Thank you for this perspective. All the talk about majors and things (“what does she want to major in?” “My kid is planning on majoring in x, and y schools and a school have great programs and internships for x”) sometimes makes me feel like she’s set up to be behind because she wants to explore. It is nice to hear a different angle on it.
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The field of study my kid likes is vast and normally the colleges have 3-4 majors related to that. So one of the big criteria for us while researching colleges was how easy or difficult it is to switch majors at that particular college. We made our list accordingly and made sure S26 gets to explore a bit before deciding on what he wants major in.
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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.
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Appreciating that because D26 is not interested in engineering or CS and not compelled toward anything obviously impacted, her being undecided does not feel as fraught. Combine that with her interest only in LACs/Women’s colleges (the appeal of which could be related to her staunchly undecided position), and it is certainly easier for her to be undecided. She could end up in math or econ., sciences seem less likely though not impossible as she has really liked a few science classes. Language and linguistics are a definite no. She is actually excellent in languages and got an award in one last year, but finds language class uninteresting even though her language class this year is fascinating to me, with multimedia units, historical and cultural perspectives, and really interesting projects.
In the end, she loves to learn and likes a lot of different things. I was similar and ended up in one of those highly interdisciplinary majors that folks now like to rail about being “useless majors.” 
I ended up doing pretty well for myself. Will be fun to see where she ends up.
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My S26 had been fairly undecided up until the last few months, when he decided to focus on philosophy and math, with a minor in studio arts. I think this is likely to evolve as he gets into his college classes, but sometimes I think of this spectrum of study as… “how to be undecided without being undecided” 
They cover off on the broadest interpretation of his interests, basically saying: I like to think about stuff and I like to make stuff. Which I think is great, though it has been interesting trying to thread the needle in his storytelling.
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Classically (back before professional education became the thing), I understand that a math/philosophy dual major was quite the thing to do. (Not sure if this was also true in the US.) My understanding (low - D19 is the philosophy student, not me) is that, for example, once you get deep into logic, there is definite overlap and complementarity with math.
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UGA early numbers came up in my newsfeed (not sure why!) - I know they were being discussed here -
EA Applications – 34,350+ Applicants– This is a 14% increase over last year. The breakdown of the applicants is roughly 13,780 GA Residents and 21,300+ Non-GA Residents.
Not sure if this is new info?:
This growth in applicants and focus on In-State enrollment has led us to split the EA decision timelines into two groups , with In-State EA students receiving a decision in late November and Out-of-State EA applicants receiving a decision in mid-December.
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Yes! There’s definitely overlap, and some colleges that S26 is looking at even offer a Philosophy/Math combo degree (Boston University, Northeastern, U Washington, and Yale). I didn’t know your D19 was a philosophy major. NYU is famous for philosophy and it is on S26’s list too. Can I DM you if you don’t mind—would love to hear more about what she thought.
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I don’t know if she’d characterize herself as a philosophy major as such - she went through Gallatin, but did a number of philosophy courses. (I took her and a friend out to dinner one night and they sat deep in a discussion around philosophy 
and I was - ok… there was some overlap with some of the stuff I had to do in my IR masters but it was definitely not my thing.) but sure, DM me and I can ask her! Math is not her thing though - she endured a macroeconomics course to satisfy her quantitative GE. Other than English, which they’re both good at, my 2 kids are chalk and cheese with their academic strengths and interests.
Don’t think I mentioned, but we are having double the application fun this season as D19 is applying to masters programs too. (Some of the ones she’s looking at have a philosophy component, but not all. She ultimately wants something where she can lean into a therapy qualification, and it seems there are a lot more ways to get there than I realized.)
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Ah, thank you. D26 did not apply to UGA, but it’s a strong state flagship so always a huge topic of discussion at her school. Despite their transparency, it’s still sometimes a mystery why one student is accepted in EA vs. another. We live in a suburb of ATL where all the schools are high-performing, and the general theory is that they can only accept so many applicants from this area – they also want to focus on more rural parts of the state.
So there are always a lot of disgruntled kids come late November when UGA in-state EA comes out.
Same! And I feel like I know how undergrad apps work, but I am totally out of my element with grad school apps.
I did help D22 with researching schools, and there is so much specific to the field she’s looking at – it even has its own common app! (Which, of course, 90% of the programs use but not all of them, to make it even more fun.)
CSS Profile question: We’ve been in the filling out CSS profile hell this morning. We got to the question that asked for the best estimate of how much the student expects to receive from their parents for 26-27 educational expenses and would love some thoughts on what to put there. Context below.
TLDR: How much should a full pay family seeking merit put down for this question if they already spending more on private high school than they plan to for some, but not all of the colleges on their list?
We will not be eligible for need based aid anywhere. Full stop. D26 will be in the running for merit aid at some schools on her list (some don’t offer any), and we do not want to write anything down that unnecessarily makes them say “well, we were going to offer her $50k in merit, but now that we see what her parents are planning to pay in the CSS, let’s knock it down to $30k cause that would cover the full cost difference.”
We currently spend more per year on her high school (a number that is in the CSS profile form already) than we’d plan to spend on some of the schools on her list after merit aid. However, for other schools on her list we would have to spend more than we currently do for her high school. So the true answer for how much she will receive from us is - it depends on where she decides to go and what they are offering!
Thoughts on what someone puts down for expected parent contribution in this situation? Putting in a number near zero seems unreasonable, though not an impossible outcome for her. A low end realistic number also feels tricky given our income and current education expenses for her. Would putting a number that low hurt her admissions chances for no merit schools that see we “expect” to spend that little? What we currently pay runs the risk of encouraging schools to give no more merit than the gap between that and full cost of attendance. Suggestions for what we should do?
Extra explanation for the skeptics of us applying for aid: If wondering why we are applying for financial aid if we know we are not eligible for any need based, there are three reasons. First, some of her schools say you can’t get institutional aid in subsequent years if you do not seek it when you first apply. So, we are applying as insurance against a job loss or other unforeseen catastrophic expense. Second, we’ve been told that some schools want a financial aid app for them to consider you for merit. Third, her college counselor told us absolutely to fill out FAFSA and CSS.
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May I ask what field?
I have nothing to do with the process other than offering to pay the application fees! She did show me her Google sheet of the various programs she’s interested in on FaceTime while explaining some of them to me, that’s it!
This is tricky. We’ll be in exactly the same position, and I don’t have any recollection of how we answered on the CSS when filling it out for D22.
I don’t think this question alone will determine merit aid, however – so with the information you’ve given, I think I would list a bit less than the amount you currently pay for high school tuition.
For instance, if the college cost is $80K, and you pay $30K for high school currently, I might list $25K expected parental contribution – I think that allows you to reasonably shoot your shot for merit but not be too disingenuous.
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Speech-language pathology. It’s a natural fit with her linguistics background, plus she has a deep interest in vocal anatomy/health from a singing perspective.
But even further, she’s watched her brother in speech therapy since he was 1, and even sat in on his sessions and shadowed his therapist when he was a senior in high school last year. He had/has a complicated case, and D22 has always found it a fascinating puzzle. She conducted years of her own informal “therapy” when both were younger, lol.
SLP programs are typically two years including summers, plus a praxis exam for licensing, clinicals and a supervised internship – but because she doesn’t have all the prerequisites, she’ll need a year of leveling courses. Unfortunately those differ by program, so she’d rather apply to three-year programs that roll the leveling courses into the first year.
So far she has narrowed it down to 18 such programs – I doubt she’ll apply to all of them, but it’s competitive to get a spot because cohorts are typically only around 25 to 30 students.
She has secured letters of rec from three professors and put together a resume. Here’s hoping she’s working on essays – because there are a lot of them, lol!
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Also on CSS profile: since we have to do it through the student’s account, doesn’t that mean our kid now has access to all of our financial information? Or am I doing it wrong? That seems a particularly invasive part of this.
This…
D26 did apply but it’s not a top choice due to relatively new engineering program . I do love their blog and appreciate numbers transparency!
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It’s funny, it felt like D26 was just barely engaged in the college application process until very recently. Now she is suddenly acting like the proverbial kid in the candy store, full of enthusiasm about various schools and wanting to add MORE schools to her list. I think part of it is that the college excitement level in her friend group has increased and they are all bouncing ideas off each other.
I’m glad to see her finally acting so excited about the process… it did not feel this way back in August, when I was pushing her to do the common app personal statement! 
(but I am awfully glad she did finish it back then! and fortunately she still likes it!)
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