Can't Decide on a Major. Interests all over the place

juillet
Sun, 19 Jul 2015 02:05:34 +0000

Part of this decision hinges on realizing that everyone has many interests. Me, personally, I was (and am!) interested in health, computer science, statistics, history, psychology, and sociology, and a little bit of law/politics too. However, you can’t combine all of your varied interests into a career - not all at once, anyway - and you can’t combine them all into a single major. (I managed to hit most of them in two careers, but I still haven’t really integrated history and law into that. Maybe the third one, lol!)

Once you realize that, your job is to select the interests that you’d most like to study in college for four years and maybe turn into a career. For some people, that involves picking whichever of their interests are most lucrative career-wise (either for money or becausse that’s what they want to study). For others, that’s just the thing that they most want to take classes in for four years - that’s how I picked my major (psychology), without really thinking exactly how I was going to parlay it into a career. That worked itself out later.

I will say that my sister has a major in exercise science and she has been struggling to find full-time employment in her field; she graduated in December of 2014. Of course, you can major in exercise science and go do something else - it’s difficult to find in-field employment. Your major doesn’t sentence you to a certain career - I just finished reading a thread on a diferent forum about a whole bunch of people several years out of college who are working in fields they never imagined in college. I’m included in that; my career is actually related to my undergraduate major, but this isn’t what I planned on doing when I started college, or even when I selected my major!

Also, [information systems actually has one of the highest unemployment rates](Box) as a major, although that may be rebounding. IT is a great field, but you don’t have to major in IS to get into it. My point isn’t that you shouldn’t major in business or IT, but selecting something because of current unemployment rates isn’t necessarily a good idea. First of all, you have no way of knowing what they’ll be like in the next 3-5 years - law and real estate seemed like really good propositions in 2005 when I was a sophomore year in college! Second of all, just because something is lucrative doesn’t mean you’d be good at it. I’d be a lousy engineer.