How I came to study psychology

 Underneath my yearbook photo it says biochemist.  I was, of course under the sway of my hero, Isaac Asimov.  But it was hard Man.  I did okay with the lectures, with talk of valences and you know, how oxygen lacks two electrons to fill its outer ring so it hooks up with a couple lonely hydrogens and viola water.   It's all in the electrons with the elements on either end of periodic table needing only one electron to give up or one to add to have a full outer ring with no pesky extra electron all by itself.  Acids and bases, all there is too it.

Well no, actually there was a lot more to it, and a lot of that is included in lab, that smelly old place with all those weird instruments, and complicated recipes that you have to follow just so if you want to get the proper results, and that's the thing I am no good at all at.  I like theory but I am no good at all when it comes to practice.

So after a year I was out of chemistry and into math which is pretty much all theory, and I was pretty good at that.  I had a knack even if I didn't know what I was doing meant, I was just good at manipulating symbols.  

And the profs, guys with their heads in the stratosphere high above us.  Every now and then somebody would raise their hand and ask what good is all this crap, and of course it would turn out that he was an engineer and all us pure math types would snicker.  What good is all that crap?  Well what kind of question is that to ask?

Anyway because the profs had their noses in the air they had little interest in mundane things like figuring out how to grade their students so they would just give the whole class A's or B's, and that is pretty much how I was able to skate through it until my senior year when I encountered the hard nut of Math 317.  Abstract algebra, which is the kind of thing I like, but by then I was running with a dope smoking and beer drinking crowd, and I really had no time for all that crap, and this being a mandatory class the profs had to pay attention to their grading.  I took it three times before I barely passed it.  My math GPA was below C.  I could never graduate in math.

Along the way to not getting my math degree I had taken a few elective courses in psychology because they were easy and I had a good GPA in them so I switched my major to psychology.  What would I learn there about boredom?

That will have to wait for my next post because it's 6 AM and the morning is about shot.