Thoughts On Your Student Choosing a Major

Every year when I talk to parents, I am aware that one issue foremost on their minds is their son's or daughter's choice of a major. Some parents wonder whether the major their student has chosen will lead to a successful career. Others are telling a resisting student which major they must choose in order to have a successful career. Others worry that their student will not qualify for a particular major. And still others worry because their student has no idea what major to choose or what in the world he or she wants to do following graduation.

All of these are reasonable concerns. Parents want the best for their children, sending a child off to college is a stressful and decision-ridden exercise, and, not to put too fine a point on it, the application form asks students to indicate a major or to indicate that they haven't decided on a major yet. This fact of the admissions process looms large. Of course, students are looking for a major not only because they have to fill in that form, but because they must complete a major in order finally to get a degree. No wonder then that parents and students trek to one place after another during university open houses trying to figure out what to pick, what sounds best, and what will work for them. For some parents and students this process is not only successful, but easy. The student who knows she wants to be an engineer signs up for Engineering. The student who knows he wants to be a Spanish major signs up with the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. And the student who is still deciding chooses Letters and Sciences, the University's program for continued exploration and prospecting.

But while this process of looking and choosing works, it does not always work seamlessly for several reasons. First, many students will change their majors after one or two years. Second, only in some cases does the major a student chooses actually determine his or her career. Admittedly, an Engineering major probably will become an engineer; a secondary Education major probably will become a teacher. But for many careers, the linkage between major and career is much less defined. For example, pre-med is not a major, but a set of recommended courses that a student may take no matter what his or her major. For the pre-med student who will seek entrance to a highly competitive medical school, the key is choosing a major in which the student will excel. To press that point, we know that history majors have the highest acceptance rate to medical school. But if a student hates history and will do poorly in it, then a prospective medical school applicant had better make a different choice. Or, to take another example, students can graduate in any major including Dance, Engineering, Computer Science, Russian Studies, and still get into the best law schools in the country. Similarly, if a student is interested in going into the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, or Drug Enforcement Administration, he or she might consider majoring in Computer Science, Accounting, Geographic Information Systems, Linguistics, Asian Studies, with some course work in Criminology and Criminal Justice. This specific advice aside, it simply is true in general that many students will complete a major but then pursue a career that, at least on the surface, seems completely unrelated to that choice. The pianist may wind up as a Chief Financial Officer, the biology major as a journalist, and the English major as a surgeon. I've gathered all of this advice and all of these examples from Maryland faculty and advisors, and believe me, they know.

Viki Anand, in the School of Public Health captured the view of many of our advisors here at the University of Maryland with her view that: "Students may feel an inordinate amount of pressure from significant others, parents, teachers, coaches, college administrators. This pressure can prematurely drive students to declare a major before carefully examining available options and matching their options to their personal interests. Keep in mind that students can have direction and even a plan without deciding on a specific major." Unfortunately, choosing a major for the wrong reason sometimes results in exactly what everyone wanted the student to avoid, lack of academic success. Choosing for the wrong reason also results sometimes in a student being frozen in place, unable to make a new decision, and feeling somehow trapped into staying with a choice that may have been made while completing an admission application as a high school senior. A better scenario is for students to choose majors about which they can be passionate. When students are passionate about what they are studying, they excel. And because the students themselves are the only persons who know what that might beýand they find out by discovering it, sometimes accidentally, in courses not part of their chosen majorýthey need to choose for themselves.

Finally, let me pass on some words of wisdom from Maynard Mack, Jr., Professor of English and previously Director of University Honors: "Any training a student gets at Maryland--and all students get plenty--has a shelf life in the working world of only a few years, whereas any real education--learning how to learn, how the mind works, sorting out one's values and the world's priorities--will last every student as long as he or she lives. Training is for the present, education for the future. A major is not your student's education, but a part of it. Education is not preparation for a job, exclusively, but rather preparation for the future which is, by definition, unknown. Your student does not know for sure what the future will bring. Therefore a broad experience, looking at lots of different ways in which people become human, lots of different ways in which the mind's work gets done, is almost certainly the best thing your student can gain while at Maryland."

I am sure you are still wondering if your son or daughter has chosen the right major. As my son said to me when he was beginning college, "Parents never know what to worry about." As you would imagine, I took no comfort from that statement at the time, and certainly do not recommend that you take comfort from it today. But I assure you that I have thought about it for years. I understand now that he was telling me he would handle his own life and that no amount of anxiety on my part would change that. We all do the best we can for our children. That includes giving them the best advice we can. As we sometimes discover to our surprise, they eventually accept most of it. Nevertheless, they must make many decisions on their own and for themselves. And ultimately, we discover that it was all for the best, that in fact their choice becomes ours when we see what that decision made possible for them.