Help Lori pass his DiffEq final tonight.

[Hauldren Collider]

I lived in Baltimore for just under one year growing up and it was a crap hole. Thankfully, my parents wised up and moved us all back to San Diego. The only decent things were the crab shacks down by the waterfront and being close enough to visit the monuments in DC. Other than that it was a crime infested ****hole. Definitely not the all white suburbia I was used to up to that point. I do remember really liking "Bogey's" restaurant (themed with Humphrey Bogart pictures) and some Jewish Deli I can't remember the name of but which was really good. I also remember some old Jewish guy arguing with the owner because he served ham on the menu even though it was a Jewish deli. The owner saw it as a necessary evil to attract non-Jewish customers while the angry guy saw it as a sell out to the goy.

Dude, UMd is in College Park, inside the DC beltway.

edit: beaten by lori

[Lorizael]

I'd recommend going for a CS minor. If you end up deciding not to do grad school (which physics majors kind of have to do if they actually want to go into physics), you'll have enough skills to get a good tech job. And it's just generally useful. A significant number of physics students here at CMU end up going that route.

Nah, I'll either be minoring in this or this. Haven't decided which yet.

[Hauldren Collider]

[Lorizael]

Let me just say I think it's pretty sexist that there's a Black Women's Studies minor but not a Black Men's Studies minor.

[Hauldren Collider]

Where is the Tannu Tuvan Lesbian Women's Studies major?

[notyoueither]

I would have thought something agricultural involving gender...

[Lorizael]

In all seriousness, I'm not sure what I'm going to minor in or what I'm going to do after I get my BS. At 28, I don't know that I want to spend the next 10 years in school getting a PhD. I'm studying physics now because (a) I needed a goal and (b) I have a deep-seated yearning to understand how the universe works. I suspect I'll only go on to graduate school if, in the next two years, something I study in physics (or possibly astronomy) captures my attention so fiercely that I absolutely must become an expert on it.

Outside of physics (but still within the sciences), I'm very interested in the human capacity for rationality and irrationality. From the perspective of my own strange sense of morality, I would be doing something important if I were to help make the human species more rational.

Outside of science, I have a passion for writing. While I'm pretty decent at this whole math and science thing, my oldest and strongest talent has always been writing. I don't think I'll ever be entirely satisfied with myself until I can find a way to incorporate that into a career.

Unfortunately, there's no physics/rationality/writing major/career. I have thoughts about what I'll end up doing, but nothing concrete. We shall see.

[Hauldren Collider]

Why don't you just study something that can earn you money to spend on the things you enjoy, aka writing and thinking about rationality? Your job doesn't have to be the same as your leisure. I know guidance counselors always say "you should enjoy your job!" but for most people that isn't really true, it's a way to pay the bills. That's why they call it work.

[Lorizael]

I've been depressed for most of my life, which means I've experienced very little in the way of joy. I have no desire to spend the rest of my life doing things I don't enjoy.

[Hauldren Collider]

You can still do things you enjoy, just not during every waking moment of the day. Even if you nominally enjoy what you do for work, it isn't going to be a picnic no matter what it is. It'll mostly just be work, maybe slightly less aggravating. No one is going to pay you to only do things that you enjoy.

[Ban Kenobi]

Thank you, Captain Obvious.

[Lorizael]

But they might pay me to do something I find fulfilling.

[Hauldren Collider]

Thank you, Captain Obvious.

It isn't obvious to everyone, believe it or not.

[Ben Kenobi]

Unfortunately, there's no physics/rationality/writing major/career. I have thoughts about what I'll end up doing, but nothing concrete. We shall see.

There is. It's called history. There's a whole branch that focusses just on the history of science. They document the processes and the experiments, everything that scientists did to arrive at the results that they did. It's a fascinating field.

[Ban Kenobi]

It isn't obvious to everyone, believe it or not.

Not. It's common knowledge that most jobs suck. It's also only natural that some people dream of not spending most of their life doing something that sucks.