I spoke with a former student recently; I taught her in her first semester at Notre Dame and was delighted for a chance to catch up. She shared that she had changed her major from biochemistry to political science. Remembering her excitement about becoming a doctor, I asked what spurred her to make that change.
She described the challenges of keeping up in some of the notoriously tough first-year science classes. It was her final statement, though, that really stuck with me: “Plus, it was just a lot of memorizing, and I didn’t think it was all that interesting after all.”
I’ve heard this refrain many times, from scores of students, whether they did or did not persist in a STEM major. It’s a familiar story, too, because my own husband had the same experience and switched out of his biology major during his sophomore year. He was doing well in his classes, but he was bored and disillusioned with all the memorization.
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