This is where I force the facts and not their interpretation. I would ask who do you look up to that you are for certain has it “all together” at this stage? I would ask her what the redeeming qualities of her friends are (and it wont likely be their gpa). My S23 is on his third major now I think.
I was one of those who switched my major in college as well. I was going to do genetics as I was fascinated by the science and treatment of genetic disorders. I then had someone ask me “have you met yourself?”, as in, I am such a social outgoing person that how could I ever survive in a lab? Truth is, I would have been miserable. So nursing it was!
One thing I’d question is “easier for who?” – I mean, engineering is a whole lot of math, but if you had asked me to do a major in something like my S22 is doing where they’re producing 10 page papers as a weekly assignment and longer ones for end of term, I’d have just curled up and died (or, um, never finished college, I guess, not actually perished). While my S22 would be miserable in a math-based major like engineering or physics.
The ability to write well and convey meaning to other people is hard. Just as math is hard. Different people choose different hard to learn to excel at.
I know you/she know this, but that’s so common. That was me my freshman year of college. I slayed in HS. I was a total academic rock star. Then when I got to college and realized that it was really hard and I wasn’t as successful and I had to work and I was a front row seat holder on the struggle bus it was just so hard. Not because I was struggling academically, but because I had always defined myself as “the smart one”, the one for whom school was easy and I just didn’t know who I was if I wasn’t the rock star student. It was a huge crisis for me to figure out who I was and what was special about me if it wasn’t my brain. It took me a while to work through all of that, and there was a lot of soul searching (and major switching - from Biology to Public Policy, from Med School to Law School). So tell her she’s not alone, that more people than she knows - current students, past students, future students, are all in the same place.
Shame on that advisor for making her feel crappy instead of just talking through her interests and trying to find what other major would be a better fit. Isn’t that what we pay advisors to do – advise?
I hope your daughter comes to understand that there are brilliant kids in every major, including business and humanities and social science fields. I have that overachiever kid who excelled at everything in high school. But that doesn’t mean she enjoys everything – she loves languages, but if she had to take an engineering or chemistry class, she would be miserable. And same with a business class – absolutely no interest.
That doesn’t make her less smart, regardless of the reputations of the various majors.
My son’s speech therapist went to my alma mater (Florida), and she was pre-med until she got to organic chemistry. Pretty common, lol! So she went looking for another path and found speech-language pathology, and she’s been successful and fulfilled in that field. (My daughter is now applying for SLP grad programs after majoring in something tangential, so that story comes to mind.)
Hope your kiddo finds the right thing – and gives herself permission to be happy doing whatever that is!
As someone who’s been a faculty advisor to students, I can imagine this happening, though I don’t know of it ever actually occurring.
I do know from experience, though, that some students take faculty being neutral and doing their jobs in a professional manner as disappointment. I don’t know if that’s the case here, but if your daughter was already experiencing some self-doubt about this, it could totally track.