What I Learned When My Second-Year IT College Student Wanted To Switch To Maritime Studies
My oldest son dragged his leftover lasagna around the plate last Sunday, halfway through his second year of IT at our state university. He’d been scrolling his phone under the table for 20 minutes, which is his usual move when he’s avoiding saying something hard. My husband was talking about the leaky roof in the garage, and I was stacking dirty dishes when he looked up and cut right through the noise: “I don’t want to do this anymore. I want to switch to maritime.”
I froze mid-stack. I’d expected this conversation to be about a bad grade, or needing new tires for his truck, not a total career upheaval. All I could think at first was: Two years of tuition, two years of general ed and prereqs, all that student loan debt, just thrown away? “Why would you throw away two years of work?” I said, and I could hear how sharp my voice was, even to me.
He pushed his plate away and pulled up a PDF on his phone, slid it across the table. He’d already emailed the advisor at the university’s maritime college, a separate program I didn’t even know we had on campus. He’d mapped every credit: all the general ed requirements transfer, even his introductory programming class counts toward the logistics and technical operations portion of the degree. He’d only need one extra semester to graduate, not two. He’d spent three nights that week going over the catalog on his own, before he said anything to us.
I’d missed all the signs that he was miserable, if I’m honest. He’d failed his advanced coding midterm last semester, and I’d yelled at him for skipping study sessions to go hiking. I thought he was just slacking, that he’d gotten distracted by college life. What I didn’t know was that he’d spent his summer internship at a local software firm, sitting at a desk eight hours a day debugging code for a grocery delivery app, and he’d come home every night complaining that he never got to see anything real get built. He’d gone on a fishing trip with my brother, who works on a coastal tugboat, last fall, and came back talking nonstop about learning to read nautical charts, fixing broken winches, navigating the inlet at dawn. He’d been thinking about this for six months, and I was just seeing the first tip of it.
After we got past the initial panic, we didn’t say yes or no right away. We worked out a small, concrete plan, and that’s the thing I’d tell any other parent in this spot to do first: don’t default to panic, don’t default to approval, just build small steps to test the idea. First, we agreed he’d sit in on three introductory maritime classes and shadow a third-year student for a full day on the program’s training vessel before we made any moves. Second, we’d all sit down with a financial aid advisor together to map out the extra cost of that one extra semester, instead of guessing at it from the kitchen table. Third, if it all checked out, he’d get a part-time job at the campus marina to cover his extra living expenses, so we wouldn’t have to add any more than $5,000 to his total student loans. No vague “think about it more” that just leaves everyone stressed. Specific steps that force everyone to look at the actual facts, not just the fear.
He did all of it in three weeks. He came back from the shadow day sunburned across the nose, his boots caked in salt mud, and talked for 45 minutes straight about how even the math they did on the boat mattered—wrong calculation and you end up on a sandbar, not just a wrong line of code that someone else fixes later. The financial aid advisor told us the maritime program has more industry-funded scholarships than most tech programs, because there’s a national shortage of trained maritime workers, and he got a $4,000 annual scholarship that covered almost all of the extra tuition. He started working 10 hours a week at the marina on weekends, washing boats and helping with repairs, and he says he likes it more than any of his IT classes.
I still have doubts, if I’m being honest. I worry about him being out on the water in bad weather. I worry that five years from now, he’ll decide he hates being away from home for months at a time on commercial contracts, and we’ll be right back here. I grew up thinking a good career is a straight line, that switching majors halfway through college is a mistake, that stability means sticking with the path you picked when you were 18. I forgot that I switched from nursing to elementary education in my third year of college, that I took an extra year to graduate, and that I’ve never once regretted it. I just pushed the straight path myth on my kid anyway.
One thing I’ve stopped doing is asking him if he’s sure. At first I asked that every other time we talked about it, and I realized it just means “are you sure I don’t have to be scared about this?” It’s his life, his degree, his loan debt that he’ll be paying off, so his certainty is the only one that matters. The most I can do is help him check the boxes, make sure he’s not jumping into something without looking first, and that’s what we did.
He’s handing in his transfer paperwork next week. He still hasn’t decided what kind of maritime job he wants after graduation—he’s talking about port logistics, about search and rescue, about working on cargo ships for a few years to save money before doing something else. We don’t have it all figured out. Last week he sent me a photo of him leaning against a training vessel, hands covered in grease, grinning into the sun. I can’t remember the last time he sent me a photo that happy from campus when he was in IT.
It’s not the neat, stable path I planned for him when I was holding him as a baby. It’s messier, it’s a little more expensive, and it carries more risk than staying in IT would. But for right now, this is what’s working. We’ll see how the first semester goes, and take it from there.
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