“What’s your major going to be?” The number one question asked to all incoming college freshman. The most common response to whatever answer they give, “We’ll see if it’s the same during Christmas break.” For a really long time that statement really pissed me off, it wasn’t until I was three-quarters of my first semester of college that I finally got it.
Before I came to college. I wanted a major that had a high job rate after graduation that made bank, so naturally, I asked my dad. He told me things like accounting, technology services, and other business major. So I settled for marketing, and I started the business school. I hated it. Not only did I have to take university core, I also had to take business college core. If I wanted to be in marketing, why do I have to take accounting? So in November, I changed my major to English on the secondary education track, and now my sister laughs at me.
Everyone I tell my major to is disgusted by the fact I love reading books and writing, or they think I have the easiest major ever. My sister is the latter of the two. What’s crazy to me is the fact that she spends her time reading books about how to build something when she could be reading bomb love poetry from ancient Greece. It also floors me why someone would put themselves through the torture of a billion science classes just to go to a second school where they take a billion more science classes. Or why someone wants to take four semesters of calculus. Or why someone would take a bunch of arbitrary classes that I feel have no value to everyday life.
As college students, we need to stop judging each other based on our majors. In high school, we never judged someone based on their electives, what they chose to write their papers about, or what they do in their free time. Now we get to take all those the things we loved as kids, or did in high school and get spend four more just doing that (for the most part), and make a career out of it.
I will never understand why some of my friends spend three hours a day looking at cells and how they react to certain chemicals, but they will never understand why I spend the same amount of time discussing sentence structure and syntax, and how that affects a story. One major is no harder than the other. When other people say they can my major in their sleep, I say bring it on. I never said I could take like eight science classes, and I don’t want to. Then their eyes balloon up when I tell them that I have a 12-page story due next week.
To all college-bound seniors, study what you love. Not what you think will make you make they most money. Not what your parents what you to study. Don’t spend the next four years of your life studying accounting if you hate math, or English or History if you hate writing.
