I'm Not Going to Romanticize STEM — But I Will Tell You It's Worth It

There are five things I wish someone had told me before I majored in STEM.

Nobody did, because there wasn't anyone around me who could have. I was a first-generation college student, and I started at community college in elementary algebra. No one at my kitchen table could tell me what I was walking into, or whether someone starting where I was starting could get there at all.

The answer turned out to be yes. I finished a BS in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from a globally ranked STEM university, then a master's in chemistry with a first-author publication. I'm working on my PhD now, and my job is building and championing STEM student support programs across California.

I'm not listing that to show off, but so you can see the distance — because my placement test only ever told me which math I hadn't been taught yet. It never told me what I could learn and how far I could go.

Now that I’m here, here's what I can hand you at your start.

1. Be prepared for delayed gratification

You are going to spend a great deal of your time studying. Not "some evenings." Most of them. STEM classes run on problem sets, lab reports, and exams that cover a whole semester at once, and a four-unit STEM class with a lab will eat far more of your week than "four units" sounds like.

So your social life will have a different shape than your friends'. You'll still go to the concert, still have the road trips. Just less often, and you'll sometimes leave earlier than you want to. Students often read that gap as a personal failing — everyone else is having more fun, so something must be wrong with me. Nothing is wrong with you. You picked a major with more required work in it. That's how the degree is built.

But the gratification is delayed, not denied. Some arrives during the degree, when something you fought with for two weeks finally clicks. Most arrives after. The middle salary for STEM jobs is about $103,580 a year against roughly $48,000 for non-STEM work — a gap wide enough to change what your twenties look like. A few years out you may have a salaried job with health insurance, able to travel, able to help your family, able to say yes without worrying about your bank account.

This isn't a claim that STEM beats what your friends picked; people build good lives out of every degree. It's the specific trade this path offers: you do the hard part early, and it turns into stable ground fairly quickly.

2. Embrace math, everyone can be a “math person”

You are never getting away from math. I say that with love.

For most of my life I never considered myself a math person. That's how I'd have said it, too — flatly, like it was a fact. And I thought I had proof: elementary algebra, several levels below the STEM sequence, in a school system that always seemed to sort people into math people and everyone else.

Then I started over in that class and decided I was going to become a math person. Not that I secretly already was one — that it was a thing a person could become, and I'd do the becoming.

What surprised me was how much that mind shift actual worked. When you believe you're not a math person, confusion feels like proof you've hit your limit, so you dodge it — and dodging confusion is the same thing as dodging learning. Once you've decided you're becoming one, confusion means something else entirely. It's the feeling of productive struggle and learning.

Struggling wasn't a sign I was failing at math. Struggling was the math learning.

You can make that same decision, today, from whatever class you're placed in. And the people who look like naturals? Almost always just people who got comfortable and embraced the productive struggle.

3. STEM degrees are not four-year degrees anymore

Most take five to seven years now. That's not students underperforming — it's arithmetic. STEM majors require more classes, and many must be taken in strict order. Add the math sequence, general ed, classes offered once a year, and lab sections that fill up before you can register, and four years becomes a best-case scenario where everything lines up perfectly.

So let me say the good part out loud: finishing in five, six, or seven years is not falling behind. That's what this path looks like. Graduate in year six really knowing your field and you did it — on time, by the only clock that matters.

So change what you measure. Instead of am I on track for four years, ask do I actually understand this. That's the harder standard, and the one that counts. Science builds on itself, which is the best news here: understanding stacks up, and every idea you truly own makes the next one easier. Memorize just enough to pass and that learning is still sitting there waiting — it resurfaces a year later in a class that assumes you have it.

4. Student support programs are key

Find one your first semester. Not your third. Your first.

STEM degrees come with a hidden set of rules nobody writes down: which classes never to take together, whose office hours are worth going to, how to get into research, which credits actually transfer, when internship applications open. Students whose parents work in STEM absorb this at dinner. Everyone else has to go find it on purpose.

If you're at a California community college, look for MESA — the Math, Engineering, Science Achievement program. Nearly every one has it, built specifically for STEM students: study space, tutoring, counseling from someone who knows STEM transfer paths, and a group of students taking the same hard classes you are. Also look into TRIO and EOPS — less STEM-specific, but excellent at helping you get through college. Plenty of students use both.

Students often hear "get support" as "you're behind." That's not what this is. A chemistry lab needs beakers, a library needs a building, and a STEM student needs support. Using what was built for you is just being smart and will help you get ahead.

5. You belong, don't give up

At some point you're going to feel like you don't belong. It shows up as a specific voice: everyone else already gets this. Maybe I'm just not a science person.

Two things about that voice. First, almost everyone hears it — especially students who are first in their family, or who don't know anyone with a science career, or who look around a lecture hall and don't see people who look like them. If you've never seen anyone in your life be a scientist, of course this feels unfamiliar. You're learning how this world works and learning STEM at once. That's two jobs.

Second, the feeling isn't evidence. Not belonging and feeling like you don't belong are completely different things, and they get mixed up constantly.

You'll have hard semesters. You might not pass a class the first time — plenty of accomplished scientists didn't (blog post to come). A grade measures where your understanding was on one day, in one class, with whatever help you had at the time. All of that can change. It's a snapshot of a moment, not a ceiling.

So the sentence isn't I can't do this. It's I can't do this yet — and the gap between those two is basically the whole degree. What matters is what comes next: change your approach, ask for help sooner than feels comfortable, find the study methods that work for your brain, then go again.

We need more of everyone in STEM. Not for appearances — the work is genuinely better when more kinds of minds are doing it, because the questions that get asked depend on who's in the room to ask them.

You belong here. Find someone to walk alongside you and be that person for someone else when you can.

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STEM graduates: what's your advice for students wanting to major in STEM?What do you wish someone had told you? What got you through the semester you almost didn't finish? Leave it in the comments — students are reading.