Chaos Terminal

When I meet someone new, eventually the conversation will turn toward basic formalities. One of these formalities is usually in the form of the question "What are you majoring in?", asked after they find out I am in college. My answer, "Biology and computer science.", is always countered with one of two responses:

1. ::Hesitation, look of confusion:: "Really... That's different."
-OR-
2. ::Hesitation, look of interest:: "Wow, that's pretty cool. What are you going to do?"

The people that are just confused, I basically ignore. There is no point trying to explain the purpose of my life to people that could not care less. As for the second camp, they might get an explanation if they are lucky. So, are you interested? Let's hope so:

Since I was about 10, I always wanted to be a doctor. First it was a trauma surgeon, then it was a neurosurgeon, then I finally decided to pursue a surgery tract when I finally got to med school and to find what I liked once I got there. As the years rolled by, more and more factors disuaded my dreams of cutting people up.

1. First, there were some complications with surgery and a close family member.
2. Second, the significant other of a different close family member was going through his rotation and all I ever heard were horror stories.
3. Third and finally, I got rejected when I attempted to apply to the honors pre-med program at UMich.

When I got to UMich as a generic honors undergrad, I was still considered undeclared but with a slant toward pre-med. My freshman year was filled with a very bland assortment of classes, nothing that would lock me into pre-med. These classes were:

First Semester:

• Spanish 232 (Spanish IV)
• Great Books 191 (honors writing, ancient Roman and Greek texts)
• Chem 210 (Organic Chemistry I)
• Chem 211 (Organic Chemistry I lab)
• Math 215 (Calculus III)

Second Semester:

• Spanish 275 (Spanish Grammar)
• Great Books 222 (honors writing, ancient and current Japanese texts)
• Chem 215 (Organic Chemistry II)
• Chem 216 (Organic Chemistry II lab)
• Math 216 (Differential Equations)

By my second year, I had started working at the Daily doing basic computer support. That summer, we embarked on moving our single email/web/file/dns/dhcp server on a 9600 Powermac running Linux to a small handful of x86 OpenBSD machines. As cheesy as it may sound, that changed my life. I was hooked on UNIX and BSD and systems administration. The very next semester, I started taking computer science classes. At that point, I was already very close to finishing my biology degree, so I decided to pursue both.

As of now, I doubt I will ever use the biology degree. My future is filled with computers (whether it be administration or programming or web work, we shall see). I might combine the two degrees by working in the emerging field of bioinformatics, or maybe I will pursue an earlier dream of working in cybernetics.

Posted by Mike on Aug 12, 2002 at 8:04 AM | Permalink