I attended University of California, Santa Barbara for my undergraduate education. Starting out in the honors program for Chemical Engineering, I held that distinction for all of one quarter before hitting a wall (first C in a class EVER in my second quarter) and getting thrown into a pit of uncertainty.
My next quarter (third) went better, but the seeds of doubt had been sown. I enjoyed chemistry very much and got excellent grades to show for it, but physics was constantly a thorn in my side. I got one A in all of the physics classes I took (which had some great luck to it), and never really enjoyed being in the classes.
Math was a different story from either chemistry or physics; I would do well for the most part but my grades did not reflect that. I ended up with a C in a class that I had an A going into the final because I (along with alot of the class) bombed the final but received absolutely no help from the curve (not that you should exclusively want that). I did enjoy it though, and numbers and formulas and relationships came rather easily to me.
After bad financial times, I decided to take time off from UCSB and work while taking classes at the local community college in the Bay Area. Most were general pre-requesites that would apply to multiple different majors (Economics, Finance, etc.). I also was adamant about being entrepreneurial, so I had some business and entrepreneur classes as well. I then continued the next semester at Santa Barbara Community College with the same type of courseload while continuing to work.
I came back to UCSB an Actuary major, as this is what my sister was doing and decided to take a crack at it since it combined my love for math with the Econ and Finance based classes I had been taking. This involved taking multiple statistics courses at the beginning, and from there my path slowly began to form.
The statistics classes were the ones I thoroughly enjoyed; I loved the math and the theory behind the statisical formulas. But in addition, I appreciated the thought put into explaining in detail the limitations of each concept, when properly apply them, and when making assumptions are okay (as long as they are clearly stated at the beginning).
While I am certain many scientific and/or STEM disciplines also