Need Help Regarding Major Selection -- Long Post Alert

juillet
Thu, 29 Oct 2015 03:36:49 +0000

As I mentioned, professor is my end-all goal, but there are a thousand ways to get there and I want to do something else before I settle down and start teaching.

No, actually, there are not a thousand ways to get to be a professor. There is pretty much one route to become a tenure-track professor: You have to get a PhD in something, and then you have to apply to tenure-track faculty positions. (There are some full-time non-tenure-track instructor/lecturer positions, but they’re less numerous, and you still need a PhD first). That doesn’t mean that you can’t take time off before getting the PhD. But the trouble with academia is that once you start the PhD program, taking a detour makes it very difficult or impossible to get back in.

It sounds like you are a senior in high school; if that’s the case, then I think you are needlessly agonizing. Number one, you don’t have to select a major right away - you’ve got plenty of time. But number two, your major doesn’t limit your choices in career the way you seem to think it does. All of the careers you’ve listed (consulting, foreign service, military, politics, lawyer, finance, and business) can be done by someone with a social science degree. I majored in psychology and I have a six-figure job that is traditionally filled by psychology majors (albeit with graduate degrees).

The best thing to do is to narrow down to a broad field and then take some classes. It seems like you have already narrowed down to the social sciences, based upon your interests and the career inventory you took. So when you hit college, your next step is going to be to take some classes in college and see what you like and don’t like. Then, at some point, you have to pick something. Nothing will be perfect - there are some things about psychology I don’t like - but you’ll find something that has a good balance of the things you like and the things you don’t.

Additional notes: You can live abroad without being in the foreign service. Not all military jobs involve strategy (they hire accountants and therapists and even band members). You can work in government without being in politics. There are different types of lawyers - corporate law is very different from criminal law, and most attorney spend most of their time reading documents and trying to stay out of court. “Business” is a very broad term with lots of different parts to it and you don’t necessarily have to go to business school.

Also, working in technology doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to learn how to code or know much about hardware. I work at a household name technology company and I don’t do either - I work as a user experience researcher. (Run an Internet search on it!) Again, tech companies need accountants and managers and marketers and an entire infrastructure to make them work aside from engineers.

Most people’s careers are NOT that personally fulfilling. People may enjoy their job, they may like their coworkers, they may even look forward to work. But most people aren’t super passionate about what they do and nobody loves every aspect of their job. That’s why they call it work. You don’t have to find the perfect career; you just need to find something that makes you reasonable content and that allows you to live the lifestyle you want to live.