Why I Picked My Major

My career discovery group for nutrition assigns us to write her emails with prompts every Friday. This was her prompt this week:

"Tell me how you picked your major? What sort of process did you use to determine that you liked nutrition or food science enough to specialize in it in college? Tell me some of your fears or worries about focusing on this subject (i.e. you are not sure you will like the jobs, but you know you like the subject, or salary worries, hours required per week worries, etc.) I am looking for some thoughtful answers that are 1-2 paragraphs in length."

This is my response

"Good afternoon Joelle,

I only became interested in bodies nutrition in the past year or two. My older brother (UCSD ’09) would always come home from college on holidays and then the summer to cook up amazing meals that would blow my mind. He would also help me out with food secrets to make my body function better when doing a sport like ultimate Frisbee. My family has also always been food conscience by never having soda or white bread in the house, or things like that, but my brother made me realize how extremely important it is for your body to eat the right diet. I began eating right, and I got interested in reading food labels then making connections between what I ate and how I functioned or felt. I’m pretty sure that everyone in my family had read fast food nation like three or four years ago, but then we started getting into books like “The Omnivores Dilemma” or “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan. So basically right now, where I am in my life, I take pride in being aware of everything I eat, and I think that having knowledge of metabolism is valuable.

I’m not thinking about jobs at all right now that require a nutrition science degree. I mean, yes, I do want to work more under the biochemistry side of nutrition compared to the community approach, but I’m not concerning myself with which companies I should apply to in four years. I am a little worried that most jobs for nutrition don’t pay around 200,000 a year, which would be nice, but I’ll worry about that after 4 years.

Another problem I foresee in my future is that I really like chemistry, but I’m just not good at it. I love the idea of chemistry and learning about it. Sadly I’ve never done that well in any chemistry classes that I have taken though. This makes me worried because in the future, I’m probably going to want to take a lot of chemistry classes, but not do so well in them. I will probably have to go to tutoring a lot more often.

Best of wishes,

Ben Hubbard"