<p>A good number of these threads consider selecting a major as path to a job. Of course, there's nothing wrong with that. However, there's another way to think about the decision of selecting a major and that is in pursuit of a professional career. Obviously, you need to be employed to be able to claim to be a professional. Thus, you need a job either way you look at it. However, selecting a major as a first step in the pursuit of a career involves multiple objectives, including but not limited to maximizing the probability of post-college employment.</p>
<p>If I am selecting a major to get a job, then it can be viewed as a single-objective decision problem (i.e., maximize probability of employment). In that case, I will look at the job market (basically the equivalent of the classified section of the newsapaper) and select a major in an academic program where there are a lot of jobs. Fine, that makes sense. In fact, you should expect that many others will behave the same way because they have access to the same information and have the same objective. This shift will reduce future probability of employment. Also, the job market today is not necessarily the job market of tomorrow. No major is a guarantee to a job.</p>
<p>In contrast, I could select a major in pursuit of a career. This is a multiple-objective decision problem. Maximizing probability of employement is certainly one objective; other objectives are personal and will differ, but could include maximizing creative challenge, maximizing the impact of my work, achieving an income sufficient for my desired quality of life. In turn, these will depend on matching my interests to my capabilities and beginning to understand how my career will relate to other aspects of my life. In multiple objective problems there are tradeoffs, and the decision maker (you) need to decide how much to weight the various objectives - what are the relative importance of each objective.</p>
<p>The threads on this list seem to focus almost exclusively on selecting a major to get a job. I think that is a disservice to the students who are faced with the decision. </p>
<p>Those who truly have the interest and talent for science should consider that career choice in light of their many goals in life, and not rule it out simply because of the gloom and doom that you tend read on these threads.</p>