Of all the decisions a student has to make during their college career, the most important one would have to be deciding on a major, next to figuring out the cheapest way possible to eat enough calories per day, of course. The major you decide on is a decision that could potentially affect you for the rest of your life, or at least for the rest of your college career.
The difficulty is that with so many majors available, it becomes difficult to know if the major you finally decide on is actually the one that is right for you. You have time in college to try out a few different ones, but you obviously can’t try them all, so how do you really know if you chose the right one?
Honestly, I don’t think you ever can really know for sure. Personally, I have changed majors three times over the course of my college career and most of the time I still am not convinced that I have made the right decision. Most people only get one chance to go to college, so if you choose the wrong major you may regret it for the rest of your life. Sounds scary, but it just might be true.
When choosing a major, you have to also decide what you want to get out of the major, and this will hopefully help you decide what sort of path you might want to take. Some people have a passion for the arts or the humanities so they get a fine arts or liberal arts degree, other people are insanely smart and want to make money so they decide to study engineering, and others beyond that don’t really know what to do with their lives so they end up studying something like business.
Some people are too afraid to study something they are truly passionate about because they don’t think they will be able to make money. In short, some people are motivated by their passions, others want an intellectual challenge and others beyond that are mainly just paying attention to whatever degree they think will make them the most money. When choosing a major, you should try and take all of those things into account. Then, maybe you will be able to find the degree that is right for you.
You really only have until around junior year in most cases to finalize what major you want to pursue, which honestly does not give you all that much time to decide, especially if you are unsure and switch majors a few times. But hey, even if you decide that you picked the wrong major after graduating, you are by no means stuck in a box as far as what you can do for the rest of your life. More people end up working in jobs unrelated to their degree than those who do have jobs relating to what they studied, which is a nice safety net to have just in case you decide you hated every class you took in college. Still, try to find a major that you actually like.
For me, the hardest and most stressful part about college has not been the course material or the workload, although those have most certainly been stressful at times. Rather, the most stressful part for me has been constantly second guessing myself over the classes I am taking or the degree I have chosen, wondering if I am truly interested in the subject and whether I will be able to use the degree once I graduate. And even if I find a major that I don’t completely hate, is it really the very best fit for me? These are the questions I wish I had the answers to, but I don’t, even as a senior in college who has finally decided on a major.
It sounds depressing, but in some ways I feel even more lost and unsure about what I want to do with my life than when I started college as a freshman. I just hope that over time I will figure it out and be able to confidently say that I chose the major that was right for me.
