How To Choose The Best Major For You

By Julia D on July 25, 2018

Recent high school graduates know that the second they post college acceptance photos on Facebook, questions flood in. “Was that your top choice school?” “Are you going to live in the dorms?”

Most often, however, it’s “What are you going to major in?”

The question is incredibly overwhelming if you have no idea off-hand whether you’d prefer chemistry over philosophy, or pre-medical sciences over linguistics. It’s even overwhelming for people who have known all their lives what they wanted to major in. “What’s your major?” is the most frequent conversation-starter among new first-years trying to bond with prospective peers during lunch at orientation. It’s a common icebreaker in classes as well.

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Like many students, you might find it ridiculous to decide on a major when you’ve just turned 18 and haven’t had much time to explore. That’s completely fair, and entirely valid; often, choosing a major is likened to or viewed as choosing your future career or life path.

You might worry you’re being basically being locked into a trajectory before you even know if it’s for you. That’s certainly how it feels before you discover that post-grad life comes with a host of options and unconventional roadmaps to success in fields other than that of your major.

If you’re an incoming college student worried about your major, don’t believe for a minute that the first major you choose on your application needs to be the major you have when you walk across the commencement stage years later.

Choosing the best major for you can be challenging, but you have plenty of resources at your disposal that can help. Here are eight ways to help yourself choose the best major for your lifestyle, goals and personality.

1. Use your GEs to your advantage

Nearly all first-year college students are required to take classes to fulfill a standard set of general education areas. For each general education requirement, which can include Textual Analysis, Cross-Cultural Analysis, Scientific Inquiry, Interpreting Media, and others, your university likely offers an entire list of different classes that can be used to satisfy the requirement.

This makes it easy for students to customize their experience; at my undergraduate university, for instance, students who didn’t want to take straight math classes like precalculus to satisfy the Mathematical and Formal Reasoning GE would take classes such as philosophy, which teaches comparable skills in a different setting. In fulfilling your GE requirements, you could easily stumble onto a class you might not have otherwise taken, and that class could be the gateway to the best major for you.

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College is meant to be about exploration, especially in your first year before it comes time to declare a major. You don’t want to spend too long without a proposed major, though, as it can delay your graduation and cost you more money. Be strategic about designing a class schedule in your first few terms that exposes you to fields like astronomy, creative writing, politics, and cognitive science. A diverse class schedule will help you realize which classes bore you relative to the ones that excite you when you wake up Tuesday morning and realize it’s time for the graphic design class you love.

3. Do some research about your options

You might not even know about all of the majors that exist. Since the job market is constantly evolving, universities are working to design new and better majors that set students up for the careers of 2018 and the future. This year, at the University of California, San Diego, “Business Psychology, Data Science, Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, and Real Estate and Development were established as new majors in response to future demand, workplace trends and alumni feedback,” according to the university’s newsroom.

More and more schools are also offering game design and digital media majors to introduce students to the increasingly lucrative field which combines creativity with engineering. To find the best major for you, conduct a thorough search of your university’s website and read through all of the major descriptions available online. If you have yet to commit to a university, consider the set of available majors at each school an important criterion that could help you select one. Some schools offer more specialized majors, such as forestry and natural resources, while others just offer the straightforward basics like life science, history and politics, to name a few. This leads us straight into the next tip for choosing the best major for you.

4. Choose a broader major–you can specialize later

Stressed about all of those specific majors like child and adolescent development or marine biology? Zoom out a bit–if you know you want to do something in science, but can’t tell early on whether to go for plant sciences or marine ecology, just choose biology. You have plenty of time to take prerequisites and then switch to a more specialized major in the same track before graduation, or you can go onto graduate school to specialize later. There’s nothing wrong with choosing one of the general majors.

Later on, however, when it comes time to job search, you probably won’t be locked out of too many biology job opportunities if you technically majored in ecology and evolution rather than general biology. You’ll find after graduation that landing a great job is only partly about whatever you majored in and mostly about your skills, experience, application materials and success in an interview.

5. Go to advising and collect degree program maps

You’ll likely find there are plenty of handouts in the lobbies of various departments that outline the course requirements for each major offered. Some of those handouts depict visual maps of different major pathways, compare similar degrees and highlight the differences, and highlight areas of specialization in each major. When I was a first-year, I visited departments that housed the majors I was interested in, and grabbed every physical resource available to me so that I could weigh my options later in my dorm room. It often helps to look at physical printouts of majors and pathways rather than to open ten tabs on a laptop, which may overwhelm you.

If you’re looking for personalized advice or to explain your interests to somebody, most campus departments all have advisors. Their jobs are devoted to helping students select majors! Sometimes, departments will hold major advising sessions and workshops nearby in your residential community on campus. Take the time to attend these and gather information so that you can make an informed choice about the best major for you.

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6. Visit the campus career center and student-run organizations

In the same vein of visiting departments on campus, consider visiting your school’s career center and making an appointment with a career counselor. This can be extra helpful if you have an idea of what type of career you’d like to have, but don’t know which major might lead you to that career.

You can also learn a lot about different career paths by attending meetings of different student organizations–think pre-law society, dentistry club, creative writing groups, and other groups dedicated to academic pursuits. Here, you can chat with students around your age and see what draws them to their field of choice. It can be easier to express your concerns and ask questions in a casual setting like this. Don’t be afraid to ask the organization members about their experience in different majors. You might pick up some tips that the professional major advisors couldn’t have told you!

7. Try out a realistic work experience early on

“Need experience to get job…need job to get experience.” Most of us know this circular trap pretty well, but as a first-year, you might want to get your feet into the internship world. If you can find an entry-level internship in a field you might be considering — before it’s time to declare a major — you can gauge your interest in that field. Work experience is always useful, and if you can find opportunities that connect to the fields you could see yourself following, you’ll be able to make a more confident choice in college majors.

Infographic by Julia Dunn

8. Choose what doesn’t feel like work

Think hard about what you enjoy doing when procrastinating. Do you avoid calculus homework and find yourself playing around on Photoshop? You might like graphic design. Do you volunteer at an LGBTQ center in your free time? Maybe social work, feminist studies or sociology is for you. Of course, even people who really love their jobs often have areas of their work that they love a little less—perhaps administrative paperwork or bureaucratic hoops to jump through.

Nonetheless, the best major for you will be aligned with a field that feels exciting and brimming with opportunities. If you envision yourself in a job that feels worthwhile, significant, and relatively easy for you (matched well to your strengths), you can plan backwards to select the best major that would get you there.

Once you have your mind set on a few possible majors, confirm that the logistics of each program will work with your lifestyle. If you’re considering computer science, know that at many universities, that major is “impacted.” Since demand is high, it can be difficult for students in the degree program to get the classes they need at the time they need them. If you’re curious about the research taking place in different departments, find out if those departments are hosting any special seminars or events you can attend to learn more.

Often, departments will hold a speaker series or poster session to engage community members and prospective students. Additionally, think about the structures of different majors: can you take classes in any order, or does the program follow a strict sequence? Are the classes usually held in the nighttime or morning? How many units of coursework is required?

These factors can influence your decision when choosing the best major for your lifestyle–for instance, if you’re a commuter student, you’ll need classes at a reasonable hour. If you’re low on financial resources, make sure you think through your options in case you can’t graduate in the usual four years.

Choosing a major can be much less arduous the more you experiment and explore your options, gather information, and talk to people. Connect with older friends of yours who may have already graduated, and find out how they chose their majors.

Ask somebody in your family or social network about their line of work and what choices catapulted them to where they are. Seek out informational interviews whenever possible (use LinkedIn!). You may be able to shadow someone in a legal office or nonprofit. Plus, the more professionals you make connections with, the more likely it’ll be that one of those connections might think of you when they see a job opening in their field. Getting onto people’s radar in the fields that interest you is one of the fastest ways to connect your college degree with a satisfying job in a timely manner after graduation.

Lastly, make sure you are choosing the best major for you–not your mom, who became a lawyer but always wanted to be a psychologist and has pressured you to follow that path since your junior year of high school. Don’t select your major based on your parents’ ideas of what successful majors are. You will be employable in any field if you do what you are good at, what you enjoy, and what you are motivated to pursue. The decision is yours to make–but plenty of advice will be out there to help you choose the best major.

2. Find out what you don’t want to do

Not sure what elective class to take? Just take something. You’ll learn about your likes and dislikes regardless of the outcome. Although it can feel like a waste of time, negative experiences place us on a path to success by redirecting us to another opportunity. If you decide on a whim to take a beginning computer science class, and by week four of the term, you’d rather be doing anything else, you’ll have narrowed down your degree options by at least one–maybe more, if your dislike of computer science extends to software engineering and sister disciplines.

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