 2022. This is because many students don’t know themselves and what they’re interested in.

Comparably, before Amanda chose her major, she didn’t have much interest in many things, so she didn’t know what she should major in. She didn’t know what career she wanted to pursue in the future either. As time closed in, she felt the pressure and need to choose a major. This being physics.

After a few years of pursuing her physics major, exploring what she enjoyed, and being able to attend an active school, Amanda discovered her interest in the biochemical and physiological process by which an organism uses food to support its life.

Amanda: Um, I was about to enter into my 4th year of college at San Jose State and I decided that I wanted to switch into nutrition. I really like learning about everything that we put into our body, how our body works, and like everything that we are eating and how it really helps us stay healthy.

Many high school and college students struggle with finding what major they actually want to major in and would actually enjoy, but none of them express how difficult it is to find what suits them best.

Many college students switch majors, which leads to the higher success rate of students graduating college and pursuing the profession that they enjoy. For instance, according to the University of Tulsa, 80% of students in college change their major at least once, and of these students stands a 79% graduation rate.

Finally being able to know what major she actually wanted to do made it a lot easier for Amanda to progress in. Not only was she able to learn about humans’ health and the impact of it on our bodies, but she was able to enjoy her favorite hobby of cooking and baking while doing her in-class labs. 

Amanda: For my cooking classes, we had cooking basics such as culinary basics and practices and then lab, we would learn our knife cutting skills, like how to dice onions, how to mince garlic, and get like uniform shapes for our cutting. And we would make stuff to learn um techniques for cooking, so like for frying we made chicken tenders, we would practice breading the chicken tenders, and frying it, making sure we put it into the frying pan away from us, so it doesn’t spread the oil. We also learned how to make in other classes like my cultural foods, we had a lab where we every week we would make a different culturous food, so one week it would European food, another week would be Asian cuisine, and so on and so forth, so we learned about the culture in our lecture and then my professor would go on and give us recipes to cook for that culture and we would try it. And it was just a lot of fun trying new foods because I was a very picky eater, so trying these… like making them, I knew what we were putting into it and it made me more interested in trying it.

As I watched my sister go through college and follow in the path of nutrition, I learned how I don’t have to rush what I want to do in college. I don’t have to know what I want to pursue in the future yet as I still have a couple of years. She showed that when you find something that you enjoy, you are capable of pursuing it in the future.