Thinking: Good or Bad?

School has started up yet again, which is good because now I'm not bored all the time, although sometimes I do miss reading books for hours in my spare time. With school comes my indecisiveness of what I want to study and get into, which I have given a great deal of thought. I'll give you an insight of how I've been thinking through all the possibilities of things I think I would want to do for next few decades of my life.

First of all, it would have to be something I'd enjoy for while and not get burned out. Second, it would have to make me a fair amount of money, if I'm going to get into all this dept for schooling, it may as well help me get out of dept. Recently I've found that I've been enjoying mathematics more and it's been helping me to exercise my brain, so I'd probably want to something that involves math. For a long while, Chemical engineering seemed like the career of choice for me. It seemed to have a lot of aspects I'd be interested in, like physics, math, biology, and of course chemistry, it also makes a very decent amount of money. So for a while this was my plan. But then recently I watched an episode of Cosmo's, an excellent science documentary done by the astronomer Carl Sagan. In the episode he talked about all the things that had to be in place for there to be life here on earth and how delicate that balance was. He stated that the earth was actually like heaven compared to the hell that exists on other planets, that could in no way at all sustain any life. He then talked about things that could offset that balance, things like mass deforestation, and pouring harmful pollutants into the air. Thus pushing the heaven we have here on earth more towards the hell found on less hospitable planets in the solar system. He ended the episode with this phrase: "If visitor came [to the earth], what account would we give of our stewardship of the planet earth?" This actually made me think, 'probably not a very good account' was my first impression. After watching that I decided that I also wanted to make a difference, if I could, in helping to preserve this heaven we enjoy on earth. One of the solutions Sagan proposed was finding a more efficient source of energy. After thinking it over, I decided that I could best do this through mechanical engineering. It would help me to be creative, I'd do things I'm interested in, make good enough money to pay off dept from loans, and hopefully make a positive difference.

By now I probably have you all thinking, 'oh great! Jaron's turned into a tree hugger!', well, I'm certainly not going to go vegetarian or march up and the down the streets waving around signs that say 'save the trees' on them. But what I am going to do is whatever I can so I can at least say I did my best to preserve our home, home meaning Earth.

But it seems that my indecisiveness has taken its toll because apparently I can't start until next fall. I was about a week too late. They have a new program for mechanical engineers that makes it so certain classes are only offered during certain semesters and I just barely missed. After that curve ball I've been re-evaluating what to study and thought maybe I could just get a bachelors in math. But I think I'm just going to stick it out another year, maybe knock out some generals, until I can start next year. I'm pretty excited for it, it has a lot of math and physics in it so I'll enjoy it immensely I think.

So as you can tell, my brain has been on overdrive for the past while. Beside all that, School is going swell. I'm still having an excellent time in marching band and making lots of new chums. I think this is going to be a great semester!