<p>[Majoring in a Professor
By Scott Jaschik
Inside Higher Ed
August 12, 2013](<a href=“http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/08/12/study-finds-choice-major-most-influenced-quality-intro-professor”>http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/08/12/study-finds-choice-major-most-influenced-quality-intro-professor</a>)
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<p>I wonder if some students give the experience in the first course too much weight, since teaching ability can vary widely within a department.</p>
<p>Oh, absolutely! 40 years ago I was taken in by a marketing professor in the intro marketing class at University of Michigan business school (now Ross). The marketing department wasn’t dumb – they put their best professor in front of the first year students. Still remember the guy, C. Merle Crawford, saw in the alumni magazine that he died a few months ago and felt sad. I went on to be a marketing major, although it actually was not a great fit for me and I never worked in the field after graduating. :)</p>
<p>My daughter’s boyfriend was considering a couple of different majors, and he made sure to take TWO classes in each major just to offset this possibility.</p>
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<p>Wasn’t a factor for me as if that was the case, I probably would still be in college 10+ years from my actual graduation date because I had so many wonderful Profs across a wide variety of fields.</p>
<p>I chose my economics major that way. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to major in and this guy hands down made a subject I previously knew little about, nor did I care much about it, and made it really interesting to me.</p>
<p>This was something we discussed when selecting high school courses, go for the elective with the engaging teacher even if you dont know if you are interested in the subject.
In college, you didnt see profs teaching outside their area of interest/ expertise as much as in high school and word of mouth along with perusing the texts in the student bookstore can give an idea of the strenght of the class.</p>
<p>I don’t know about this as relates to college majors, as most people I know went into college quite rather decided, and stuck with their first choices, but this effect was huge in my high school. We had an amazing AP Art History teacher. After taking her class, students would list art history highly as one of their interests and started spending half of their free time in museums. Of course, both in high school and in college this makes sense. If someone makes their field seem like its the absolute best, of course people will be turned on to it.</p>
<p>I need to make sure the art history teacher at our high school is not too good :).</p>
<p>Sometimes, possessing some understanding of art history (and music, etc) can be useful to white collar professionals in their jobs or in interviewing for jobs. Some companies may value this quality and look for it in the interview process. In my opinion, this might be a reason for a child to take a variety of electives in high school and in college. ymmv</p>
<p>Yep.</p>
<p>[Computer</a> Science Sees Unparalleled Growth in SEAS | News | The Harvard Crimson](<a href=“Computer Science Sees Unparalleled Growth in SEAS | News | The Harvard Crimson”>Computer Science Sees Unparalleled Growth in SEAS | News | The Harvard Crimson)</p>
<p>I chose my major based on a freshman seminar taught by an art historian! It was a course that combined studio art and art history - she was not actually in the department I ended up in, but I did studio art and architectural history. Great major has served me well. :)</p>
<p>Harvard had charismatic intro to comp sci courses even when I was there.</p>
<p>"Undergraduates are significantly more likely to major in a field if they have an inspiring and caring faculty member in their introduction to the field. And they are equally likely to write off a field based on a single negative experience with a professor. "
-These must be kids who are not sure about amjor to begin with. It maybe a high number of them. However, the ones that do not see themselves doing anything, but this one profession, that has beein stuck in their heads since they remember thinking about their future, whose will learn to do what it takes, including private tutoring, if needed. There are some very determined students out there, who know exactly what they want and nobody will derail them. I would say that CS is particularly almost addictive. If you one who cannot detach yourself from your program that does not work, you absolutely got to get it running right, then you are true programmer (or whatever they call you, it does not matter, you are hooked, you will not let it go, bad prof., good prof, or whoever is laughing at you at the moment, it will become irrelevant)</p>
<p>First semester freshman year S took a history of geology class taught by the department chair, and he was totally captivated. This professor has a heap of charisma and just made the subject jump to life. Every semester up until the end of his sophomore year when he had to declare a major, I asked if he was sure that he wanted to be a geologist, he’s never wavered. I just wonder what would have happened if his freshman schedule had been different.</p>
<p>This more or less happened to me. My interests were redirected – more refracted a few degrees than utterly changed – by a charismatic lecture series I attended in spring of my freshman year. And I developed a life-long interest in accounting thanks to a great introductory accounting course I took as a sophomore, which in the long run has probably had more impact on my life than any other course I took anywhere. (It was also a stone gut, which made it even greater.)</p>
<p>My best friend in college took Geology for Poets as a junior and immediately switched his major from History. He really had to shuck and jive to meet his major requirements, since he declared the major without having taken a single course that actually met any of its requirements. It wasn’t such a large major, though, and I think the department decided to let him substitute Geo for Poets for the regular, more rigorous intro course since he had so immersed himself in it.</p>
<p>My son had both experiences. A mediocre Gen Chem professor and an awful Organic Chemistry professor pretty much killed his original interest in Chemistry, while a unit of his core Social Sciences class taught by one great Sociology professor, and a seminar on martial arts taught by another one, really turned him on to Sociology, something he had no knowledge of or interest in before he went to college.</p>
<p>Re: [Computer</a> Science Sees Unparalleled Growth in SEAS | News | The Harvard Crimson](<a href=“Computer Science Sees Unparalleled Growth in SEAS | News | The Harvard Crimson”>Computer Science Sees Unparalleled Growth in SEAS | News | The Harvard Crimson)</p>
<p>The growth in (intended) CS majors has been observed at other universities (e.g. Berkeley and Stanford), so the effect of the specific introductory course may be overstated. The likely reason behind the growth is that CS graduates have done relatively well in the poor job markets over the last few years, and memories of the tech bubble crash of the early 2000s have faded.</p>
<p>…As I said, if CS is “your thing”, you will be hooked, it is addictive, you will not quit, no matter who is teaching it and if in fact you even understand the lectures, irrelevant, you will find your ways.</p>
<p>This is one of the reasons that I want to teach intro to psychology and introductory statistics if/when I become a professor (as well as an introductory public health class, if the college has interest). I love my fields and I want to inspire passion and interest in majoring in them. And in the case of statistics - majors in my field usually hate the class, as often they are majoring in psychology to escape math, so I want to teach them that it’s very useful and can be really interesting and fascinating.</p>
<p>And this is why I find it so sad that colleges, especially high profile universities, often hire adjunct professors or instructors to teach those foundational classes. Not only are those classes the foundation for the rest of the major - you won’t do well in Psychology of Stereotyping and Prejudice (PSYC 310) if you didn’t do well in PSYC 101 - but that’s how you get majors, and thus money, to your department. My prestigious university hires adjuncts to teach introductory psychology and introductory statistics, and one of our statistics professors is…dry, to say the least. He makes the students hate it. But statistics, in addition to being vital to the field, is also one of the more lucrative subfields of psychology and social science. ANd we don’t have an advanced statistics course here, whereas my mid-ranked LAC had one (and a class on the theory of psychological measurement, which this top university also does not have). Instead, we have a lot of “boutique” courses in our professors’ area of interests.</p>
<p>Maybe I’m just different, but as an aspiring professor I really <em>want</em> to teach intro, research methods, statistics, the basic social psychology class. Not that my own subfield isn’t fascinating and that I wouldn’t love to teach a seminar on it once in a while. But that intro class is much more likely to change someone’s life than your 10-person seminar on brain development in songbirds.</p>
<p>For me, though, I chose my major because I liked the content of it. My intro sociology professor was actually much better than my intro psych professor, and the soc prof was the one who inspired me to get a PhD myself. But I liked psych better.</p>
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<p>However, if the department is already at full capacity, it may not have as much incentive to “market” the major to students in the introductory courses.</p>
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<p>The statistics department might not be too motivated to have its best teachers teach the service courses for social studies majors, as opposed to those courses taken by statistics majors.</p>
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<p>Well, if colleges did that, that would be a little conniving–“Let’s purposely put all our bad teachers in intro classes to push people away from Psychology because those Philosophy classes are pretty empty.”</p>
<p>My Intro Economics course was taught by a great professor who was the Head of the Economics Dept. He asked all of us what our majors were and learned that quite a few of us were Math majors. He addressed this by saying if any of us Math majors were thinking of switching then Economics would be a good choice.</p>
<p>I think he had heard from his spies about the Calculus professor from Germany who nearly flunked every math major the previous semester. I became an Economics major and waited three years to use any math.</p>
<p>My intro econ profs were not scintillating. But my great HS AP Econ teacher had already given me the bug.</p>