I'm one of the students who chose two majors instead of a major and a minor (crazy, I know), and I've spent a ton of time figuring out what works best for me. It wasn't always so easy, because when I first had to choose my major, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do.
After a few weeks with the catalog, I found design. After a couple quarters supplementing my design classes with English courses, I decided on a creative writing degree as well!
If you want a quicker path to your major, career services can help. Career services offers a class called career advising where you can discover more about the college major you would like in the future.
This course is only two credits, so you won't need to choose between the career development course and a GECR (General Education Course Requirement) class.
I visited one of these courses with Stan, the career services employee who made the seminars I discussed in previous blog posts.
Stan started the class by discussing the career services seminars available over the next two weeks. There was a seminar about going to grad school, one for law school, and a few on finding jobs or other opportunities after college.
How to choose a major; a quick experiment
The day I stopped by, Stan handed out a career investigation four panel that you can do today! I’m linking the PDF here so you can download and print it out.
If you don’t have a printer, grab a sheet of paper and draw a giant plus sign in the middle so you have four sections. You’ll want to write:
- What you like to do in the top left box
- What you’re good at in the top right
- What is important to you in the bottom left
- And what interests you that you have no experience with in the bottom right
I put in about six answers per section and I’ll go over a couple of mine to give you an idea of how to find a field of study further down in the post.
- For what I like to do, I wrote reading, writing, and using Photoshop
- For what I’m good at, I put in editing and design
- For what’s important to me, I put in friends, family, and location
- Finally, for what I’m interested in, I wrote carving and painting
What your results say
Finally, we went over the different degree options and talked about each choice. Stan discussed a few fields of study at EWU, and I’ll put an example of each one for reference:
- General sciences (geology)
- Health sciences (nursing)
- Engineering (mechanical engineering)
- Technology (computer science)
- Social sciences (psychology)
- Government (political science)
- Business (finance)
- Creative arts (creative writing)
- Design (visual communication and design)
- Education (secondary education)
After looking at my results and the fields Stan mentioned, I came up with editing, humanities, and design based off my interest in painting, carving, editing, and Photoshop. What kind of work will be best for you?
