[Ipg-smz] What college class or major did you transfer out of?

[Esther Schindler]

On Jul 23, 2019, at 3:45 PM, Phil Shapiro via Ipg-smz <ipg-smz at netpress.org> wrote:
>         Just curious, what class or major did you transfer out of?
> 


When I was accepted at Brandeis, I was asked to provide a major, so that I could be assigned the right advisor. 

I didn’t really know what I wanted, so I contemplated my two best subjects in high school: programming and English. I told my mother, “I don’t know whether to write down ‘computer science’ or ‘English.’”

“Well,” mom said, “You could always write books about computers!”

I responded with the plaintive whine of a 17-year-old, “Mothhhhhhhher!”

But neither of those majors lasted a semester. I discovered that an English major was expected to read boring 18th century fiction and to re-do all the grammar courses I’d already aced. And — given that I already thought I knew how to program — I cut classes for programming so much that I was utterly lost. I got a C on the final (and didn’t even deserve that). I’d never gotten a C before and I freaked out. I didn’t come back to programming for five years.

I switched to Linguistics, with a minor in Women’s Studies. The latter was a minor only because it wasn’t available as a major. Had I stayed for my senior year, my thesis was going to be on the anthropology of women and language.

…So now I write about computers.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://netpress.org/pipermail/ipg-smz_netpress.org/attachments/20190724/c3f78764/attachment.html>