Arrange for a light course load in your topic for a semester, and take a course or two, appropriate for your age and knowledge level, in the most appealing or least terrifying STEM field available. Frame it to your advisor as exploring the prospect of building on your undergrad with grad work in more concrete disciplines, and consider their perspectives on which classes would suit. Aim to dabble in the social side of the disciplines that you’d previously ruled out as being too hard. Aim to surround with people who have an affinity for those disciplines but are beginning in them at your age or older, and feeling positively about them.
You will probably hate many things about that “obvious” proposal, and consider it a poor fit for your life for many reasons. Examine the reasons, and the things you hate about it. Those reasons contain the most actionable and personalized advice on your situation that’s available to you.
Well: the only obvious drawback I see is that my uni just doesn’t offer anything more STEM-related that a course in high-school statistics taught by someone who’s never studied math in her life. And since it’s not an option in my curriculum for this semester, I can’t take it anyway. But it definitely sounds like a great plan, similar to what I’ve already rejected as very good but impossible in practice. I should find a way to make it work.
Oh, your brain is making you struggle in different places than mine would, if doing things the “obvious” way doesn’t seem initially loathsome! That’s nifty!
The question to ask an advisor might look like, “what would a transition to a stem field look like for someone in my situation?”. That is, at least, if you have good open-minded advisors. Not all programs do.
If your uni doesn’t have anything in STEM, a different approach might suit:
Pretend that you are a 22-year-old retail manager who lives in your city. In this hypothetical, you went to work at a department store after high school instead of going to university, and worked your way up. You have decided to pivot your career into STEM. How would you do it? What resources are available? What social or professional organizations exist in your area, which might be able to offer guidance on steps that you might take.
In your situation I’d prioritize opportunities with a social component, like study groups or meetups or single classes at another local academic institution, over those without, like isolated self-study of online courses.
This raises the question: How much time is it appropriate for you to devote to exploring this transition possibility? It’s obviously more than zero, but less than “all of it”. I’d propose the rule of thumb that you should assume worst-case mental health next semester, examine your planned course load, and assess which courses you think you would be able to pass easily while badly depressed. Take those classes, and skip the rest. If you failed the others, you would have to retake them later anyway to continue on your current path. So you can get all the benefits of the “no change, bad mental health, fail some classes, retake them later” timeline, along with all the benefits of the “carve out some time to explore a possibility that seems exciting” timeline, and the only difference is that you don’t pay the course fees to take and fail the extra classes the first time around.
Consider this proposal:
You will probably hate many things about that “obvious” proposal, and consider it a poor fit for your life for many reasons. Examine the reasons, and the things you hate about it. Those reasons contain the most actionable and personalized advice on your situation that’s available to you.
Well: the only obvious drawback I see is that my uni just doesn’t offer anything more STEM-related that a course in high-school statistics taught by someone who’s never studied math in her life. And since it’s not an option in my curriculum for this semester, I can’t take it anyway. But it definitely sounds like a great plan, similar to what I’ve already rejected as very good but impossible in practice. I should find a way to make it work.
Oh, your brain is making you struggle in different places than mine would, if doing things the “obvious” way doesn’t seem initially loathsome! That’s nifty!
The question to ask an advisor might look like, “what would a transition to a stem field look like for someone in my situation?”. That is, at least, if you have good open-minded advisors. Not all programs do.
If your uni doesn’t have anything in STEM, a different approach might suit:
In your situation I’d prioritize opportunities with a social component, like study groups or meetups or single classes at another local academic institution, over those without, like isolated self-study of online courses.
This raises the question: How much time is it appropriate for you to devote to exploring this transition possibility? It’s obviously more than zero, but less than “all of it”. I’d propose the rule of thumb that you should assume worst-case mental health next semester, examine your planned course load, and assess which courses you think you would be able to pass easily while badly depressed. Take those classes, and skip the rest. If you failed the others, you would have to retake them later anyway to continue on your current path. So you can get all the benefits of the “no change, bad mental health, fail some classes, retake them later” timeline, along with all the benefits of the “carve out some time to explore a possibility that seems exciting” timeline, and the only difference is that you don’t pay the course fees to take and fail the extra classes the first time around.