What should I major in?

juillet
Tue, 06 Oct 2015 07:53:28 +0000

Man, I came here to say what @brantly said.

Your major doesn’t make money. Your job and your career is what makes you money. I read a story about an English major who learned how to code and went to be a software engineer for some big Silicon Valley company; I’m sure she’s making a lot of money. I’m equally sure that somewhere out there there’s an engineering major who discovered he hated it and is working as a social worker or a math teacher. (Actually, I know that engineering major: he was my high school calculus teacher.)

Your major doesn’t determine your life’s course; it’s really something that you study for 4-6 years to give you a little bit of depth and a jump-start into something. But beyond that, most jobs are pretty major-free. Even technical jobs like software development or data science don’t really care about your major so much as they care about your skills: a philosophy major who knows how to code, knows machine learning and knows a lot of math and stats can go into data science regardless of how he learned it.

Often your major may pan out in ways you never expected; you don’t have to think about a straight line between related jobs. I know some folks who are doing things that aren’t related to their undergrad majors at all; I know some who are doing things that are only tangentially related to their undergrad major. The other thing is that there’s a whole world of careers out there that you probably don’t know about. I had no idea my career existed in college. One of the careers you have might not even exist yet - think of all the people working in social media!

There are some fields that require pre-professional college-level preparation - like engineering or nursing. But you’d know if you wanted to do one of those. And even those aren’t closed to you later if you’re willing to return to school to get qualified to do them.

So pick something you’re interested in, and spend some time developing skills that are broadly useful across fields (writing, presentation, coding, research, statistics, etc.)