I have several thoughts on this. First, I think it’s ridiculous that we expect 17-year-olds to know what they want to major in, and then what they want to do with said major for the rest of their lives. I mean, come on. That’s what college should be for, to figure that out.
Unfortunately, it seems like the more selective the school, the more they expect you to have it all figured out before applying. How many times have we heard that the application should tell a cohesive story, that the classes and extracurriculars and essays and everything else should all focus on the THING the student is all about – usually the intended major?
It’s a crazy amount of pressure to put on a high school kid.
That said, most schools have “impacted” majors – the ones that restrict entry to certain majors so you don’t later have the option of switching into them. That’s true of computer science at Georgia Tech, and of architecture and music at Rice. At Clemson, it includes a bunch like communication, landscape architecture, health science, construction science and several others. Nursing is like that at many schools, too.
So that is the biggest concern with applying undecided, I think – the fear that you can’t later get into a restricted major. I guess the only way to resolve that is to go through a list of each school’s restricted majors and eliminate, and then go ahead and apply for one if there’s even minimal interest?
D26 is doing that at Miami Ohio – she’s interested in the Emerging Technology and Business program. The main major is called just Emerging Technology and Business, and then there is a subset of that called Games and Simulation. The games subset is much harder to get into – it only takes 50 students – and requires creating a video for the application. She’s not totally sure she wants to do it, but she was told that if she has any interest at all, to go ahead and apply for it, then if she changes her mind, it’s easy enough to switch to emerging tech – but it will be impossible to switch into games later.
The choice of major with her has been interesting – she started off thinking a studio art degree, then realized she really didn’t want to paint and do ceramics and take art history and all of that. She wants to do cool things with design and technology, and bonus if it’s video-game related. She loves digital storytelling and narrative design in games, plus UX/UI in general.
Or at least, she thinks she does. She’s definitely artsy. She’s never coded, but math comes pretty easily to her, and she’s not opposed to learning. Anyhow, this combo of art and tech is still kind of a niche major, and it’s called something different and looks a little different at each school. It’s been quite the journey to find all the programs that might possibly interest her, and then filter them based on her other preferences in a college.
My D22 was definitely unsure what she wanted to study when she was in high school. But she was interested in applying to mostly selective schools, and we were advised that she really needed to choose a major and “craft” a cohesive story for her application, even if she changed that major after getting to college. So we sat down summer before junior year and just did process of elimination on every type of career we could think of. And then, we talked about all the subjects at school and what she’d always loved and gravitated toward.
For her, that was Latin (huge Latin nerd) and languages in general. She loved grammar. So she settled on linguistics as a major, and her whole application focused on that theme, pulling in her chorus/theatre experience (and how she loved debating the pronunciation of church Latin in songs vs. classical Latin in literature), her summer studying Latin at the governor’s honors program, her year-long research on the effect of grapheme-color synesthesia on learning English as a second language, etc. Her personal statement was about being cast as the narrator in several plays, starting in kindergarten, and what it said about her life and her love of storytelling. It was all genuine, but it was also a whole packaged thing.
(D26 – although she kind of has a sense of what she wants to study – does not have quite so polished an application, although I’d say her theme is “creativity.” But the schools she’s targeting are not nearly as selective.)
Anyhow. Tl;dr – totally agree that undecided should be fine when applying, but it definitely depends on the school.