We’ve heard from tons of students that choosing a major is one of the most stressful and difficult decisions of their college career. It is a big decision that shouldn’t be taken lightly, but we are here to help take some of the stress off of the importance of your choice. Life is stressful enough, so let’s make this decision easy!
While your major may help prepare you for your desired career, and some majors lead to specific careers in a more linear fashion, we have some good news: Your major doesn’t determine your career – and that’s a good thing!
What does that mean for you? A couple of things:
1. You should put care and thought into choosing your major, but don’t let it be a major stressor in your life (pun intended).
We have several awesome tools at our disposal to help you determine great careers based on your interests and abilities, and these choices often lead to a number of majors and fields of study that will prepare you for the career you’d like to pursue. Even if you’re not sure exactly what career path you’d like to take, an exploratory conversation, some research, and an assessment like YouScience can help us figure out even a more broad area of study that you will enjoy.
2. Seeking out experiences that will help you gain the skills to succeed in the career you desire will help you get there, regardless of the major you choose.
Most majors don’t lead directly into a linear career path, which means that you can actually decide on a career later on, and actually pursue it, if you focus on gaining the right skills and experiences to help you succeed.
Yes, even if you decide to pursue a medical career with an arts major, you can still gain admission to medical school, provided that you’ve met the appropriate prerequisite coursework and requirements.
Or, let’s say, that you’re a chemistry major and you decide that you’d like to pursue a career in journalism. This can still be completely possible if you join your school paper to gain experience as a reporter, and maybe pursue an internship or two at local newspapers, magazines, and television stations.
3. If you are more than half-way through your degree and you change your mind about the career you want to have, you likely don’t need to scramble to find a new major.
Changing your major late in the game, especially after you’ve completed 45-60 credits, can be costly, in terms of both time and money. If you are considering making a change because you’ve decided that you’d like to pursue a different career than you had originally planned, it might not be necessary to officially make the switch. If, however, you find that you are not interested in or succeeding through your coursework, that is a different story, and would lead to a different conversation.
While choosing a major shouldn’t be trivialized, we are here to promise you that whatever major you choose, it’s going to be okay. Wonderful doors will open to fulfilling career opportunities if you cultivate strong skills through the experiences that you choose to be a part of.
We can help you learn about your interests, skills, and careers that would be a great fit – and help you design a path to your desired career that works for you, wherever you are in the process. Give us a call today to make an appointment with our career specialist!
