From STEM to literary journalism: one student’s pivot

switching from – Amelia Angeles moved from biomedical engineering at UC Irvine to literary journalism after realizing research-heavy work wasn’t what she wanted long term—and found her stride through drafting, peer review, and reporting.

When Amelia Angeles still had her backpack on, she was already building her next solution in her head. Even as a kid. she was drawn to Legos—so much so that her mother suggested engineering when she watched her daughter race through math and science placement tests and could get answers out fast. even on car rides.

The instincts were there early. Her mother quizzed her on multiplication tables during trips to and from school. Shopping trips turned into head-to-head math competitions, with cash in hand and change calculated before the receipt printed. In class, classmates slid worksheets onto her desk and asked for help with the problems that left them stuck.

By the time Amelia reached high school, her path looked set. She was placed into Algebra II as a freshman, a course typically taken by juniors. Her schedule filled quickly with AP courses, many of them in STEM. One summer. she job shadowed a civil engineer and also took an electrical engineering course—building and programming a small robot she named “Sir Bertram.”.

But somewhere between walking construction sites and sodding circuits, her attention started to pull toward a different side of engineering—one that didn’t look like assembly, programming, or building at all.

When she started at UC Irvine, she enrolled as a biomedical engineering major. She said she enjoyed AP biology in high school, and merged that interest with engineering. Yet when she took her first biomedical engineering class, the work felt nothing like what she expected. Instead of building prosthetics or programming robotic arms, she found herself researching patents and attending lectures about cardiovascular diseases.

Her final project during that phase pushed the gap further. She worked with three other students to write a research paper about heart valve replacements, spending hours sifting through patents and blueprints.

The more she went deeper, the more she dreaded it. She describes one specific fear forming around how the work would live inside her life: spending years on a single project. stuck in a lab with the same small group of people. She wanted the opposite—multiple projects, travel, meeting different people.

By the end of her first quarter at UC Irvine, the realization arrived all at once. She said it paralyzed her with fear and made her realize she didn’t want to be an engineer.

After multiple meetings with career advisers. she made a decision that didn’t just change her coursework—it changed her identity on campus. She moved toward the communications field. But UCI doesn’t have a communications major, so she chose something adjacent to it. In her junior year, she switched her major to literary journalism.

Telling her parents was its own kind of test. Her mother asked whether she would still be able to graduate on time, and when Amelia reassured her she could, her mother offered support without hesitation. Her father hesitated.

“Your whole life, I’ve seen you want to be an engineer,” he said. “Are you sure you want to leave that behind?”

Amelia says that after sensing her resolve, her father told her he believed she could adapt. Still, she admitted she kept her own doubts close. She said she secretly shared her father’s concerns and worried that choosing journalism would mean abandoning the part of herself shaped by STEM.

The shift from engineering problem sets to journalism drafts landed hard, and she didn’t hide that. She described taking her first journalism class while wearing 4-inch black leather go-go boots and shaking.

In journalism, she said she spent hours writing a draft, then deleted and rewrote most of it the next day. She spiraled over never feeling fully finished, missing the clear-cut solutions she was used to in STEM. During her first round of peer reviews. she imagined her paper coming back with critiques from her peers and a professor telling her she wasn’t good enough. The thought made her stomach turn.

Her early drafts came back marked and corrected. She said the pages carried multiple notes in the margins. asking her to “show. not tell. ” and AP-style corrections scattered across the paper. But the feedback wasn’t only criticism. Passages were highlighted. with comments like “I like this!” and “Great job!” After writing workshops. classmates asked about how she structured her story and for advice on how to approach sources for an interview.

One by one, those interactions changed how she felt about the work. She said she became more confident with each annotated draft and conversation after class. She also acknowledged she still struggles with impostor syndrome, but added that her peers and professors have never made her feel like one.

And even with the switch, she says her STEM identity didn’t disappear. She still calculates remaining change in her head when she pays in cash. When her younger sister struggles with math homework, she’s the first person she calls for help. “Sir Bertram” still sits in the corner of her closet.

What changed, she said, was what she wanted to build her life around.

She pointed to the opportunities that followed. She was invited to the Magic Castle in Los Angeles—the most prestigious magic club in the world—because she wrote a profile on one of their magicians. In her journalism classes, she’s met people she believes she’ll stay close to. She also said she was accepted into the EdSource Student Journalism Corps. and got her first article published earlier this year.

Her message to other students is direct, shaped by the fear she describes carrying through that middle-of-college career pivot: if you’re afraid of taking a different path, don’t assume you have to lose yourself in the process. She said you might find a more complete version of who you are.

Amelia Angeles is a fourth-year literary journalism major at UC Irvine and a member of the EdSource California Student Journalism Corps.

The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view.

UC Irvine literary journalism biomedical engineering STEM to humanities student journalism EdSource Student Journalism Corps academic major switch peer review impostor syndrome Magic Castle