Tips for Choosing a Major
A More Thorough Approach than Career Tests
On a questions and answers forum, a Junior in high school asked for a website where free career tests can be taken. The concern was that "my parents think that I'm throwing my life away because I have no idea what I'm going to major in college". Since I'm rather passionate about that fact that I wasn't prepared for college either, I decided to share with this young person what I wished someone would have told me. The following was my reply (which happened to get voted best answer because of 1 vote. Yes!)

Your parents are absolutely right! Figuring out your college major now will put you so far ahead of the game. You also have time to make an informed decision. If you can avoid changing your major when you get into college then that will save you so much time and money! (However, if you happen to change your major sometime in the future then that's fine too. You don't want to waste your time in a field that doesn't make you happy.)

Career tests are a joke. They are not very accurate.

What you do is visit the website of any good-sized college or university and find a list of the majors they have available. Then write a list of the ones that interest you. Even if you have just the slightest interest, write it down. Even if you have no idea what it is about, but it still sounds interesting, write it down. Hopefully the same place where you find the list of majors will also tell you what jobs you can get with the degree in that major. If not, then perform an internet search for each major you've written down, and find out what kind of jobs you can get with those majors. Then make a list of those jobs. Also ask all your friends and family what their jobs are and if any of those sound interesting then add those to your job list.

Now that you have a job list of potential careers that you'd like to have, then find people who have that job and job shadow them. Ask them if you can watch them at work for a couple of hours or for the entire work day, whatever is good for both of your schedules. Get a feel for what they do. Ask them what it took to get where they are.

By the time you've job shadowed people in each of the jobs on your job list, you'll have an idea of what you want to do for the rest of your life.

5 Major Tips (pun intended):

1. Don't let other people tell you what you should do or what job you should go into. It doesn't hurt to listen and take the information with an open mind. They may have suggested it because they noticed something about you that is a good quality for a person in the field they suggest. But ultimately they are just telling you about the field that they like, and even if its your own mother, that person doesn't know you as well as you know yourself. You make the decision; you'll be the one that has to live with it.

2. If you're not good at a subject, don't let that keep you from exploring a certain field. I was terrible at science, and I'm still going into medicine and I love it. If you work hard and put your mind to it, you can do anything you want. If engineering sounds interesting to you, but you're not good at math, who cares, you can do it if you put enough effort into it.

3. Don't let the time requirement deter you either. The rest of your life you'll ether be studying or working. Just make both good work. And work hard and smart at the beginning, so you can do what you want for the rest of your life. If a job requires that you still go to grad school after 4 years at a university, so be it, if that is the field you want to work in.

4. Factor in other things you want in life. Many people told me it shouldn't matter what a job pays, because if you like the job you never work a day in your life. I agreed with picking the job that I liked, but I didn't agree that what I got paid didn't matter. I knew I wanted to have a family that I needed to support. If I picked a job I liked that didn't pay well, then I couldn't support a family. So I picked a job that I liked AND paid well enough to let me do other things that I wanted to do.

5. Even if you like the major, the job, and you're interested in the field, and even if you are naturally good at it, all majors get to be very hard when you've finished the introductory courses and move on to the 300 level courses (not MyMajor 101 anymore, MyMajor 301, etc.). Expect that it will get harder and be mentally ready to make the adjustment. This is why you did the research and job shadowed people in the field you like, because you already know that's what you want to do. My guess is that this is when the majority of people change their major. They are people who don't know what they want to do, so they're not motivated enough to stick with it through the 300 and 400 level courses.

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