Misconceptions About College Majors: Five Rules that All Students Should Know

Choosing a major is one of the largest decisions that the students make during the four years, so it is important to know the five myths that can cause them to pick wrong majors.

Myth 1: What you major determines what you will do for the rest of you life.

Many people believe that college majors decide the future jobs for the rest of the life. This is false. There are constantly newly introduced jobs into the market, and most people who venture into this new market do not hold a degree on them. Take blogging for instance. Before Blogger and Wordpress were popular, no one really knew about the job title called "blogger." Furthermore, people who blog regularly as their main occupation hold degrees in various college majors, starting from English to Music. It is no surprise that many of the people who became full-time bloggers did not major in computer science, and simply, learned as they went.

Myth 2: Since you hate to write, you can just major on math or something other than English.

Every major requires a student to master the ability to write concisely and clearly. Even mathematics mandates the students to write well and ask them to present a thoroughly-researched paper on their junior or senior year as the capstone. It is true that for students in natural sciences, the style of writing in lab reports is a bit different from critical analyses of literature in English courses. But, the common ground is that regardless of the majors, students must be able to express themselves in written form.

Myth 3: You like learning about this major, but since there's another major that pays much better, that's the one you should major.

Choose what you love to do. There is no point in receiving a degree on something that you do not enjoy. There are people who commit suicides even after publishing some renowned articles or receiving doctoral degrees in their fields. Money should be a concern when choosing a major, but it should not be the deciding factor. If you love Art, major in Art. But, if you are afraid that simply majoring in Art may not give you a solid job in the future, consider double-majoring in English or History to develop strong writing skills. By doing so, you may be able to pursue careers like the editor for Art magazines, where you travel to review the museums and be paid for doing it.

Myth 4: Pre-program majors are awesome.

Whether your goal is doctor, pharmacist, lawyer, or dentist, do not major in something like pre-med, pre-law, and so forth. A major issue with these majors is that when you graduate with these majors (most institutions do not allow you to major in them anyway), you cannot find a job with these majors unless you decide to attend professional schools for them. In other words, if your college diploma is on pre-med, there is no job market opening unless you go to the medical school and become a doctor. So, instead of majoring in something like this, choose majors like Biomedical Engineering or Philosophy to explore a variety of options and actually have secondary options in case you do not attend the professional schools right away.

Myth 5: You hate certain major because you did poorly on the introductory course of it.

In my institution, there is a political science course called POL 111, an introductory course taught by the chairman of the political science. It is extremely tough course that is meant to discourage freshmen and sophomores from pursuing pre-law (a "weed-out" course is the informal title of it). There are political science major students in my school, who received low B's or C's on the course, and still end up attending law schools. What does this mean? It means that some introductory courses are meant to be challenging and prevent everyone from doing well. So, if you did poorly on the introductory course, this does not necessarily represent how you will perform in the upper level courses. If you like the major, try another introductory course and see how it will work out. For some students, it takes a while for them to get used to the style of studying in certain majors.