Picking a Major

So I'm getting to the point in my schooling where I really need to get serious about choosing my major, and sticking to it. Ive been interested in so many, but eventually lose interest. Im always so apprehensive do to the fact that I dont want to choose a major and have to stick to that type of work for my life. So does anyone here have a job that is completely opposite to the type of major you chose in college? or, vice versa, anyone who's job exactly correlates to the major they chose? OR ANY OTHER ADVICE WILL BE GREATLY APPRECIATED!

Choose whatever you want. If you get bored, you can always go to medical or law school. If all else fails just choose biology. You can do research, consulting, hold a couple public offices, teach, sell pharmaceuticals, etc.

Option 1: choose something that you love to do. You'll have a great time learning about it, and with luck it will pay well. The downside is you'll destroy your love for it by turning it into work.

Option 2: choose something that makes a lot of money, and you happen to be good at. Work hard, get good grades and possibly pursue a graduate degree. With all that money, you can afford to do what you love...with all the cool toys nobody else can afford (10 barrel system anyone?).

Option 3: Quit school and start working at whatever industry you are interested in. Once you're sure that industry is for you, take night classes and finish your degree. With the experience and degree, you will be better equipped than any other recent graduate.

From my experience, employers seem to care more about grades and experience. My regret from college is not seeking out internships. Experience also helps you find out which field you might be interested in.

Your major doesn't really matter. More than half of the people with a college degree don't pursue a job within their major. Take classes that interest you work on learning as much as you can and you'll get the most out of college.

Agree with major not mattering to an extent, but a technical degree of some kind (ME, EE, CE) tends to impress people more than, say, an English degree.

My degrees are in Geography (Actually cartography), and Environmential Science.

I'm a wildland firefighter, so I guess my degrees are related to my job, I look at maps & I'm in the environment.

I started school as a biology major, got to Organic Chem & dropped out of the biology program, switched to Enviro, then switched again 1/2 way through my senior year to geography. It all worked out. I took something in school I was vaguely interested in, then found something I liked to do, while at an INTERNSHIP.

Do internships, they rock.

zac

Find something you can tolerate doing and that is fairly secure and has potential to make money. That way you can work to pay for your hobbies.
Medical imaging is a growing field with lots of offshoots and various hours. It also pays well. Do what you love doing as a hobby and not a career yet. A lot of it depends on your goals. Do you want to travel or do you want a job that keeps you home? Do you want the wife and kids thing or be single for awhile?

I majored in wildlife management and vertebrate zoology while minoring in chemistry. Now I am in vet school. I am pretty sure i will stick with veterinary medicine

+1 on your degree may not be in what you end up doing. For a couple examples, here are what some of my closest friends majored in, and what they are doing now:
-Russian: Manages a chain of hotels
-Mechanical engineering: Does financial statements on vehicles for the military
-Chemical engineering: manages crews in oil fields
- Electrical engineering: Sales rep for an engineering firm, travels the world trying to sell circut boards
-Biomedical sciences: manages a colony of primates for research purposes
-Sociology: keeps international students leagal as they attend colleges in the US.

As you can see, most people stayed in the same general field, but what they do is much different that what they actually went to school for. IMHO a science degree will get you much further than a liberal arts degree (unless you want to teach), and an engineering degree will get your the $$$$ (but you will need to be competitive).

my $0.02

..if you can't make A's in calculus, dif-e, organic and physical chem, and stat. thermo u are just a wuss

..Just kidding. It's been 35 years and I still have nightmares about school.

MrNate said:

Agree with major not mattering to an extent, but a technical degree of some kind (ME, EE, CE) tends to impress people more than, say, an English degree.

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Sadly, I am living proof of this.

That said, I majored in English (sports journalism concentration, whatever that is) and am working in said field.

I got a degree in geology now I'm in civil engineering they are somewhat related but not really. I don't think it matters what you pick as long as you have some good work experience.

jbford said:

..if you can't make A's in calculus, dif-e, organic and physical chem, and stat. thermo u are just a wuss

..Just kidding. It's been 35 years and I still have nightmares about school.

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calculus, organic, and p-chem were not that bad........
Of course, I only minored in chemistry, so I got to avoid dif-eq and thermo

I majored in criminology, because I didn't really care what I majored in at the time (just needed a degree in general). I wish now that I had at least majored in business. That seems like a degree that would be useful in most fields, no matter what they are (teamwork, time management, public speaking, organization, etc). My sister just graduated, and a few years ago was majoring in "liberal studies," whatever the heck that means. I talked her into getting her business degree, and she ended up really liking it. She's kind of a free spirit, and could never see herself working in the corporate world, but the contacts she made during her schooling got her a job with a great non-profit that she really enjoys.

Oh yeah, I forgot to add:

If you pick any type of engineering just because you don't know what major you want, you have some serious pain/fetish issues.

I went in to school knowing what I wanted to do (landscape architecture), so I can't relate too much. Everyone else I graduated with, however, started out in something different. It is very rare to find a landscape architect (or any other profession for that matter) who didn't start out in some other program and then switched.

ASLA.org for more info on Landscape Architecture. I love it. It's not just planting shrubs like most people think. I specialize in stormwater management and wetlands creation. I know of a lot of water management issues and wetland reclaimation in the Humbolt area. You might like it, you might not. Just throwing it out there.

benko said:

Oh yeah, I forgot to add:

If you pick any type of engineering just because you don't know what major you want, you have some serious pain/fetish issues.

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And stay away from science unless you really love it. Otherwise, it's just ridiculous hours for very little money and bad job prospects.

benko said:

Oh yeah, I forgot to add:

If you pick any type of engineering just because you don't know what major you want, you have some serious pain/fetish issues.

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That's some good advice right there .

There are some things where the degree is really important because it prepares you with a generalized knowledge for things you may encounter. If you don't want to bust your @ss while the other kids are partying stay far away from hard sciences, especially application science like engineering. Not saying other majors aren't "hard", but the level of commitment in most of the 'hard' sciences is much greater than 'soft' sciences.

What are you interested in? See I just kind of rolled out of bed one day and said "I am going to become an EE". I am not terribly interested in EE anymore, but I have a decent job that pays the bills and allows me to support my family and brew . If I ever decide to take more coursework it will probably be more theoretical physics. You can only have hindsight sometimes...but to go forward you have to make a decision otherwise you wallow.

Got a degree in Landscape Architecture and then a masters in City and Regional Planning and now I'm a planner for a county. But I'm looking to start working on an education PhD so that is a pretty big divergence. You just need to find the right thing for you, if you keep trying stuff and deciding you dont like it then you just havent found the right major.

My mother is a school teacher, so when I was growing up I always had to go to summer school, I was never allowed to just ride bikes and hang out and stuff like other kids do in the summer, it was always something... Math Camp, Science Camp, Accelerated Junior College, etc...

Well the result was, that by the time I graduated High School and got to University to enroll as a freshman, I already had enough credit hours to be a Sophomore and was just a few short of being a Junior. I had planned on just taking basic college stuff the first year while I decided what I wanted to do you know ?

So we had to talk to a guidance counselor before we registered for our classes, and I already had a lot of the basics covered, like Freshman Math, Freshman English, etc... stuff like that I already had credit for. So the guidance counselor told me with all those credits you're nearly a Junior you need to go ahead and declare a major.

Well I had no idea really what I wanted to do other than drink beer, get high, and chase freshman girls so I asked her what I could pick that would work with my credits and make a lot of money.

The advisor told me, I should declare a business major and then if I went full time and summer school, I could graduate in two years. That sounded good to me so I signed up.

Well my first two semesters I didn't do real well, I was just immature at the time to be taking Junior level college courses and I was more interested in smoking weed and shooting pool, so I think the first semester I passed math/college Calc One ( barely ) and made an A in something called "History and Criticism of Motion Picture". The second sememster I got a B in Calc II and failed just about everything else, mostly from just not going to class and not being mature about it.

So at the end of the year, my folks really laid down the law about it and I decided to drop out for a while and see what I wanted to do, after the summer I decided to move to Memphis and go to Memphis State and get in the commercial music department.

I did that for two years, but eventually I realized I wasn't going to be able to make a lot of money as a musician, so I started wanting to change my major. Well my mom told me that I should pick computers since I've always been a computer geek anyway, so I changed to Computer Science for a year and then changed to Management Information Systems after that for another year.

I was in my last semester there and only 6 hours from graduation, and I got hurt in a real bad car accident and couldn't do much of anything for a couple years after that, but eventually I decided to go back to school and finish. I had moved back to Alabama then because since I was hurt I couldn't work or live on my own, so I moved back home and enrolled at UAB.

Had to talk to a counsellor at UAB and she asked me about what I wanted to major in, and I told her basically - look I don't really care, but I've got about twice as many credits as a senior, just pick something that will get me out of here with a diploma as quickly as possible. So she says, well you've got to have 36 credits at least from UAB to graduate here, so you could do business and be done by next spring if you buckle down and get serious ( and she started me off on academic probabtion too ).

So I ended up back in a business program where I started, only 5 years later. I finally got my act together about going to class reliably, and made straight As from there on out, and actually had a pretty decent GPA when I did graduate with a B.S. in Management specializing in Marketing.

Well while I was back in school I had to support myself, and since I was always good in computers and programming I started doing temp work as a computer programmer in C/C++/VB and by the time I graduated I was pulling down 70K part time. This was back right at the beginning of the .com boom. Once I graduated I was making 6 figures easy, and the company I worked for would pay for you to go to school, so back to school at night and got my MBA.

Never did get around to looking for a job in Marketing and Management like I ended up majoring in though, the money in IT was just too good at the time to walk away from, and basically I've been doing that every since. Now I manage a small group in the IT department at a bank.

So you can see, out of all the things I went to school for at one time or another, it actually ended up being a hobby basically that decided what I eventually ended up doing for a career.

I'm going to second just about everything I heard here.
One of the most important items was brought up by zoebisch01. I'm an ME, I love the field and I enjoy what I do. However, through college it was pretty frustrating that most of my friends could reliably count on not having a Friday class. One friend, a finance major, only ever had one Friday class and he dropped that one.

Of course, you do have the last laugh:
The friend who never had a Friday class for an entire semester is unemployed.
I earned more in my internship than my friends who are english, art, and criminal justice majors will make starting their jobs and I make more now (almost one year into working for GM) than they will likely ever make with their current degrees.
My friend the art major (graduated) does landscaping/snow removal for a living. He's active in the art scene but the pay from selling anything is more of an occasional boon than a job.

benko said:

Oh yeah, I forgot to add:

If you pick any type of engineering just because you don't know what major you want, you have some serious pain/fetish issues.

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Well, you might know that you have an aptitude for engineering but not know exactly what you want to do with it... Better to get the paper in some kind of engineering discipline than to take the path of least resistance was my thought in that scenario.

There are a lot of jobs out there that require "technical aptitude" that aren't necessarily "in the field", and a technical degree goes a long way towards demonstrating that. Technical sales jobs, for example.

But yeah, going for an EE probably isn't the best idea for someone who has no aptitude or interest.

I was a civil engineering major an I thought it gave me a lot of options, although I never pursued a professional designation. My career arc is as follows:
Interned at Sprint in their Outside Plant Engineering basically checking line drawing and testing for dead pairs.
Co-oped at a Commercial roofing company doing field meaurements and drawings.
Roofing co offered me a Project Management/sales position after graduation.
Got sick of that and thought my engineering was going to waste so I left roofing co and went to a Local municipality doing traffic optimization and signal timing and co-ordination. IMO public worked sucked so after 6months I went back to the roofing co.
Left roofing co 2 years later to work for a commercail office deveolper doing ground up development and construction. Built a 4 building 500ksf office park. Saw the slow down coming so left 2 years ago.
Currently I work for a real estate investment advisor and manage due dilligence and construction projects on behalf of clients like pension funds that don't manage them directly themselves.

Pretty far from CE degree I have, but I use the skills almost everyday and it was the thought training that got me to where I am today.

My only regret is that I didn't minor in business. I will eventually need an MBA to avoid a glass ceiling.

I do much of the recruiting and applicant screening for my program where I work. When hiring new BA and MS applicants, we don't look for specific degrees as much as we look for concrete evidence of skills (some specific, some not so much), aptitude, and a personal drive to succeed.

Most resumes we reject out of hand because there is nothing special at all about them: A middling GPA, no relevant experience (bartending, dorm RA, acapella, etc., don't count), no references from faculty, and nothing else to show the person did anything more than simply attend classes and take tests.

We look for high GPA, significant senior projects or theses (with a significant writing component), participation in an honors program, internships with real experience, and credible references.

We've hired people with degrees in statistics, philosophy, economics, public health, mathematics, and psychology all to do basically the same job.

My point is, no matter what major you choose, you can open a lot of doors for yourself by taking college seriously and taking advantage of the opportunities there to make yourself stand out from the rest of the crowd.

Yeah see the thing is, the way I see it is you can flounder (and waste precious time) or you can just pick something and run with it. It's not terribly easy to change career paths but make the best out of what you are doing in the meantime and figure the rest out as you go along. Just don't take coursework you loathe. The courses I took were quite difficult, but at the same time they were intriguing. If I had hated it, I would never have continued. I have held so many different jobs in my life and I plan on doing other things in the future once the kids get older.

SWMBO gets first crack at more education though, she dropped college because she couldn't decide. Fortunately, it's worked out well for us, but tbh she still bounces around on "what she wants to be when she grows up". My point being is that if she had stuck with it, at least she could have had built up accreditation in a field. Most of that stuff is the basis for getting a degree in just about anything. And once you get a degree it is even easier to pick up in a similar field.

I have found first instincts are often quite a good gauge. When I first started into college (back when I graduated HS) I was undeclared. Out of the blue I picked Agricultural Engineering because my advisor told me I had to pick a major. Well I dropped out because I just didn't have direction (as a person) in my life at that time. Fast forward to when I was 24, I went to school with a wife and child in tow, with EE (and another degree in Physics) as a goal.

I don't really do much EE stuff, in fact it's a mix of ME, CompE, Computer Science, Physics, Data Analysis...I fall back on the EE for signal processing and such. One of my favorite things to do is growing food. Not saying I would have been happy as an Agricultural Engineer, all I am saying is that your 'loves' are already there. You can't go by the 'undiscovered country' in your life because there are infinite lifetimes of things you can do out there. You just have to find a way of whittling down to what will bring you satisfaction.

I think I need a beer after writing all that. I suspect you'll need a beer too when your done reading it

zoebisch01 said:

Yeah see the thing is, the way I see it is you can flounder (and waste precious time) or you can just pick something and run with it. It's not terribly easy to change career paths but make the best out of what you are doing in the meantime and figure the rest out as you go along. Just don't take coursework you loathe. The courses I took were quite difficult, but at the same time they were intriguing. If I had hated it, I would never have continued. I have held so many different jobs in my life and I plan on doing other things in the future once the kids get older.

SWMBO gets first crack at more education though, she dropped college because she couldn't decide. Fortunately, it's worked out well for us, but tbh she still bounces around on "what she wants to be when she grows up". My point being is that if she had stuck with it, at least she could have had built up accreditation in a field. Most of that stuff is the basis for getting a degree in just about anything. And once you get a degree it is even easier to pick up in a similar field.

I have found first instincts are often quite a good gauge. When I first started into college (back when I graduated HS) I was undeclared. Out of the blue I picked Agricultural Engineering because my advisor told me I had to pick a major. Well I dropped out because I just didn't have direction (as a person) in my life at that time. Fast forward to when I was 24, I went to school with a wife and child in tow, with EE (and another degree in Physics) as a goal.

I don't really do much EE stuff, in fact it's a mix of ME, CompE, Computer Science, Physics, Data Analysis...I fall back on the EE for signal processing and such. One of my favorite things to do is growing food. Not saying I would have been happy as an Agricultural Engineer, all I am saying is that your 'loves' are already there. You can't go by the 'undiscovered country' in your life because there are infinite lifetimes of things you can do out there. You just have to find a way of whittling down to what will bring you satisfaction.

I think I need a beer after writing all that. I suspect you'll need a beer too when your done reading it

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Dude, this seems to be the story of everyone's life lately. I think we all need a beer.

I was a philosophy major as an undergrad, as you can guess, that didn't get me very far except at parties where I sounded cool. After school I spent 5 years working odd jobs typically in the retail/warehouse industry. After those 5 years I finally figured out what I really wanted to do and went back to school in order to obtain the relevant education and I now have a job I really love.

Best advice: Pick a major you are interested in, then go and get a job, then re-evaluate, rinse, repeat.

BS - Engineering Physics
MBA - Strategic Planning

Job - 35 years of computer geeking

Wow. I really appreciate everyones feedback, it really is helping a lot. Definitely seeing a pattern that Major's sometimes matter and sometimes dont. This is far better input than Ive ever gotten from any advisor, or family members. Well to explain where I am I will tell you all my major idea's and rebuttals to them. I first picked Environmental Sciences and found that I dont want to asses environmental issues or advocate them professionally, I want to solve them. So then I switched gears leaning towards Environmental Engineering, however one day I was sitting in math class(which really is not a hard class due to its level) and I realized, NO! I cant do this, im not interested, I really dont like math. So there went ERE. However I still wanted to work towards developing ways to battle the worlds environmental issues, So I looked into Industrial Technologies, and decided I would minor is Appropriate Technology. This major seems to work, being that one day Ide like to build my own house, as well as build houses for friends and family's, help solve environmental issues, etc. (construction of houses is an art which is very prevalent in my mother's family but is dying off. My sister is a teacher, my brother's just about done with law school, and my other sister is working on her Phd) So anyway I was pretty stuck on Indust. Tech. but then realized, Im just going to be learning about technical sciences and what not. I have opinions, and Idea's and I want to take my time in college to further these more abstract thoughts and idea's, and take a more traditional scholarly path. So then I started thinking about a duo of Geography and Political Science. Majoring in one while minoring in the other. So as you can see, Im stuck between a degree which might make me more money, but not allow me to study certain things that im more interested in. Or study things of interest, while maybe missing out on a more successful degree and ultimately certain skills that I can only obtain while in college studying Indust. Tech. Im well aware of the fact that not only can I study world issues on my own, I can learn how to build a house in a more straight forward manner, Both outside of school. So that's where I am....