UNILYFE: Why Economics (and not History)?

I'm currently an undergraduate at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS), National University of Singapore. As mentioned in my previous post, I do not have a major yet. I should be declaring my intended major (Economics) by next semester.

Honestly, my intended major comes as a surprise to many of my close friends and classmates. This is because my intended major during my secondary school and junior college days was not Economics - it was actually Law/History/Political Science. In fact, I disliked Mathematics and Science a lot to the point that I even declared to my Secondary 4 Co-form teacher (who's a Chemistry teacher, by the way) that I was going to pursue the Arts stream in JC. That did not happen because I ended up in the Science Stream by luck. Regardless, I still pursued my interest in History and I took H2 History at the A-Levels.

Pursuing Economics was not something that I considered at all during my schooling years. I knew Economics at the university level was really different from what I did in JC. Unlike JC Economics which requires one to churn out essays and essays, university Economics requires you to think more like a Mathematician/Statistician. AND I didn't really enjoy Mathematics, especially in JC. I was really very keen on pursuing History or something related. Basically, anything that required me to write essays.

But life hit me hard in JC where I could never perform well in H2 History. My highest grade for the subject was a C (at Prelims and at A-Levels). I started to doubt my ability to do well in History. Although my grade should not be the only defining factor on whether I should pursue the subject at a higher level, I still felt like I was not good enough. Hence, I told myself that I was not going to pursue History at university.

Honestly, I was still very lost during the A-Levels and even after getting my results, I was still confused by what I wanted to do. I narrowed down my options to either Political Science or Economics. Both are really interesting disciplines but I decided to go with Economics in the end. I enjoyed making sense of data. "What do these data mean? What do they signify? How are we to make use of these data and findings to improve policies?" This was when I realized I should pursue Economics at university.

In my previous post, I mentioned how I didn't want to pursue History anymore, even for a 2nd major or minor. Guess what, I had a change of heart somehow and I'm going to pursue a minor in History. NUS History has too little modules that I'm genuinely interested in. In fact, they used to have so many interesting modules but it was discontinued. I'm intending to take HY2260 History and Popular Culture next semester. I hope it goes well because I heard that it is a good module to take.

That's all for today! I'm going to do a revamp of my blog website too because I want to post my own opinions on some current affairs issues.