It’s that time of year again. And unfortunately, I don’t mean Christmas.
I’m referring to the beginning of the school year. The standard time for parents and academic advisers to start prodding you with the same question over and over again: What are you going to major in?
What are you going to do with the rest of your life? Time is running out, so you better figure it out now.
As a kid, this question was always easy to answer. I always wanted to be a doctor. Just like that, I would answer back to that reoccurring question with so much audacity and not a single doubt in my mind that I would, one day, be a doctor. Twelve years later, it has become clear to my family, friends and me that I’m not going to be a doctor. Hospitals terrify me and I’m awful at chemistry. But as a kid, being a doctor just made so much sense.
Although I sadly won’t be able to fulfill my childhood dreams of saving lives like they do on TV, I figured out what I actually want to do with my future. I’m lucky that, somewhere down the long and twisted road that led me to MU, I have been able to find a suitable major and career field for myself. Many of my friends, however, still are not sure what type of career they want to pursue. I have watched them struggle with pressure from parents and jump from major to major trying to get it all figured out.
One thing I keep noticing with majors is the common pattern of my male friends gravitating toward the “guy” jobs while the female friends pursue the more “feminine” jobs. This trend is seen more often with the boys. I often hear of my male friends majoring in engineering or going pre-med, which are predominately male fields. It would be pretty unusual to discover that one of my male classmates is a nursing major. The male nurse is not unheard of, but it is definitely not as common as the female nurse.
I think today, even with all our diversity, males are still hesitant to work in a field that is predominately female. This is not solely an issue of individual masculinity; it’s social, too. It’s what society has built into boys since the very day they were born. Little boys do little boy things, like play with trucks and action figures. Most want to grow up to be firefighters or baseball players, not hardworking, softhearted nurses. That’s just the way things have always been. Look at the movie “Pearl Harbor.” As far as I could tell, all of the nurses throughout the movie were female. All the pretty women dressed in their starch white uniforms were helping heal the wounded — no male nurses in sight. Nurses were typically female back then, as they still are today. People get stuck in their ways.
If you walk through the halls of a hospital today, it is more common to see male nurses. My roommate, a nursing major, has also assured me there are a number of male students in the nursing program here at MU, which is good progress. But when picking majors, males seem to be more likely to major in biology and aspire to be a doctor or some other health profession other than nursing. It’s just not the “manly” thing to do.
Today, the statistics are certainly showing a shift in interest. Men are finding it more appropriate to break the mold society has kept for centuries and step into typically female professions such as teaching and social work more often than before. Just as women have made their way into predominately male jobs, men are doing the same. Careers that have typically been viewed as male-oriented, such as business and corporate jobs, are being infiltrated by women these days.
So if you are still struggling to get your act together at MU, consider casting away the work-world stereotypes society has imprinted on us. For the guys, if you want to help people, but don’t want to be a doctor, be a nurse. It won’t strip you of your masculinity. If anything, it will help you actually meet a girl. The same goes for any other major, job or career. Today the work force is evolving. Women are running huge corporations and being elected to big political jobs — positions that men have been known to dominate. The work force is evolving. Don’t be scared to, as well.
If a girl can do it, any boy can do it too, right?