<p>I am an incoming freshman in letters and sciences and I really have no idea what I want to major in. Does anybody have any course selections which would be good for me to explore different fields?</p>
<p>ps. Should be an interesting class with an interesting professor.</p>
<p>have you been to orientation yet? they should have told you about CORE classes, which is gen ed everyond has to take, and if you take a variety of CORE classes, that’s a good way to see different majors, since you have to take English, History, Science, Math, CORE really spreads out over everything as a good sampler of what UM offers.</p>
<p>^And I suggest using ratemyprofessor.com (although not all profs will be on that site) to get a feel for who the better professors to take each CORE class with are. It is usually pretty accurate. But remember, CORE is sometimes very mindless…there are some good classes but since “everyone has to take 'em” there will be a lot of kids in the class who are not passionate about the subject and this really takes away from the class as a whole. For example, I took many lower level history classes that were just horrendous because students never did the reading and therefore discussion sections were spent sitting around in silence. But the higher up you go the more interesting things get, the more engaged the students/profs are.</p>
<p>Secondly, I suggest go to testudo.umd.edu and looking at the classes offered for each major you are interested in (there should be a “schedule of classes” link for the Fall semester, and you can see a list of abbreviations which are the “major” titles). See what group of classes looks most interesting. What can you see yourself doing for the next 4 yrs? What combination of things can you see yourself doing?</p>
<p>Third, go to the career center with that group of majors you are interested in and ask about possible professions. Decide which professions seem to suit you best. Good luck! </p>
<p>It is really, really worth it to spend some time on this…I know what I am suggesting sounds tedious, but it is way better to get this out of the way early than to be in your junior year trying to figure out what to do still!! Esp. since for many majors you have to meet certain requirements to be accepted into them, as well as maintain a certain GPA. It is important to know how you should be focusing yourself, even as early as second semester freshman year.</p>