Putting It All Together - The 8-Step Method to Choose a College Major

We’ve come a long way in this sequence, so let’s put each idea into its place. We’ll use an eight-step decision-making framework from the book Smart Choices* as our scaffold.

Step 1: Work on the Right Problem

The way you frame your decision at the outset can make all the difference.
—Smart Choices

The question that drew you to this website was probably, “What should I major in?” To help you uncover the answer, we started by exploring a more fundamental question: “What do I want out of college?” By thinking about what you want before thinking about how to get it, you’re able to consider a wider set of options from a fresh perspective. That means you’ll be able to make a better decision when it comes time to choose a major.

To-Do:

Recognize that you must decide what you want out of college before you can choose an appropriate major.

Relevant Page(s):

Step 2: Specify Your Objectives

The next step is to figure out what you want out of college. College means a lot of different things to different people, so this can be a trickier than it sounds.

To help sort it all out, we dove deep into the nuances associated with the most common reasons for college. Now that you’ve read them, you need to figure out which reason matters most to you. If you have access to receptive friends, try explaining your thoughts to them. If you’re alone, try journaling; it’s like being able to have a conversation with yourself without the social stigma. Either way, the process of having to clearly explain your thoughts forces you to slow down your thinking, notice where your thoughts seem fuzzy, and keep working it over until you find something that feels right.

To-Do:

Ask yourself, “What all do I want from college? Of all those things, which are the most important to me?” If you’re struggling, use these questions to help clarify: Do you care most about being able to justify your choice to your peers or being able to sleep soundly at night? Are you more worried about failing to succeed or failing to try? Will you measure the success of your decision on a short or long timescale?
Once you’ve got a head full of thoughts, try talking it out with someone or journaling. Either approach will force your thinking to improve. Keep at it until you find an answer resolving in your mind.
Finally, write down your answer. This will be your “college goal”. You can always change it later, but it helps to commit to your best answer for now.

Relevant Page(s):

Step 3: Create Imaginative Alternatives

It’s time to think about majors. Use your college goal and the procedures we’ve previously discussed (see “Relevant Page(s)” below) to generate a list of majors. According to Smart Choices, “Your decision can be no better than your best alternative.” For our purposes, that means it’s really important that we spend the time now to explore all our options, including creative/out-of-the-box solutions.

To-Do:

Brainstorm 5-10 majors. Keep track of why you think each one might be a good choice.

Relevant Page(s):

Identifying Potential Majors

Step 4: Understand the Consequences

Next, figure out the likely consequences of choosing each major by comparing them. Based on the most common college goals, we developed a set of factors you can use to compare majors. You may also want to consider any other factors you think are important to your particular situation. Unfortunately, many of the factors that would be most relevant are not easy to measure until you’ve started college. (For example, it can be tough to figure out how much you’ll enjoy a major until you’ve had time to dive deep into it.) So, realize that your comparison is limited to what you can reasonably discover now, and there will always be uncertainty in your decision. We’ll talk more about how to handle that uncertainty in step 6.

To-Do:

Identify the factors that matter most to you for comparing majors.
Evaluate each potential major using each factor.
Consider eliminating any options that score poorly relative to the others.

Relevant Page(s):

Comparing Majors

Step 5: Grapple With Your Trade-offs

As you compare majors, you’ll likely end up with multiple promising majors with no obvious way to decide. This is a classic trade-off: Each major has its own set of advantages and disadvantages, and no one option is perfect. If this sounds like your situation, the honest truth is that you’ll have to make some tough choices. You may have to decide what matters most to you and be willing to accept the consequences, even if that means you don’t get everything you wanted. It may be painful.

Although I can’t do much to guide you through the specifics of your trade-off, I can arm you with some tools. First, there’s Jeff Bezos’s approach: Aim to minimize regrets. Think about what you would most regret doing or not doing in your life, then figure out which major would help you avoid that regret.

Next, there’s a whole academic field dedicated to techniques for making good decisions when there’s lots of uncertainty. The techniques can get pretty complicated, but there’s a simple one that may be useful when you get down to your final two majors: the take-the-best heuristic. In this technique, you first put all your factors in order from most-important to least-important. Starting with the most-important, you go down the list until you find one in which one major does substantially better than the other. Ignore all the remaining factors and choose that major. This technique works because it forces you decide what’s most important to you, then use that to compare majors. It can fail when you have multiple less-important factors that cumulatively add up to be more important than your most-important factors.

To-Do:

Acknowledge that you may not be able to get everything you want out of college, and you thus may have to make hard choices with trade-offs.
Try to grapple with your trade-offs. Don’t make any final decisions yet, but don’t move on until you’ve thought about how you might prioritize majors in the face of trade-offs.

Relevant Page(s):

Step 6: Clarify Your Uncertainties

Even with all the thinking we’ve done so far, there’s still so much that is unknowable. Whereas a casino is full of games you can know with odds you can calculate, the real world is more complicated. In the real world, there are many things you can’t know (“unknowns”), some of which you may not even be aware of (“unknown unknowns”). This doesn’t mean we should just throw up our hands in defeat, but it does mean we have to be thoughtful about how we handle uncertainty.

Luckily, many others have faced this same decision before us, and we can learn from their experiences. So, here are some questions worth considering: What would happen if your educational experience didn’t proceed as you’re now imagining? If you don’t graduate, need to switch majors, or are forced to switch schools, how will that affect your chances of success? How could changes in the economy (e.g., recession) or job market (e.g., the automation of jobs) impact the options you’re considering? Which of your options will be best suited for handling hurdles like these?

To-Do:

Consider what sort of disturbances you may face during and immediately after college. If you have access to older students who have already started/finished college, ask them about the disturbances that impacted their college experience.
Consider how well your college goals and potential majors would hold up to those disturbances.
Come to terms with the potential for “unknown unknowns”. There aren’t any guarantees when you’re choosing a major, just best guesses.

Relevant Page(s):

Step 7: Think Hard About Your Risk Tolerance

Just like grappling with trade-offs, determining how much risk you’re willing to tolerate is a deeply personal decision. We covered some of the factors that may influence your risk tolerance—student loans, family support, pressing obligations—but we’ll never be able to cover them all. It’s up to you to honestly evaluate your life situation and decide how much risk you’re willing to take in the pursuit of your goals.

It’s worth remembering that risk isn’t for nothing: You accept risk in exchange for the potential for greater rewards. My advice is to be willing to take substantial risk, as long as you think the potential rewards are worth it and you believe you could recover from failure. But I’m just a random guy on the internet, so make the decision for yourself.

To-Do:

Evaluate your own life situation, especially your financial situation. If something disturbs your plans, how vulnerable will you be?
Where are you aiming to go in life? How much are you willing to risk to get there? If your plan fails, will you be able to live with the consequences?

Relevant Page(s):

Step 8: Consider Linked Decisions

What you decide today could influence your choices tomorrow, and your goals for tomorrow should influence your choices for today.
—Smart Choices

And finally, take a moment to think broader. How will this decision connect together with the rest of your life? What other big future decisions may be influenced by your choice of major now? Are the options you’re considering consistent with your overall life goals?

Preparing for these questions has been what this whole sequence is about. College is more than just four years of study; it’s the first of many opportunities you’ll have to set the course of your life. It’s important, but it’s not the end-all and be-all. And while we’ve considered a number of linked decisions (life goals, career goals, etc.), you may have more that we haven’t covered. The good news is that you have now seen a functional strategy for how to think through them, so you should be equipped to handle them on your own. If you aren’t sure how to start, copy the approach we used here: Define your problem, figure out what you want to accomplish, come up with options, and evaluate them. You can always change your mind later, so don’t hesitate to try and see what you can come up with now.

To-Do:

For one final time, consider your college goals. With everything we’ve uncovered, are you still satisfied with them? Will they suit you well for the future you want?
Are there any other big decisions you can anticipate which may be linked to this one? If so, what do they imply you should do about your current decision?

Relevant Page(s):

None in particular.

So, that’s it. If you follow these eight steps, you’ll have a good shot at finding the best major for you. If you haven’t already, you should do more than just read this page: You should work through each and every To-Do item we’ve discussed. If this website was a textbook, the To-Do items would be the homework assignment.

So, do whatever you need to do to make sure you work through the list. Personally, I would print out the page (using the handy print-preview button below), but you could also bookmark it or set up a calendar reminder to make sure you return. Just make sure you don’t forget to do it.

*Hammond, John S., et al. Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions. Harvard Business Review Press, 1999. (return to section)