Liking something and being good at it is totally different. Let's just start at that. Why I took up a degree in sciences that came with not only life science but with Physics and Chemistry bundled in is just sheer ignorance and having no choice in the subjects that we had to get credits for.
I wasn't exactly a big fan of the those two but I've come to "embrace and appreciate" them after having to sit through hours of lectures and a few more for laboratory work. I really didn't care if I managed to solve the word problems in our class but I was more grateful for it is that it gave me answers or at least an idea on how and why things work. How would you measure the height of a flag pole without having the need to climb it up, what affects the speed of a moving vehicle and thus our safety, why I experience motion sickness with sudden lurches (inertia), how the size of a tube will affect the pressure and many more seemingly mundane things that happen around us but we just take them for granted. These things were explained and dissected in the Physics classes.
Chemistry, on the other hand, was a bit more abstract for me since it is not that visible always. It deals on the smaller and finer things which is just like physics but on a smaller picture unless one talks about nuclear bombs. My only favorite chemistry was biochemistry. It totally spoke to me even though our professor at that time wasn't really keen on her job. It validated what I had been taught all these years on the human body and health. It made me understand more of what goes on inside a living organism like our human body.
What I regret was not taking up psychology at least once in those undergraduate years. This I manage to get a bit through educational psychology in graduate school. That didn't satisfy me still and I gravitated towards buying and reading some books related to it later on when I had the chance. I would like to try to be in a class with challenging discussions about how the human mind works. I would like to learn more about it from equally curious people like me.
This curiosity about everything sometimes makes me wonder if my teenage son would also have a similar curious mind enough to push himself to get into a higher level of education. Or would the Korean educational system totally kill whatever tiny interest he had before coming here?
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