My Journey of Choosing Major

During the recent several days, I have kept hesitating about what major I should learn. To my surprise, things were not that simple as I thought.
According to the majority of people, I should have simply chosen the major that I had the most interest in. And there was no doubt that I was fond of finance and whatever related to finance. It seemed to be very obvious that I should choose Quantitative Finance. However, I always thought finance should be learnt by oneself, and it might be a waste of time learning it for four-year campus life. Besides, I could not be sure to be able to enter this major because of the strict selection. Therefore, I put this major away at the very beginning.
In fact, the primary thought I followed was to find an easy-to-find-job major which should not be so busy that I could learn finance in my spare time. While at the same time, I didn't even want to bother to consider about engineering which I was not interested in at all. Hence, I started to concentrate my mind on School of Computing.
There are six majors in SOC available for us SM students. I mainly focused on the major Information System because it had a connection between computing and business. However, from the moment I showed my interest in the major on, there appeared lots of difficulties consecutively. First of all, my parents, my relatives and my classmates were mostly against this major. They thought it would be hard to have a satisfactory prospect for a student of IS. Some of them also said I would not acquire the skills I wanted initially. Fortunately my thinking hadn’t been totally disordered, and soon I chose to investigate more details about the major all by myself.
I searched a great deal of information on the Internet, which was basically about what IS is and the advantages of IS. Simultaneously, I browsed through many books related to IS in the library. Also I turned to the seniors and professors for help. Having practiced all means I could think of, I finally got a clearer grasp of the major. I had to say that it is really a good major, but not for me. Thanks to the detailed investigation, I found it was not where my passion truly lay. In consequence, I got even more confused about the major choice then.
The confusion lasted until the conference between some instructors of NUS and us. The instructors included some graduates who had already attained some achievements and some excellent seniors who hadn’t graduated yet. I deemed that one of them left a strong impression on me. His name is Deng Ke. He is an SM1 student and graduated from SMU as the first batch of student. Up to now, he has had an impressive success in his career and now is studying in INSEAD, which is the most prestigious business school I have dreamt of for years. I didn’t admire him only because of his bright glitter of his success. Actually, it was his experiences that impressed me most, because these experiences were so similar to the track I planned for myself. After his speech, my passion for finance became uncontrollable out of nowhere. As a result, I immediately decided to follow my passion and to fight for QF, the major I gave up at the very beginning.
To be frank, even after this whole major-choosing thing was settled down, I didn’t know what courses QF would provide us with in details. It seemed ironic that I finally trust to my intuition and passion instead of rational analysis. In my defense, the future itself is unpredictable, which means the analysis made now may not be valid in the future. Anyway the choice to follow passion won’t make me regret!