7 More Reasons Why I Didn’t Study STEM

Yesterday’s piece, Why I Didn’t Study STEM, was true but, as you all noted, incomplete. Fair enough. Here are seven more reasons why I didn’t go from Mathlete to math major.

7. I lived in a small town, so I didn’t have any real ideas of what STEM careers were besides “crime-solving math detective.”

6. When I taught myself how to program in BASIC, I was much more interested in the nodes of the massive text adventure game I was building than the actual programming language.

5. When I signed up to take a programming course at the local college, I dropped it after the first session because the lab section would have conflicted with community theater rehearsals.

4. Also, community theater gave me actual jobs where I was paid money. Clearly, theater was where the jobs were.

3. I was also getting work as a church organist and choral accompanist. Nobody was interested in paying me to do science to things.

2. I never understood trigonometry (even though I probably could have learned it eventually) and have only the vaguest idea of what calculus actually is.

1. I spent most of high school writing a novel titled The Red Book of Cordia. The minute that was finished, I started writing a musical.

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