Choosing a college major:
10 things you can do this summer to help you decide on your major before starting college
I know that the summer before college starts is supposed to be fun. I spent plenty of time hanging out with friends, hiking in the Vermont hills, and going to music festivals. What I didn’t do is think at all about my college major, and I seriously wish I had. It will help you honestly to take some time before you get overwhelmed by new classes, new friends, and dorm living, to have your “ducks in a row” concerning your college major. Because believe me, four years in college, will go by really fast, and the next thing you know you’ll have graduated with a BS in something you didn’t even realize you signed up for and maybe don’t even want to use in the real world. Here are 10 things you can do this summer to help you decide on a major before you start college.
1. Go to your college or university’s website or have them send you a catalog of all their major and minor offerings. Go through this list in detail and check any major or minor that may be a possibility. Star those that sound especially good. Cross out any majors that are definitely not of interest to you. Question mark the ones you’ve never heard of before. I didn’t take a sociology class until I was in my senior year, when I started saying to myself, “Wow, I didn’t know that this is what sociology is all about. This is way more interesting than psychology.” At that point it seemed like it was too late.
2. Take any that you starred, questioned or checked and put them in order of most interesting to least interesting. This is your scale, not someone else’s. And remember that it’s not your father who’s stuck with the business major you didn’t want in the first place, it’s you. So, try to narrow down the list according to your priority of interests. Take at least an hour to look up each potential subject in more detail. Find out what classes you would be taking. You want to be sure that your impression of what your major is all about is accurate. For the longest time, I was going around telling everyone I was majoring in psychiatry, when in fact it was psychology.
3. Don’t confine your search for your college major to your potential college or university. Ok, I know you may already be accepted and it might be a pain to have to transfer or to start over again, but it beats spending four years somewhere that doesn’t even offer the major of your choice, or a strong program in it. Check out the following link for a directory of all the subjects you can study: http://www.ohe.state.mn.us. If you find that your ideal college major is not offered at your school of choice, check out the National Center for Education Statistics interactive “College Navigator” at: http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator and it will help you find a school that does offer it.
4. Take a serious look at what potential careers you could enter with your top 5 majors of choice. If you already have a career path in mind, be sure to verify that your college path will lead you there. Not only, is it important for you to know which career you are interested in, but take some time to actually research the career.
5. Call and talk to 3 people in your area who are in a similar field (for every field of interest), or if you can’t find them, do an internet search and find someone somewhere who is working in a career that you are interested in. Ask them about their educational path, what their undergraduate major was, and if they needed further studies to enter into their career choice.