One of the most frustrating things as a college student is hearing a student ask another student about their major and immediately criticizing them for choosing that major. For myself personally, I am a double major in political science and art history. However, I often do not tell people that I am an art history major because I frequently get "major shamed" when I do. Students immediately want to determine the difficulty of every possible major and label each major as "easy" or "hard". Frankly, I do not believe there is such thing as an "easy" major. I do understand that many of the STEM majors (biology, chemistry, engineering, etc.) are classified as hard majors, which is understandable considering the mass amount of studying you have to do to excel. However, other majors do require a considerable amount of studying, or require a mass amount of energy spent on a project or paper. For myself personally, if I am not spending hours writing a paper, then I am probably spending hours researching a topic in order to write a paper. And really, some things come easier to others. I know several biology majors who would find writing a 10-paged paper to be an impossible task, while for myself it is something I have become very skilled at. I struggle immensely with taking tests, yet others may have much less of a problem with it. Overall, college as a whole is a difficult task to take on and to declare any major as "easy" is not a honest evaluation.
Another factor that students use to determine whether a major is worthy or not is determining how "employable" a major is. I often hear students criticize some major because they don't think anyone can actually attain a job. First off, this is simply ignorant; all majors have some degree of employability. Sure, if you major in something that is more common perhaps the job market is a bit more scarce but every major has future job opportunities. And perhaps not every person is looking for your generic 9am-5pm job. Perhaps they are looking for something less traditional. I personally have little desire to sit in an office Monday through Friday for the means of earning a well-paying salary. If you are looking for a traditional office job, that is okay too, but I simply believe we should stop enforcing this idea that certain majors have little window for obtaining a job when that is not necessarily the case.
I believe that major shaming is the product of something almost students in every major deal with: fear and insecurity. I believe that students are being told more and more often how difficult it is to get hired and I think that is causing students to worry about their future careers. However, the road to any career is not an easy one and to put students down for their major and future life goals is just adding to this cycle of fear and insecurity. In the end, I am frankly fatigued from justifying my major to other. I am tired of hearing the passive aggressive comments and subtle jabs when I tell people that I am an art history major. Perhaps I will use my political science major and be employed in that field, but because I am extremely hard-working and driven, I know that I can major in anything and create the future style that I want.
