What’s a major and how do you choose one?
It isn’t easy figuring out what you want to do with your life or who you want to be when you’re 40 – let alone 25 – when you haven’t quite finished figuring out who you are at 17. Yet, that’s what most colleges and universities, and parents and future employers, want you to have done. At 17.
This is simply pulling out the rug before you’ve even had a chance to sit down and start thinking.
Now many experts argue, as do I, that the age of adulthood, the age you’re expected to make well thought out, complex decisions should be 25. Why? Because that’s when the prefrontal cortex, the bit of the brain that sits right behind your forehead and is sometimes known as the third eye, becomes fully developed or mature. Before that, during your teen years and your mid-twenties your brain is doing a lot of developing, which is why those years are so confusing but also, so exciting. Once the prefrontal cortex has developed fully, most people are able to calm down and control their emotions and to think clearly and logically.
That’s a much better time to start thinking about who and what you want to be and how you’re going to get there. But most of us don’t have the luxury of doing that. We have to decide now, when life feels like it’s at its most dramatic and nothing seems to make sense.
This is where choosing to study in the United States could give you a little bit more time to explore, to think and to decide. American colleges have a system of majors and minors. This means you can choose to study or ‘concentrate’ on a subject in which you can imagine a career or in which you have a talent or interest while also studying an eclectic variety of other subjects for a richer, more interesting undergraduate experience. This could be Maths or Law or Computer Science or Fine Arts. That’s your major. You can also choose to study another subject simply because you want to or because it complements your major. You could do Math and Music or Fine Arts and History or Biology and Human Rights or Law and Linguistics or Cognitive Science and Philosophy or … or … you get the picture. That second one would be your minor. You don’t have to have a minor and you could even do a double major, but that’s a decision you’d take after lots of research, discussions and logical thinking.
US undergraduate degrees are four year programs; first and second year students are known as freshmen (not freshpeople) and sophomores (which comes from the Greek words for wise and moron!) while third and fourth year students are juniors and seniors. What’s more important to know is that you don’t have to decide (also known as declaring or moderating depending on the school you’re at) your major until the end of your sophomore year, by which time you are hopefully a bit wiser than you were as a freshman. Those first two years you explore by taking classes across both the Sciences and the Humanities – most schools have set requirements over how many you have to take across various domains, distributions, disciplines (different schools have different names for this, just to add some excitement – or confusion – in your life) that will normally include courses that are writing intensive, quantitative, interdisciplinary and so on. You might ask why as indeed you should. I like the way Princeton University explains it:
Exposure to a variety of academic disciplines not only helps us identify the right intellectual tools for the task at hand, but also deepens our respect for the variety of ways human beings seek to understand our world. The general education requirements offer students the chance to develop both intellectual rigor and humility by considering the possibilities and limitations of all forms of academic inquiry.
Princeton University, General Education Requirements
In the meantime, if you’re still not sure exactly how majors and minors work or how you’d go about choosing or what else you should be thinking about if you’re contemplating college in the USA, talk to me. Book a call or send me your questions.
