You Will Choose The Wrong Major
Well, most of you will.
For anyone entering college, congratulations! This is an exciting time in your life, and the next four years (ideally) will be a time of joy, strife, and perhaps most importantly, self-exploration. College will be a time where you understand more about yourself — who you are as a person, what kind of people you gravitate towards, and what sort of topics you are interested in. You will go through change, both voluntarily and involuntarily.
And in the process of change, you may find that your major — the major you were so excited for, the major you thought would be your life and career path, the major that you had spent so many years dreaming of — is not in fact as enjoyable as you thought it would have been.
Don’t worry. A lot of us choose the wrong major.
When I first entered Economics in 2016, I was incredibly proud of my choice. Supply and demand were my jam, Adam Smith was my idol. I found Economics to be incredibly interesting, and could envision a future studying and reading all about economics. I told everyone about how economics was the underlying principle to our society, and was intertwined with our concept of civilization as it stands today. I was enamored with the prospects that Economics could open, and sneered at anyone who questioned the merits of the field.
At that time, my biggest dream was to start a company (although I had failed horrendously at previous entrepreneurial ventures) and to also explore a career in Economics, researching behavioral economics. I had a folder on my laptop, with multiple research papers that I had found to be interesting from some of the world’s top economists. I sometimes wrote on my Medium, but it was just for fun and wasn’t really meant to become anything — I had only started writing a year earlier in an attempt to write essays for college applications in the US (spoiler alert: I failed).
Then, something changed.
Economics became a drag. When you sit in class every day for over 4 hours, what was once interesting can slowly lose its glamor. The study of scarcity no longer held my attention as it once did when I first entered college. I was starting to pay more attention to my phone than to my lecturers, and also was missing some classes due to my debating competitions and jobs.
Long story short, thanks to a fateful watch on a lonely train ride, I found a new love in movies and writing. After watching Baby Driver and reading through the whole screenplay, I set a new mission to start reviewing movies on my Instagram feed. I watched tons of movies and reviewed over 100 of them in the span of a year. I started to realize that maybe research and economics weren’t the only choice I had — that maybe there was something more to do with my life than what I had studied in college.
From that point on, I knew that I would not spend my life in the major I had chosen when I first entered college.
So why do many of us choose the wrong majors?
The short answer is: because most of us don’t know what we want. Look at it this way — if I asked you at the age of 18 what you wanted to work in for the rest of your life, do you think you could give me a definitive answer?
A lot of you probably say you could. But only a few of us, the very lucky few, actually know what we want to do for the rest of our lives.
For the majority of people, our choice of major is based on very asymmetrical information: high school does not equip us with enough knowledge to understand the difference between economics and management, or chemistry and chemical engineering. We aren’t given enough exposure to what each major will teach us, and even though we might have some picture of what studying a certain major will entail, the reality may be very different from what we expected. So we make our choices based on our very limited information, or from our parent’s expectations, or from hearing stories about successful people from a certain major. We commit to four years of studying a topic that realistically, we’re not even sure we’ll actually enjoy.
And so, many of us end up in the wrong major.
We enter college excited about the future, but slowly find out that accounting isn’t as interesting as we thought it may have been, or that engineering is way harder than we imagined, or that computer science doesn’t make you an instant Zuckerberg. Each of us has our own unique expectations when entering college, and it’s safe to say that a lot of those expectations are not fulfilled.
For those of you who actually enjoy your major, great! It’s fantastic to find what you love in college and to spend your time studying a topic that excites you.
But for the rest of us who aren’t so lucky, what now?
Firstly, you don’t have to stay where you are. Some choose to change majors midway through college, and even though that might sound bad, in the long run, an additional year or two really isn’t a huge cost to pay.
But the good news is that even without changing your major, you can still have a great experience in college. There are organizations, events, and extracurriculars that you can join, where you can find a supportive community and a ton of friends.
You can do personal projects and experiment on your own, creating whatever you want in your spare time. College gives you a lot of spare time, time you can use to try (almost literally) everything. Make videos, write dumb stories, dance with your friends, start a podcast.
The job market is particularly unforgiving right now, and is expected to be for the next few years. But jobs right now aren’t as rigid in demanding certain majors — meaning that even if you graduate from one major, it doesn’t mean you can’t get a job in an entirely different sector.
Just because you chose the wrong major, doesn’t mean it’s a bad major or a bad college experience. College is a lot more than just your classes. It’s a time for you to find who you like and what you like — even though what you find may not be the same interests as you expected in the beginning.
This post has been surprisingly long. But the point is: don’t come to college for the major. Don’t believe that once you’ve chosen one major, you are doomed to work in that field for the rest of your life.
You will meet tons of new people. You will have tons of new experiences. You will change. Don’t close yourself to it.
Embrace it.
