a little background

After returning from a hellish summer spent as a hired hitman for the Penn State College of Medicine--namely, decapitating rats in a biomedical laboratory--I decided that this particular line of research was not for me and promptly abandoned the biology major intended to prepare me for it. Thus at the beginning of my third year in college I began my subsequent search for a new major, which manifested itself in my mind as something on the scale of the quest for the Holy Grail, led me eventually (that is, after a harried and anxious week of, as my roommate put it, "trying to decide on a career before the add-drop period ends") to psychology.

I was drawn to the discipline because it would eventually, I hoped, enable me to save the world in a way that didn't involve killing rodents--that is, by learning how the human mind worked, I could somehow intervene (exactly what method I would use--government policy, marketing, curriculum design, etc.--as yet unclear) to, essentially, "make people (life, the world) better." Because I had taken a few neuroscience classes (and was still hedging my bets on the switch of majors), I thought I would take a more neuroscientific approach to psychology. Thanks to my background in the "hard" sciences, I was convinced as well that this, more than Jung or Freud, was the Path to Truth about human behavior.

And yet almost immediately a nagging anxiety formed to deflate the euphoria of having made a decision about my Purpose in Life. I was afraid that whatever they would teach me would "deconstruct" subjective human experience. What would love become for me once I knew the story in the vocabulary of pheromones, neurotransmitters, and hormones?

Psychology lasted for about as long as it took for me to realize that everyone's first response when I told them my new major was something like, "Oh, yeah, you should be able to relax through the rest of your time here." In my brief tenure, nothing I learned did major damage to my general conceptions of humanity; Psychology 101 was too general, with mind-blowing textbook chapter headings like "Sometimes Humans are Inconsistant," while my neuroscience course was still dealing with the anatomy of a sheep's brain.

The next spinning of the "what's-my-major" roulette wheel landed me, in accordance with the laws of probability, on the large wedge of economics.