CHOOSING AND USING YOUR MAJOR

Compliments of Bell Atlantic Information Systems

A. SEPARATING MYTH FROM REALITY

THE MAJOR MYTH:

Most college students think a corresponding academic major exists for each specific career field, and it's impossible to enter most career fields unless they choose that matching major for undergraduate study. This is not true!

THE REALITIES:

The relationship of college majors to career fields varies.  Obviously, some career choices dictate that you choose a specific undergraduate major. If you want to be a nurse, you must major in nursing. Engineers major in engineering. Architects major in architecture. There is no other way to be certified as a nurse, engineer, or architect. However, most career fields don't require a specific major, and people with specific majors don't have to use them in ways most commonly expected.

Most college majors don't offer specific preparation for a single type of work. Instead, they educate you and help
(along with your activities, work, etc.) make up the personal package that can enable you to become anything you
want to be. Majors don't limit you to one type of work. In a recent survey of 3,000 UVA Arts and Sciences alumni, 70% of the respondents indicated that there is little connection between their undergraduate major and current career. For example, if you major in nursing, history, engineering, English, or many other majors, you might nevertheless choose to become a bank manager, sales representative, career counselor, production manager, or pursue a number of other career fields. Your awareness of the relationship between career fields and college majors can play a vital part in your choice of academic major, minor, and elective courses.

Choice of a major is only one factor in determining your future job prospects and career path. Your grades, the
electives you choose, and the skills you acquire through your  coursework often tell employers more about what you have to offer them than does your major. Furthermore, other factors such as your personal traits, your goals, your experiences (jobs, extracurricular activities, volunteer work, internships, EXTERNships), and your knowledge of and demonstrated interest in a career field play a large part in determining an employer's response to you. 


B. LIBERAL ARTS MAJORS AND CAREERS

It is important to understand that your values may be independent of your career considerations. In addition, there are definite benefits of a liberal arts education. Many of us come to college seeking to expand our awareness of all that makes us human. Getting a job is important, but it is only part of what we hope to get from our education. A liberal arts education can offer the following benefits:

A personalized education. We all have individual educational needs. Some of us want to learn more about how we relate to other people; others hope to learn to enjoy the arts and the aesthetic side of life through cultural enrichment; some see college as a way to get away from parents and learn to live independently. All such needs are perfectly legitimate reasons  for going to college. The flexibility of the liberal arts curriculum allows both room and time for such needs to be met. 

Broadened global view. Students frequently want to broaden their view of the world. Course work in philosophy and the
humanities may help us to explore our values. Courses in the social sciences may broaden our understanding of people. The arts, humanities, and social sciences may broaden our view of cultural heritage. Such cultural explorations may even facilitate our career choice.

Generalist education. Many of us are by nature generalists.   We want to "dabble," are easily bored, and enjoy synthesizing
diverse ideas and interests. The liberal arts curriculum is geared to the development of generalists. Indeed, it was founded on the notion that the generalist is the desired end product of education.

Liberal arts skills. Along with some of the above outcomes, liberal arts courses do develop important skills that can be
transferred into the world of work. Liberal arts students have the opportunity to develop broad skills in communication,
problem-solving, working with people, and cross-cultural understanding. Many of these skills are the same ones that
prospective employers have identified as skills they value and see as potentially relevant to almost any career. These include skills in oral and written communication, social scientific research methods, visual design and media production, and computer knowledge.   You might plan to take certain courses to strengthen a certain set of skills that you would like to market to an employer. 

C. GOING BEYOND YOUR MAJOR

Liberal arts majors, in particular, need to offer employers more than their orientation as a generalist and their broadly based transferrable skills. They need to develop entry-level marketability and to demonstrate career field interest. Before they can become bank presidents, they must first get some job experience within the bank. In most cases a college major alone is not sufficient for getting a job. The increased number of college graduates has produced more competition in the job market.  Usually, the easiest way to land that first job is to have a skill that is immediately useful to the employer. There are many ways to develop such skills while you are becoming educated: summer or part time work, intern/EXTERNships, volunteer experience, extracurricular activities, elective courses, and the like. Once in the field of your choice, you, as a well educated person, can build your own career and become a generalist, but careful planning to get your foot in the door is required. To become competitive in today's market, you need the experience and competencies related to your chosen fields.

Internships, EXTERNships, part-time jobs, and extracurricular activities provide numerous opportunities for you to gain experience and develop the competencies required by your career choices. As a liberal arts student, you are faced with the challenging task of discovering better ways to compete in the employment market, increasing your awareness of employment options and creating more links between your undergraduate experience and the world of work. Creating these
links requires flexibility, imagination, and divergent thinking.   This can further be accomplished by looking for a combination of courses and activities that will be rewarding - beginning the exploratory process early enough to test perceptions of yourself against realities, avoiding premature commitments or single-minded concentration on one area of knowledge to the exclusion of other areas.

D. MAKING YOUR LIBERAL ARTS DEGREE MARKETABLE

There are several factors that will determine to what extent your liberal arts degree is an advantage or disadvantage to you when you enter the job market.

     1. The first factor is where you go to school. Degrees from certain very prestigious liberal arts schools are still highly marketable.  Alumni of such institutions provide excellent contacts and will often go out of their way to create opportunities. OCPP has developed UVA CONNECT, an alumni network of CLAS graduates who have volunteered to provide students with information and advice about their career paths, their employers, and their geographic locations.
Students can get more information about this program in the OCPP library.

    2. The second factor is your career plan. The liberal arts provide an excellent background for many professional options. Those who plan to enter a professional field where a graduate degree is required often find an undergraduate program in liberal arts allows them to develop perspective and to mature as a person before they specialize. Professional careers where this is possible and desirable include psychology, law, business, and medicine. However, pre-planning should occur if you are considering these options because certain undergraduate courses may be prerequisites for
graduate school or, if not required, may make graduate school less difficult. The OCPP library has extensive resources on choosing and applying to graduate schools. You may also consult with the preprofessional staff in OCPP if you plan to attend law or medical school.

    3. The third factor is the extent to which you supplement your degree with work experience and elective coursework to support your career goals. There are numerous examples of liberal arts students who marketed their degrees because they could offer relevant work experiences and demonstrated interest in their fields. An internship in personnel or marketing, part-time work in banking and retailing, and volunteer experience in the helping professions are examples. The OCPP library has directories and listings of internships, volunteer opportunities and summer jobs. OCPP also has an EXTERN program which provides 2nd, 3rd, and 4th year students with the opportunity to observe an employer of their choice during
University vacation weeks in January and Spring Break, as well as any week in the summer.

     4. Whether or not you acquire technical skills to supplement your liberal arts education is another factor. A liberal arts student is one thing; a liberal arts student with a minor or a concentration in computer science or other technical expertise is quite another.   There is no reason for liberal arts students to be technically illiterate unless they choose to be so. The broad perspective of a liberal arts education is powerful and highly marketable when used in combination with some solid technical skills.

If you happen to love electrical engineering, you are fortunate, but many options exist for those who do not see themselves as technical specialists. Forcing yourself into a technical field that you aren't suited for will only lead to unhappiness and probably failure. Don't confuse yourself by thinking you have to attain high-level skills in technical areas before you can communicate with specialists in the field. You don't have to major in engineering, computer science, or finance. A course in each area may suffice.   Several courses or a minor is better yet, but not essential.

E. ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

Many students don't really know what they want out of life.  College students always want to start a session with their advisor with the question, "What should I major in?" or "What can I do with a major in so-and-so?" But good advisors know that you can't really start with those questions. You have to put them aside until you first find out about "What do I want to be? What do I really want out of my life? What kind of person am I, so far? Where do I really want to go with myself?"

Perhaps the primary reason first-year students choose the wrong major is that so many concentrate exclusively on studying for a specific "job," as if each job required a certain major. This orientation is especially powerful among students during uncertain economic times and has been fostered by the attitudes of parents, employers, government officials, and educators. Additionally, students often choose their majors unwisely because they lack sufficient information about themselves, potential courses of study, jobs and the job market, and above all about how to combine their education with their career goals.

Counseling & Testing Services can help you focus on the broader career planning question of "What do I want to do?" This can lead you to explore yourself and career fields that provide opportunities for you to achieve what you want, not only from your college major, but from life as well.  In attempting to answer what you want to do, you'll find that the choice of an academic major takes on new meaning. You are no longer concerned with the prescribed route of specific majors. The search becomes one of finding the best academic program for your chosen career goals.

We can compare this process to map-making. You actually begin to chart your college career, using your career goals as the basis for decisions about academic major, minor, elective courses, internships, vacation jobs, leadership commitments, and extracurricular activities. Instead of looking at an academic major as a map, view the choice of academic major as one part of the map you are making in order to reach your chosen career goal. Don't limit yourself by starting with the question "What can I do with my major?" and then after reading about what other people with the same major are doing to earn money, decide without further thought, to look for the same kind of job when you graduate. How many times have you heard someone say, "I'm majoring in English so I guess I'll teach"? If questioned further, this person might not like anything
about teaching except the subject matter. Obviously, this person chose to follow someone else's map.

F. STRATEGIES FOR CHOOSING A MAJOR

With your personal "map" drawn to your specifications, you will probably find that one of the following four strategies for choosing a major will apply to you:

* One option is to major in something with a high potential for developing you as a human being. Because most of us choose liberal arts hoping that we will profit as human beings, it makes sense to emphasize this factor. "What can this major contribute to my needs and development as a person? Will it offer me an opportunity to sort out my values or gain a broader view of the world? Will it help me to understand things I'm curious about in terms of people or society in general?" The majority of UVA CLAS alumni surveyed advised students to major in a field that was interesting to them. Adopting this strategy need not leave you in an unmarketable position as a graduating student if you combine it with the third or fourth strategy below.

* A second option is to consider a major that provides a good background for the professional areas you hope to enter in
graduate school. For example, history provides a foundation for graduate study in law, library science, and urban planning.
Sociology or psychology may prepare you for a graduate program in social work. This approach is fine as long as you can count on being accepted into graduate school. If you can't, undergraduate  degrees in history, sociology, and psychology are not marketable in and of themselves. For that reason many graduates are electing the third option.

* A third strategy is to develop a marketable combination of liberal arts major and a technical major, minor or coursework concentration. Major or minor in some field you love without worrying about career practicalities. Then carry a second major or minor that is marketable and provides a key to get you hired. You need not love the second major, but it should be
something you feel you can do reasonably well in and would enjoy doing for a few years. It never makes sense to go into a field for which you know you are unsuited. Usually there is a variety of marketable majors available to complement the field you have chosen.   Some common marketable combinations are psychology and marketing; economics and accounting; and English and computer science. 

There are advantages and disadvantages to double majoring. On the positive side, you may find that you are able to get into
classes more readily. Having a double major may communicate academic perseverance to employers. However, in reality having a double major rarely strengthens your candidacy for jobs. You certainly can communicate your second concentration to employers without formally declaring a second major. Remember that you are doubling your requirements which allows you less curriculum flexibility, less opportunity to take career-related electives, and perhaps less time to explore experiential options. 

* A fourth option is to more or less downplay the issue of choosing a major. Focus on selecting courses that develop specific skills. This is often an excellent option for persons with reasonably clear career goals. For example, a person  wanting to pursue a career in public relations in a school with no such major would want to put together a program that included coursework in English (writing), Business (labor negotiations and advertising), Speech (public speaking) and other departments. What you major in will be of no concern to employers; the fact that you have taken courses in all areas related to public relations will. 

G. EVALUATING THE MAJORS/CAREERS YOU ARE CONSIDERING

New first-year students need adequate information about all that a college has to offer, and they need to know the requirements of the different programs of study. Just reading the catalog isn't enough, and for the majority, exposure to a few subjects in high school simply won't serve to introduce or to interpret the college curriculum, which is a smorgasbord  of specialization (and, often, of obscurity) by comparison. Before you can make a realistic decision about your major, you must take an informed look at all the possibilities.

The questions below should be considered when you evaluate a major. Departmental advisors and departmental handouts for prospective majors available through departmental offices should be the most help with any questions that are not answered in the course catalogue.

Do you know:
* What preparatory courses are required?
* What's the minimum gradepoint average for acceptance into the major? (if applicable)
* How many courses in the major are required?
* Are the course offerings sequential or non-sequential?
* If there is a required course, or courses, could they pose scheduling difficulties?
* Are the exams finite reasoning or essays?
* How much freedom is there for elective courses, for flexibility and creativity, and individual projects?
* How many credits are needed in order to graduate in that major?
* Who is the departmental advisor?
* What are graduates of the department doing now?

Go visit the departments you are considering and ask for any information packets that they might have for prospective majors.  Talk with current students who have selected the major you are considering and perhaps sit in on a few classes to help you determine what a particular major may entail.

H. YOUR NEXT STEPS

By following the recommendations provided here and working hard to answer the right questions about yourself, it will be much easier for you to plan your college curriculum so that you can study what you enjoy learning about, what you can do successfully, and what will serve as groundwork for the future you want for yourself.

Counseling and Testing Services has two computerized career guidance programs, SIGI-PLUS and CHOICES, that will help you think through your interests, values, and skills in relation to careers. The career library has a wide range of publications containing information about career fields, the job market, and the relationship between majors and careers. Career counselors are available by appointment to direct you to use this information to set some career and academic goals for yourself. If you have specific questions about academic requirements and specific course offerings, see your academic dean or departmental advisor.