Mission
My experience choosing a college major was pretty typical: I knew the decision was important, but I was completely lost about how to make it. When my classmates confidently declared they would be following their passion, I felt passionless. When my high school guidance counselor read me the results of my career aptitude test, I felt skeptical. And when my parents recommended “good” majors like engineering, I felt defiant. There were a hundred and one easy answers on tap, but none of them offered what I really needed: guidance on how to make a well-informed decision.
Without that guidance, I was left to make the decision on my own. I settled on physics, stuck with it through college, graduated, and got a job. Everything worked out fine, but I still find myself thinking about how things could have gone differently. Where would I have ended up if I had been more thoughtful about choosing a major? And what would a better decision-making process even look like?
I’m not sure there’s much value in dwelling on that first question, but the second one seems worthwhile. This website is my attempt to answer it. Although it’s too late for me to change my past, I hope I can provide the guidance other students need to avoid my mistakes.
So, here’s the deal. Take a break from worrying about what to do with your life and give this website a try. We won’t rely on career aptitude tests or some magical idea of “following your passion”; instead, we’ll work to uncover what’s most important to you, then apply it to choose a good major. If you’re ready to dive in, I recommend you start here.
About Me
My name is David. I grew up in a suburb, attended good schools, and got good grades. I worked my butt off in high school, and I entered college with 46 credit-hours. Although I didn’t have a post-college plan before I arrived on campus, it didn’t take long until I was swept up into matching the ambitions of my classmates. Since I was majoring in physics, that meant that I decided I wanted to become a physics professor. The job sounded sweet, especially since I was loving my classes at the time. So, I set my sights on mastering physics and getting ready to rock grad school.
By the time I got to the first semester of my junior year, I wasn’t so sure anymore. I didn’t enjoy my undergraduate research experiences, and the upper level classes weren’t interesting me as much as the intro courses had. The final straw was when I learned that the working conditions in grad school kinda suck and the chances of actually ever becoming a professor are low. This left me feeling lost: If I wasn’t going to become a physics professor, then why was I taking all these advanced physics classes?
I experimented with taking classes in other majors (computer science and nutrition), but they didn’t feel compelling enough to be worth adding as a double major or minor. So, I decided to just focus on graduating ASAP and figure it out from there.
I graduated with honors at the end of my junior year, then moved back home. Since I feared the cultural stigma of moving back in with my parents, I mentally classified this time period as my own version of a senior year. From that perspective, my actions didn’t look too bad: Other students take a semester off from serious classes to study abroad; I graduated early so that I could have time to figure out what to do next. I set a one-year deadline for exploring before I would need to start my adult life.
I spent that year traveling, reading, talking, and thinking. By the end of it, I had decided to move to a different state and start a life there. I booked a flight and arrived on the fourth of July with only two suitcases and a motel reservation. From there, I leased an apartment, found a white-collar job, and started creating a life.
After three years at that job, I wasn’t satisfied. It felt like a waste to confine my efforts to helping a company make more money, when what I really wanted to do was create things of value. I’m not opposed to companies making money, but I think it should come as a result of improving people’s lives, not getting better at extracting cash from their pockets. So, I decided to take the plunge by leaving the corporate world and starting work on independent projects. This website is the first project I’ve completed.
About the Website
As I mentioned earlier, this site is the result of my efforts to think about choosing a college major. I expected there to be a lot of great advice available that I had been too dumb to search for, but there wasn’t. Even though millions of students go off to college each year in the US, we seem to expect each one to figure out how to choose a major on their own. Isn’t there anything we could tell all those students that would help them make better decisions?
This website is my attempt at an answer. If you’d like to help me spread the word, please share the link with your friends. Thanks for reading, and good luck with college!
FAQs
Contact Me
You can email me at my name @decidemymajor.com. See the About Me section for my name.