Introduction
The Main Sequence is a guided walk-through meant to help you choose your college major. It blends academic research findings, expert recommendations, popular advice, and my own thoughts and experiences. The goal is to help you figure out what you want out of college and how to get it.
As a warning, I should tell you that this series is long. It’s 18,000 words, which makes it 1/3 the average length of a non-fiction book.* At a reading rate of 200 words per minute, the expected reading time is an hour and a half. If you’re looking for easy answers, try letting a Buzzfeed quiz decide your major. If you’re willing to do what it takes to figure out the right major for you, keep reading.
The Danger Lurking Ahead
My high school experience felt designed to prepare me for college. Actually, it was narrower than that: My experience felt designed to prepare me for college applications. I was encouraged to take classes that would fulfill admissions requirements, get grades that would reflect well upon me, and optimize my choice of clubs/activities towards the presumed preferences of college admission committees. Day by day and year by year, the system incentivized me to focus on preparing to apply for college rather than focus on learning. And so I spent my adolescent years letting my path be guided by the system. Except for the few nonconformists, my peers did the same.
Looking back now, it’s clear to me: We sold out. We ignored our interests and our childhood fascinations, all because the educational system told us that we needed to learn advanced mathematics and the grammatical structures of a foreign language. Unfortunately, calculus and the Spanish conjugations of the subjunctive won’t prove to be useful skills for most of us; they were a waste of time that could have been better spent learning things we were actually interested in. We dedicated ourselves to the subjects adults told us were important for our future success, and we let the stacks of college acceptance/rejection letters serve as the measure whether we had achieved that success.
Contrary to how it may appear from the outside, college is not an extension of the school experience you’ve had so far. Up to this point, your education has followed a strictly defined track. Your job has been to try to do the best you can at the things other people tell you are important. College, on the other hand, is all about taking an initial step off the generic path and onto your choice of specialized track. In short, you finally have an opportunity to pick the direction you want your life to head in.
While the opportunity to select the direction of your life can be exciting, it can also be scary. It forces you to immediately make one of the most important decisions you’ll face: What do you want to do with your life? The process of defining your life path requires conscious attention; you need to challenge yourself, test out new fields and interests, and make sure you’re happy with the track your life is on while it’s still easy to change tracks.
The danger, then, is you won’t realize the rules of the game have changed and you’ll keep playing by the rules of high school. You’ll focus on test scores and acquiring more and more accomplishments without stopping to ask yourself what you really want out of life. I’m here to give you a wake-up call: It’s time to grapple with the hard questions, chart a preliminary course for your life, and set sail. You can always change your mind as you go, but you’ll be best off if you spend time now thinking long and hard about the direction you want to head.
So, that’s the situation you’re facing. Over the course of this sequence, I’ll try to help you figure out what to do about it.
Disclaimer
Like all people, I’m not perfect. This website is my best attempt to help other people (like you) make good decisions when choosing a college major. The site collects together the best of what I’ve read, discussed, and thought up myself. That’s all I can offer. We won’t focus on whether you should go to college or where you should go to college. We’ll focus on how to choose a major that fits with what you want out of life. I hope you find it helpful, but no promises.
With all that said, let’s get started. Before we can think about what to major in, we need to consider why you want to go to college in the first place.
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*This estimate is based on an average non-fiction word count of 50,000 words. (return to section)