I'll be graduating high school in a few months and I have no real plan for my life. I applied to electrical engineering at various universities because hardware and computing systems seemed interesting enough, and it's a practical choice. In school I got high nineties in physics, calculus, chemistry and biology class, but none of it really excited me or made me want to keep going on my own time.

What does pull me is the idea of research itself: actually discovering new stuff, adding to knowledge instead of just using what's already there. The problem is I don't have a field that excites me yet. I feel like I haven't seen enough of any discipline to know if it's worth years (or a lifetime) of focus.

For people who ended up in research careers, how did you figure it out? Was there a specific moment, project, class, paper, or random conversation that inspired you? Did you mostly wander through undergrad, switching majors or labs or taking odd electives until something stuck, or did it come earlier for you?

How do you know when something is more than a passing interest, when it's the kind of thing that could actually sustain you long-term? Is it the questions that keep nagging at you years later, or the daily grind of experiments/debugging/reading feeling surprisingly okay (or even good), or some other signal? Any stories from when you were directionless at my age but eventually found your thing would be great. Low-stakes ways a freshman could poke around different areas without locking in too soon? Summer programs, random labs, self-reading that helped?