Double major or minor?

cosmicfish
Thu, 21 Jun 2012 23:42:01 +0000

As far as your claims, if you have actual data that compares double majors to single majors with regards to salary and acceptance rate into grad school I would like to see it, otherwise saying that is purely anecdotal.

It absolutely is anecdotal - that is all most of us on here can offer.

Here is my anecdotal evidence: I knew several double majors in college, know roughly what offers they received (we swapped that info freely amongst ourselves, it was essentially a ***ing contest) and none of them had offers significantly better than mine for comparable GPA’s, and yes that includes a few double-engineers. I know several engineers in my very large company and have had access at various times both to academic qualifications and to a certain level of salary information, and have seen zero evidence of any of the double majors having any significant edge in salary. I know several grad students at top programs, and cannot immediately find any double majors in the group - I know several double-majors who applied to grad schools, but all of them went down in “quality” of program in their acceptances.



I could care less however since I’m doing it purely because I want to and because it ADDS to the depth of my program.

If that is how you feel, more power to you - it is your life, your decisions. But unless you attend a small school there should be a plethora of senior and grad-level courses that you could have taken that would have positioned you much better for some specific research area, and that is what I mean by depth. Most grad programs won’t care about the 24 credits of sophomore/junior level classes you take to get a double major, they will care about the 24 credits of senior/grad level courses that you could have taken in areas that they already expect their students to be strong in.

*: Note that this may in fact be good choices on their part, rather than any weakness of their applications - grad school being what it is, you go with the best advisor and research even if it is at a “lesser” school.