If you walked around a college campus for an hour and eavesdropped on the conversations of students, I bet you'd hear "oh, that person has an easy major" at least once. I think I have heard that statement a hundred times just this semester. It turns out that everyone seems to have their own rating scale for most of the majors offered by their college.
The scales I've heard about go something like this: if you're pre-med, engineering, business or computer science, you're a hard-working genius. I completely agree with this statement. But then, you have the "easy" majors: English, journalism, political science, communications, theater... and there are more that you can add and subtract depending on who you're speaking to. If you major in those "easy" subjects, your college is experience is somehow not as genuine and you haven't worked as hard. This is where I take issue with the concept.
First of all, easy is a relative thing. What's easy to you may not be easy to me and vice versa. I will finish this article in thirty minutes and I can finish a five-page paper in two hours because that's easy to me. However, if you ask me to solve a page of algebra problems, I hope you're willing to give me at least half a day. If you ask a math major to write a five-page paper they'll likely need that half a day, but they can solve those algebra problems in an hour. You can't nail down what's easy because there isn't anything that is easy for everyone.
One thing that will always cause trouble is trying to discuss someone's life when you haven't lived it. If you think political science is easy, have you majored in it? If the answer to that question is no, then how would you know? I am a Communications major and my days often consist of papers, debates and presentations. If I could write papers all day I probably would, but debating is not a natural strength for me and I've always been shy, so presentations are one of my least favorite things. I am learning to love it, but nothing about it is easy and it takes me out of my comfort zone every single day. That's why I can't help but get frustrated when someone who has never been a communications major tells me that what I'm doing is easy.
As children, I think we all dream about what we're going to do when we grow up. Some of us wanted to be famous actors, hard-hitting journalists, world-renowned doctors, stockbrokers, lawyers, business owners...the list goes on. I don't want someone to tell my future kids that their dreams are somehow less valid because what they want to do will be "easy" to major in.
Every major has that one class that's a killer. Every major has those professors who grade unbelievably meticulously. Every person has at least one thing that they struggle to do and will have to do in order to get their degree. Every person is an expert at something that another person can't even begin to do. Majors are impossible to rank, and the truth is that even though they're all certainly different, none of them are easy.
