Chemistry major or Physics... any advice?

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For how I see things ... it's hard to explain I suppose. Nothing every literally changes in my field of view, and I've never really hallucinated outside of things in the corner of my eye like shadows or bugs. How I see things could be described as though I turned off the part of me that acknowledges visual stimulus, so things will happen. and my eyes are open, but nothing is registering. I'm pretty sure that part is normal though. As soon as that happens it's like everything in front of me disappears and I can see things as though I were still physically there, looking at whatever.

I saw this camera photo condensing technology awhile ago and it seems like the best example I have at the moment. Basically you can just walk around the room and you take a bunch of photos of the room from different angles and spaces , upload them, and this program layers them into a 3d representation. So the areas where you took the most photos ( or where I pay the most attention) are the clearest and have the most details/accuracy. The areas that took in less attention are either black or really blurry/opaque. Although, what sets me apart from the computer, is that I have no black areas, because whatever bit of information I missed is filled in by something that fits logically. The fun part is that when I do this, it is literally like the matrix for me. A more lonely matrix with no sound or smells, but still. If I want to eat dinner with the hand-demon from Pans Labyrinth, I can. I can also replace him with a dancing lion...and then turn the room into a beach.

This is very helpful when it comes to understanding things like the quantum's and anything else that you could not " see ". As I can make 3d video game like metaphorical representations of how they would interact and look ... based off information given to me about them.

Anyway... I'm trying to end the rant short to save some time. Final thoughts = I wish I could stay organized in a less selfish way. Things/information/etc for school = scattered all over. And things for what I want to study = scattered in closer proximity and remembered in my head matrix thing.

Oh... last thing. I'm pretty sure most people have a " you're trying to make it more complicated " mentality because they are more step by step oriented. They don't need to think about the why, because for this step in teaching they shouldn't have to, or they haven' gotten there yet. I tend to be all over the place in that regard... so they are teaching me one thing, and I am asking them how it applies to something we don't cover for another week/month/months/year/years

Just a comment about AS people and math: IMO you have to read math differently than how they teach it. You have to read math by relating it to the conceptual skills that you normally use in your unique intellectual process. Like I have a more somatic, sensual systematic modeling mind, so I would have to read math in a way that sets up clear relationships between how I explore things and the concepts in the material.

The way traditional, male-dominated math curriculum goes, they teach the dry, computational aspect of math for the first few years, then they teach the analysis, which is much more like how you describe you think. In my opinion, women and autistic people would do a lot better in math if they went the opposite way, teaching analysis first and then the computational rules and operations flow naturally from the analytic insights.

But if you want to be a scientist, no matter which kind, you will be more gifted and accomplished in your field if you master math somehow. Don't cut corners in math study because they will definitely come back to bite you in the ass.

I agree with others that growth fields are in biochemistry, but also physical chemistry and other fields related to power generation and nuclear power. If you major in chemistry, you can also go to medical school, etc. There's not a lot you can do professionally with a bachelor's degree in physics. BS in physics don't do theoretical work, and applied physics is really engineering and so physicists with bachelors' degrees aren't as employable as engineers are. So if you want a job, it's safer professionally to do engineering with a physics minor than do physics. You can always add upper level physics classes later, getting another degree, for example.

Sounds like you are gifted in chemistry, that is great.

Good advice. What I have noticed recently after a chem exam last night and a lab/quiz today is that I can be doing things that require a knowledge of the math physically and know exactly what to do and what math to throw in it... BUT if you give me a quiz covering all the things I just did that is written strictly in words, numbers and symbols I end up sitting there starring at it blankly for as long as it took everyone else to finish the quiz... then when the room quiets down I can somewhat recognize the patterns and " feel " of the systematic part of the math, and end up doing the right set of steps for an equation thats different from the one that I am doing now. Finally, when I stop being stubborn and ask someone to try to describe to me what the question is asking, I end up getting it right, or at the very worst I arranged the steps right, but will put in a wrong number somewhere and screw up the whole equation.

I also noticed that if you alter the sentence or arrangement of the numbers in a question that is essentially the same as a question that I can do in the book or on a practice exam, or whatever... I often times either take forever to recognize it, or don't recognize it at all until I ask someone. And often times I end up doing it ten different ways before I ask for help, once I understand it I go back and see the right answer written down and scratched off twice.

So yeah... definitely key to learn it in the way that you most often think/remember things. Which can be difficult for certain concepts in math that can be technically understood similar to something like the concept of infinity. Where nobody really has a clue what infinity really is outside of our definition of " never ending ". I can't visualize that in any practical sense as well as not being able to visualize things like Eulers number or Pi. Think I'll stop there before I look at the clock and see another half hour gone.