Why leaving behind my dream degree is the best thing I ever did

My first university tutor, with a long black ponytail and wearing a vintage death metal T-shirt, brandished a syringe in front of his face.

“This is the same chemical that’s used for lethal injections,” he said, and plunged the needle into the giant, wet sea urchin bristling on his other hand.

What I saw through the lens of my microscope sparked an obsession with science.Credit:

It might’ve been a fatal jab for any of the horrified first-year biology students watching on. But for the sea urchin, the chemical had a somewhat opposite effect to death. Within seconds, the creature spewed forth its frothy, fluorescent orange eggs.

With slender pipettes, we fertilised the eggs on glass slides and, over the next 45 minutes, watched a flurry of cellular activity conjure new life into being through the lens of our microscopes.

That afternoon tutorial totally sold me on science. So when the news came a few years later that tweaks to the course meant the specific major I was pursuing on animal behaviour and genetics was cut, I was devastated. What to do next?

I took a break from biology and enrolled in some creative writing courses while I game-planned my next move in studying science. But I loved the writing units so much that I picked up some non-fiction and journalism classes as well. I joined the student paper and got hooked.

When science meets journalism. Credit: Aresna Villanueva

I switched my degree to journalism, blowing my time at university out to five years rather than my planned three. But I barely cared – I was having a blast.

Changing degrees was disorienting at first. I still felt that pressure of deciding where and what to study after the HSC, a burden vastly overemphasised to the point it feels these decisions dictate your fate in life.

But the swap was the best thing that ever happened to me. And by the time I graduated, the majority of my friends had switched up their degrees too. About a third of students drop or change their degree before its completion and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. (Ask any octogenarian: if they don’t like a book’s first couple of chapters, it’s ditched.)

I know medical students who became musical psychologists, aeronautical engineers who picked up nursing, a business bro who swapped to terrorism and security studies and became totally obsessed. My friend Lexy abandoned a primary teaching course on the eve of her final semester and now earns a living diving with Hawaiian manta rays.

Despite appearances, switching to a journalism degree was a blast.Credit:

The important thing is that you throw a dart at the wall and try something. After a couple of semesters, if you suspect there’s something else out there for you, take a week and duck into unfamiliar lecture halls to spy on students studying something different. Treat them like a buffet of free expert talks and see which ones intrigue you the most.

As a physics student-turned-filmmaker once said to me, university is the one place you can “f--k around with few consequences”. Yes, there’s that swelling HECS debt, but that’s for future you to worry about. Staying open to unexpected adventures is worth the price tag.

I strongly believe that as long as you’re studying something, there’s no such thing as wasted time, even if you end up changing your course.

During my science degree, one of my assignments included stalking ibises across campus, mapping their movements, recording their gentle honks and taking note of where they foraged for sticks to build nests.

I swapped out that amateur ecology for interviewing actual experts on campus, keeping my science brain alive by writing stories about the university’s resident climate authorities and an American PhD student testing how fast finger-length baby water dragons could sprint on a treadmill.

Even though I never finished the science degree, the skills gleaned from lab tutorials and the lectures on how to find and decipher scientific reports remain vital to my life and work.

Even if you slaved over a law degree for four years and swap to pure maths, at the very least those brain-numbing torts tutorials will have made you a more informed citizen and a more experienced student, even if you never use that knowledge professionally.

But sticking to a degree you hate, and turning away the opportunity to change tack and sail towards something that truly excites you? Now that’s a waste of time.

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Education costs: In 2021 the Morrison government hiked fees for humanities and communications subjects by 117 per cent as part of their Job-ready Graduate fee scheme. We asked graduates impacted what they think of their new massive HECS debt.

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Angus Dalton is a science reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald.