I need suggestions on different majors. I was wondering what is your major and why did you choose it, or what are you planning to do with it? For people who have graduated what are you doing now? Thank you!
Chemical engineering. Because like half the students my age, biomedical engineering sounded ~super cool~. And then I realized I’d have to go to grad school.
I’m a college sophomore with a double major in CS and Math (and minors in music and dance).
I have always loved math. As a small child (like age 3 on), my mom would let me pick out one book from the bookstore whenever we went. It was more often than not a math workbook. I really like puzzles and logic just makes sense to me. As a freshman in high school, I took CS (it was actually a graduation requirement from the magnet school) and was really good at it. I would finish all the labs for the current unit before most of the class even finished the first two (there was usually around 15 labs a unit). It just made sense to me. I just had a knack for it; it’s just like puzzles and math to me (my dad’s also a software engineer, so I guess I got it from him).
My senior year of high school, I took a semester long math course in cryptography at my high school (I took multivariable calc the semester prior). I absolutely loved it! I’ve always loved codes and writing secret messages, so learning the math behind cryptography and all these historic methods was really fascinating for me. We also did digital cryptography as part of the course. It didn’t take long for me to realize that cryptography was what I wanted to do with my life (probably within the first month of the course). It kind of is the perfect combination for me. It’s a combination of math, CS, and puzzles. To give myself the best background possible, I decided to major in both math and CS. I really like both, so I didn’t want to really choose (you can approach cryptography with a background in either). It also isn’t hard for me to do both since I came in with 3 math courses and 1 CS course already taken care of and the majors overlap a little bit, leaving me with fewer requirements to meet than some other double majors might have.
I plan to get a government/federal job in cryptography, probably cryptanalysis, since I like decryption more than encryption (the private sector is more focused on encryption). I may do a Master’s in CS with a focus in computer security and cryptography depending on what happens when I get out of undergrad (some of the government agencies will train you while you work for them with what’s basically equivalent to a master’s in cryptography). I actually have an offer for an internship this summer (tentatively based on whether I can get a security clearance) in the field so fingers-crossed that goes well.
I’m a sophomore math major. It’s hard to explain why math appeals to me, but I guess it’s because I feel really happy after I’ve solved a math problem. I like puzzles, but I don’t like lab equipment or empirical data. The classes can be hard, but there’s not a lot of writing or projects that take forever.
When I started college, I planned to double major with computer science because it’s lucrative and supposedly relies on the same skills as math. I did well in the introductory class and then data structures, but last fall I tried to take digital design and networks (two classes, both required for the major) and ended up withdrawing from them because I couldn’t make any sense of them. I never officially declared the CS major, so I just gave up on the whole idea.
I hope to get a Ph.D. in math, but I don’t know what I would do after that. I like the idea of teaching, but I have social anxiety and I don’t know if I’d be very good at it. I’m planning to study for actuarial exams, but I don’t know if it will get me anywhere because most of the jobs are far away from where I live.
I might double major with philosophy, which isn’t directly related to any careers, but I like the classes and they might improve my crummy writing for cover letters.
I majored in psychology in college. I’ve always been fascinated with people and why they behave the way they do - what motivates people to buy certain things? how do people make decisions about what to say and do in social interactions? I started off as a sociology major, but that wasn’t what I was looking for - it was too focused on group interaction, and I was much more interested in the individual. I also liked the more empirical/scientific approach to psychological research. So I changed majors to psychology.
I changed my mind a lot about the career I wanted. I started college four years before the Great Recession, so that was back in the day when kids with any major would go to Wall Street and do finance or consulting and get Paid. (That’s still true to a smaller extent, but it’s not the same). Or you could just go to law school and make Bank. (That’s not true at all anymore.) The atmosphere was one of prosperity, and the advice given was to major in whatever you liked and it would all work out later. (I think that’s still mostly true, but it’s not the advice most people give college-bound students anymore.) This was also before the second dot-com resurgence, mind you.
Anyway.
So I started out thinking I wanted to go to law school - be a prosecuting attorney, and then later a judge. Then at some point I realized that if I were a prosecutor I might have to prosecute people I didn’t want to or put innocent people in prison, and I decided I didn’t like that idea. I considered going into marketing/market research, because I was always really fascinated with why people bought things and the decision-making process behind purchases. I considered management consulting, too, and chatted with some folks from big firms. I also liked mentoring high school students, so I decided I wanted to be a high school guidance counselor. Then I worked as a research assistant for a semester and got hooked on psychological research, so I decided I would get a PhD in psychology and become a researcher. I narrowed my focus down to social/health psychology, as I was interested in how social interaction and social cognition affects health behaviors.
OK, fast-forward, I did get a PhD in social/health psychology, and I did start doing research in that area, but then I got bored and decided to change careers. I love technology and geeky stuff and I’ve played video games my entire life. So now I work as a user experience researcher at Microsoft Xbox. UX researchers use psychological research methods to understand how people interact with technology and other experiences; I do that work for video games. Basically, my job is to understand what makes video games fun and then advise development teams on how to put that stuff in there.
And on the weekend, I volunteer as a writing tutor for a college prep program!
I’m a senior double majoring in linguistics and computer science.
I came into college as a linguistics major, purely out of interest. I’ve always thought language is fascinating, and am more interested in the structures of a language than with actually learning to speak a language. I told my Spanish teacher (who I had for three years) this and she suggested majoring in linguistics. I looked into it, it sounded like the perfect major for me, and I went for it.
Come my second quarter of college, I had had people telling me that I should take some classes that teach marketable skills for when I’d eventually be looking for jobs. One of those was programming, and I went ahead and took it because it was both useful and fulfilled some GE requirements. I didn’t realize that my school has a major and non-major intro to programming class, and ended up taking the class for CS majors on accident. I absolutely loved it to the point where I took additional classes in the major track, and after a couple quarters I realized that the linguistics major was light enough that I could fit in the CS double major and still graduate in 4 years. So I officially added it on between sophomore and junior year, and here I am now as a senior.
Over the past few years, I realized that as much as I love linguistics, I can’t really see myself working the same jobs many of my peers in that major were going for. I can very much see myself working in software development though, so that’s where I decided to focus my efforts. I’m currently signed on as a software engineer at a large tech company, set to start shortly after I graduate.