I recently read an article in The New York Times by Jeffrey Selingo titled Six Myths About Choosing a College Major. I transferred to DePaul from Lake Forest College, a small liberal arts school with 1,500 undergraduate students. While there, I befriended a girl named Marissa, and as many classroom friendships start, I asked her what her major was. She explained that she was majoring in Sustainable Urban Development, something I had never heard of. As a play-it-safe business major, I knew my options to be Business Management, Accounting, Economics, or Finance. Well, until I met Marissa.
After talking to her, I learned that Lake Forest has a program like those mentioned by Selingo where they allow students to design their own majors. Their website explains, “Some of our strongest students find that no one traditional major fully meets what they want to study.” Of course, the program isn’t as easy as taking the classes you want and slapping your own label on it. Programs like these often require a proposal upon acceptance and the culmination of a thesis or research project prior to graduation.
I agree with Christine Ortiz, a dean at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there is a sense of “boxing” when it comes to choosing a major. As a confused student trying to choose my line of study, this has often crossed my mind. I’ve known I wanted to major in Economics since last year. However, after taking a few religion and environmental studies classes, I found myself wishing it was possible to combine my passions by getting a degree in something like Environmental Economics. Yes, of course, there’s always the option to double major or add a minor, but that would put me behind a year and thousands of dollars.
While one of the benefits of a Liberal Arts College is that students get to learn a little bit about everything due to our liberal arts credit requirements, what happens when we find ourselves interested in a different discipline that doesn’t match the path of our major? I think students are often hesitant to choose a major if it doesn’t exactly align with their passions and career interests. It seems like in college culture, we’re obsessed with asking classmates what their major is despite the cliché, but then feel a twang of awkwardness if they don’t have an answer. That’s my experience in the Business College, anyways. Why have we become so obsessed with these generic disciplines?
I feel like the students I tutor struggle with this as well. Students who have a multitude of passions may have to settle for cookie cutter degrees because there isn’t a major that encompasses everything they want to learn and do. I think the idea of creating your own major is revolutionary, and I hope to see more schools adopting this practice.