Disclaimer: If you are looking for professional advice in this article, your mission is futile, and kindly contact your dean/ major advisor/ college career development office. This is not an advice column, but an article about my personal journey through the murky waters of the daunting decision that is the college major selection, and what I learnt from it.
“College isn’t about narrowing down your options; it’s about expanding your horizons.” My Customs person claims that this is one of the best advice she has received in her life about college life. While I was too skeptical (and stressed) to appreciate this gem of an advice at the time, in retrospect, I can see the huge influence those words (unknowingly) have had in my college career.
I started out as a Biology major with a pre-med track, confident that becoming a doctor was my true calling in life. This was in part because of the fact that as a child, I’ve been schooled by my family to think of myself as a future doctor. Therefore, despite choosing to attend a liberal arts college, I had already decided my fate before I stepped onto the college campus. But promptly after arriving in Bryn Mawr, my aspirations of becoming a doctor received a massive blow: I learnt that as an international student I had a less than 1% chance of getting into a medical school in the US.
Weirdly enough, having my childhood aspirations shattered didn't really affect me at all. Was it possible that I never really wanted to be a doctor in the first place? With sophomore year fast approaching, I didn't know what I wanted to major in and for the first time in my life, I felt lost.
So how did I declare my major within one and a half months of the beginning of sophomore year? I expanded my horizons! I thought beyond the four years of college or the next five years after that when I get my first job and started seriously contemplating the idea that maybe, just maybe, my ENTIRE future (the 40/50+ years a regular human lives for after college) wasn't going to be decided by the one subject my 19-year-old self chose to focus on in college.
There are plenty of people on this planet who end up working in jobs that have no connection to what they majored in.That doesn't reduce the significance of a major,but shows that a college education helps us acquire certain skills regardless of our majors, such as perseverance, time management and the ability to employ our sharpened intellect to solve problems- skills that employers desire and know that most college graduates have.
Statistically speaking, certain majors are more likely to get you jobs than others, but I've seen a number of unemployed Business majors and well-employed Sociology majors to know that in terms of being successful in life, our majors don't play as big a role as we expect. It would be really sad to limit ourselves to pre-established mindset because we'll all move on from our entry-level jobs, but we won't have another chance to relive the coolest four years of our lives.
