I’m sure I’m not alone, but as a rising senior, I feel overwhelmed at the possibilities open to me for majors.
I really love math (and have taken Calc 1 and 2 at a local college, with plans to take Calc 3 and Linear Algebra next year), but I am also very interested in history, economics, Latin, philosophy, etc. (I was also intrigued by cognitive science while touring Brown). My favorite course this past year was probably AP Euro (most likely due to the teacher, but still), and I’ve loved my Latin courses all through high school. Regarding the sciences: I’m interested in them, but my classes have been largely slow and boring to this point, which makes me think that a major might be worth it, even if they don’t stand out as my favorite right now. I also have quite a bit of experience with programming on my robotics team, so computer science is definitely a possibility.
In short, I have a lot of interests and an ever-decreasing amount of time to decide on a major. I’m obviously interested in opportunities to double major, minor, or dabble in an open curriculum (like Brown or Amherst), but I would also like to establish some sort of course that I can follow moving forward.
Any thoughts on my ramblings?
You don’t need to choose your major as soon as you get to college—you just need to take classes that will allow you to graduate in four years regardless of which major you choose from your list of possibilities. I would recommend taking an introductory programming class in your first semester, along with Latin if you think you want to study it throughout college. It sounds like you’re already ahead in math, and the other subjects you listed don’t usually have long sequences of prerequisites.
If you want employment-getting to be easy, you should take note of computer science, given your apparently not-bad involvement with programming, love of math and the fact that computer science is likely to have the largest ratio of employment openings to qualified candidates (with the possible exception of nursing and related) when you graduate (http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_102.htm and https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d14/tables/dt14_322.10.asp?current=yes).
It doesn’t seem to matter to most people whether they work at what they’ve studied, but if it matters to you, note that the odds of that are poor with Latin, history and philosophy.
There are likely to be subject areas you haven’t been exposed to in your high school, for example political science and psychology, and, as far as the sciences are concerned, perhaps you just haven’t had the material well presented yet. So further exploration of new or inadequately explored fields of study would be highly desirable to do before deciding a major.