Finance
Finance and Economics are two things I've always loved to pay attention to, and being able to major in Finance at a wonderful business school is an extraordinary opportunity.
At the end of my junior year in high school I was pretty sure I was going to elect computer science as a career path and hopefully work as a software engineer or otherwise work in information technology. By the beginning of my Senior year I had changed my views about job markets and although my interests didn't change, I realized that I love programming and developing/administrating websites because it's fun. I wasn't quite confident that I would always enjoy doing it if I had to wake up every day and do it as a job. So I set my sights on Finance. All throughout my senior year of high school I researched Finance very diligently as a field of study and also as a career path. My advanced English courses provided me with assignment opportunities to write about career paths and fields of study. I wrote many essays on Finance and why I elected it as a field of study and career path. My essays included all of the explicit and implicit benefits of such a field.
During my senior year, most of my friends had elected some sort of engineering as a career path, be it mechanical, electrical, bio-medical, or architecture. Although I have an appreciation for engineering, it is not for me. I felt like a lot of people at my school (excluding my friends, of course) were just jumping on the flavor-of-the-month band wagon by simply choosing engineering without performing due diligence to assess it as a career. My friends were quite different however, and each of them held a very strong reason to accompany their decisions.
Although Finance is often sugar coated by people who say "oh, people in Finance make a lot of money", that is not the true reason why I'm interested in it. It's true you can make a lot of money, but you can quickly lose just as much. I'm interested in it because I'm interested in complex systems and how they work, and how they can be used to produce results. Every day in school, Finance and Economics professors around the globe are teaching students like me how to basically reverse engineer the financial system, discover how it works, identify the nuances, develop strategies, and use the system to produce results. I have no reservations about pursuing this challenging and stressful field, and I intend to do great things with it.