If you have ever entered into a STEM major at Georgia Tech, or at any other school, you know that it is not easy business. Sleepless nights, tears, wanting to rip your hair out (It’s an expression don’t worry!) are all parts of the package. You end up learning a lot of useful information for your future career, and for your personal life that you will definitely utilize to achieve your goals. Nevertheless, along the way, there are plenty of times that you will doubt yourself and your capability to survive your major. Being a Biomedical Engineering major, a major that combines elements of pre-med, and Engineering, I know first hand how this feels. I have had more challenging classes throughout this major than I can count from Conservation Principles of BME, to Intro to MATLAB, to Organic Chemistry I, to Organic Chemistry II, to Statics, to Biotransport, to Systems Modeling this semester. It is constant stress, and hardwork! It is rewarding hardwork, but it is hardwork nonetheless. One of the things that helped me every semester when I felt overwhelmed through this workload was to know that other people were also going through what I was going through, and were as stressed out as I was. So, being a fifth year BME and STEM student at Georgia Tech, I wanted to write this article to provide solace to people who felt overwhelmed, so they feel like there are people who have gone through what they have gone through and that they are not alone in the challenges that they face. So sit back and relax, as I take you through my journey as a STEM student taking Biomechanics and the hurdles and misery I felt as I went through the class.
To start off, throughout high school and most of my life, I was good at math and science. Others looked at subjects like AP Chemistry with dread, while those subjects gave me joy. After all, there was nothing more fun than working on Stoichiometry problems on a Friday night, right? Others would walk into Chemistry class, with a look of dread on their face, while I would walk in with a feeling of excitement. Making solutions in the lab was my jam. We would have quizzes every Friday, and I could see the feeling of dread on my peers’ faces afterward as they turned in their papers with half-empty work, not confident that they had solved the problem correctly, while I had solved the problem confidently from start to finish. I was riding a sugar high, and it felt great to be at the top. There was a great feeling that came with feeling so confident about science and I really enjoyed what I was learning as well. Unfortunately, little did I know that this was just a positive moment, and that, in the grand scheme of things, I was in for a tough reality.
Fast forward to my senior year of college. I had registered to take Biomechanics. It was a course that was required for my major. I had heard awful things from some of my friends who had taken it before me, but I went in with an open mind. The first few lectures went by, and I already felt slightly confused, but I had been able to clarify concepts that I was struggling with. I was able to do the practice problems. Nothing seemed too concerning. Then came the day of the quiz on Wednesday. Most people had not done the practice problems, and I was feeling ready. It was approaching the last 25 minutes of the lecture, and the professor and TA’s began handing out the papers. I knew it was not going to be easy, but I felt prepared, or so I thought.
I flipped the paper over, only to see a diagram with a lot of text that I could not comprehend. I tried to calm myself down and reread, but I just could not understand. It was then that I saw the time on the screen going down, 20 minutes, 19:59, 19:58, 19:57. With each passing second that went by, I was losing time, and I was still not able to understand the question prompt or the way my Free Body Diagram should look. With each second that went, I could feel a ticking time bomb going off in my head. My stomach began to burn like lava. My chest began to feel constricted, and I felt like I could not breathe. To make matters worse, I heard the sounds of chairs moving in and out beside me, as people began to turn in their quizzes and leave. People were writing so loudly that it almost made the desks shake, and it just made me feel even more nervous than I already was. In the last 10 minutes, I wrote down some work and formulas, hoping to get some credit. However, I did not get a good feeling about how this was going to go, and my gut feeling was usually correct. Seeing as my approach to studying for this quiz had probably failed, I decided to modify my studying approach for the next quiz, next Friday.
Unfortunately, modifying my approach did not change the outcome of the next quiz. The next quiz also felt just as impossible, and now that it had been two quizzes like this, I began to think I was just screwed in this class, no matter what I did. I then went home, tired, and not aware of what to do. I took a break from Biomechanics because, after all, I was going to suck no matter what, right? The grade for the first quiz came that Sunday, and it was even worse than I could have ever expected. I had gotten a 0. It seems I had managed to not even get any partial credit. As dramatic as this sounds, I then began to contemplate all my life decisions, including coming out of state to Georgia Tech to study BME. Maybe I was just not cut out for it? I had already spent many semesters before this, feeling dumb about struggling in classes at Tech, having a lower GPA than some others, and not getting a single internship until the summer after my junior year. In truth, I was doing fine, but I still doubted myself because BME was a hard major. Any Engineering was a hard major, and there were plenty of people that had quit before me and that had not even made it nearly as far as I had made it. It is extremely common, unfortunately, for people in STEM majors to drop out and some classes make many people more tempted to drop out than to stick it through.
In the second half of the class, I began to make up ground. I began to get 80’s and 90’s on the quizzes, and I even got a 98 on the second test. I had not changed much at all about the way I studied, except I had become calmer, as I had decided that the worst thing that would happen was that I would fail. I was not prepared to drop the class, in the rare chance that I passed. I finally finished the class, and it was still not my best grade, but I ended up with a way better outcome than I thought I was going to end up with in the beginning. I persevered, and that is when I realized that I was good at self-learning, even if I did not think so initially. I was proud of myself, and I felt a sense of joy as to what I was able to accomplish. So, I just want to say, for anyone coming from a STEM background who feels intimidated and hopeless about being successful in your major, you will encounter difficult times and difficult situations. However, if you are motivated to push through and persevere, you can not only find success, but you can enjoy your major while going through the challenge.
