Comparing Majors - All the Factors You Need to Consider Before Deciding

Now that you’ve got the list of majors you generated on the last page, let’s discuss how to compare them. In an ideal world, you’d be able to see into the future and know how well each major will work out for you, then pick the best one. In the real world, the future is uncertain and many of the most important decision-making factors can’t be evaluated until you’ve started college and gotten some direct experience. With that in mind, the factors we’ll be discussing here have all been limited to what you can reasonably discover about a major before starting college.

Career Prep

If you’re pursuing career prep, the relevant factors will focus (not surprisingly) around your career.

Jobs

Are there currently jobs available in the career you’re preparing for? Do they pay well or offer other desirable benefits/rewards? Are they good jobs you will enjoy? Does the field have different tracks that could allow you to move around based on your interests and personal strengths? How good are the prospects for the type of entry-level job you’ll be pursuing after graduating? Make sure the career is likely to offer whatever you care about most, since there won’t ever be an easier time to switch paths than right now.

Competence vs. Credentials

As we discussed on the Career Prep page, the process of preparing for a career requires building competence (knowledge and skills) and acquiring credentials. In general, competence is transferable to other jobs, whereas credentials are usually specific to one industry. Thus, majors that emphasize credentials over competence may provide less flexibility if you decide you want to change careers in the future.

The main benefit of credentials is access to gated jobs, which often pay well and/or have other desirable aspects. As a secondary benefit, credentials can allow you to prove to yourself that you’re qualified for a task. If you lack self-confidence in your ability to do worthwhile things in life, acquiring credentials may be able to help. However, I personally believe that there’s greater satisfaction to be found in building competence than in acquiring credentials. Whereas credentials focus on what you’ve done (e.g., completed schooling, passed a test), competence focuses on what you can do. And it’s from doing that come so many of the satisfactions of life: a state of flow, a sense of mastery, and a feeling of personal growth. I recommend pursuing credentials for what they’ll enable you to be able to do, not for how they’ll look on your walls or your resume.

So, how much of this major will be about building competence vs. acquiring credentials? If you don’t know, search for “skills required to be a ____” and “credentials required to be a ____”, filling in the blanks with the name of the target job the major will prepare you for. Looking at the skill requirements, do you think you’ll enjoy working on those skills? Are those skills a good fit for the types of things you think you’re able to do well? (It’s OK if you don’t know, but be cautious around jobs that rely on skills in which you have had difficulty in the past.) If you decide you want to switch career paths, what other jobs would those skills be useful for? And for credentials, will the requirements allow you the level of career flexibility you’re looking for, or would you have to leave behind a lot of hard-earned credentials if you decided to switch careers?

Hidden Requirements

When you’re learning about a career path, it’s easy to find out about the formal requirements: the mandatory credentials, the skills listed on job descriptions, etc. It’s harder, though, to find out about the unofficial requirements. For example, did you know many companies will only accept new grads to specific training programs and not to their regular job openings? My wife experienced this first-hand after she got her bachelor’s degree in nursing: The hospitals she wanted to apply to wouldn’t accept her application unless she applied to a new-grad residency program. That may be common knowledge in some fields (e.g., doctors), but it was news to her. And the news wasn’t good, since she would have had to wait ten months before she could have started any of the programs. Her solution was to find a job as a home health nurse, get some experience, then use that experience to get a better job. It worked out OK, but she probably would have done things differently to avoid the issue had she known about it.

So, it’s worth your time now to do a little internet investigating: Will you be qualified to start work immediately after graduating? Will you be considered a fully-fledged member of your trade, or will you be sidelined as a trainee? Do higher level positions require advanced degrees or other special credentials that you’ll have to go back to school for? There aren’t any specific search queries that you can use to answer these questions, but you can learn a lot just by reading about other people’s experiences on internet forums. For nurses like my wife, there’s allnurses.com. For you, there’s probably some relevant web forum out there (often on Reddit). Find the forum, search for the terms “new grad”, “recent graduate”, etc., and read about other people’s experiences. It’ll help a lot! (It can also help answer a lot of the questions we posed in the “Jobs” section above, BTW.)

Location

Some careers are tightly bound to specific locations, and other careers can be pursued from almost anywhere. So, will you be able to pursue this career in a place you’d like to live? If you decide to move in the future, will you be limited by job availability or license restrictions? Will the network of classmates and professors you develop now be able to help you find jobs in the places you might want to live?

In Closing . . .

At the end of the day, a college degree isn’t a guarantee of a job, even if your major is designed to prepare you for one. It’s up to you to make sure you’re doing what you need to do to be prepared for your post-graduation job search and career.

Self-Improvement

The concerns relevant to the self-improvement path all boil down to what will help you learn the most.

Interest

As we’ve previously established, being interested in what you’re studying is critical for learning a lot. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to accurately assess your interest in a major, because your assessment is limited by how much you already know about it. The less you know about something, the easier it is to delude yourself about what the subject is about and how much you’ll enjoy it. As an example, I took a class called “Philosophy of Mind” in college. When I was signing up for the class, I was excited at all the cool things I would learn (and, IMHO, I was excited by the thought of taking a class with such a cool name). In the actual class, though, I learned I don’t enjoy philosophy, and I struggled to maintain interest in the material. That experience taught me I have a tendency to daydream about what I imagine something will be like, and my daydreams often don’t match reality. You probably have the same tendency.

So, any evaluation of your interest in a major needs to be paired with a measurement of how much you’ve already been exposed to the actual subject matter (and not just what you imagine it’ll be like). In general, you’ll probably find that your exposure is lacking, which puts you at risk of mismeasuring your interest. The best way to fix this is Step 5 from the previous page: Dig into the material (books, videos, internet searches, etc.) to see what it’s actually like, then use what you learn to better evaluate your interest level. Will the material hold your interest through four years of textbook readings, essays/exams, and in-depth study? Would you be able to maintain interest in the face of early classes (When you’re in college, 8:00 AM classes feel like 5:00 AM flights: Way too early!), or late-nights spent studying for the exam? Will you be excited to engage with this material outside the classroom by participating in research, internships, clinicals, etc.?

Transferable Skillsets

Next, let’s try to evaluate how useful the things you learn will be to your future career. As we discussed on the Self-Improvement page, there are three types of “learning” in college: subject-matter knowledge, transferable skillsets, and self-improvement. For your future career, the latter two are the most important.

Self-improvement is probably the most important of them all, but it’s hard to predict how much progress you’ll make until you’ve started college. Your progress will depend on if the material is an appropriate challenge for you, and that can’t be judged until you get into the upper level classes. While some majors have a reputation for being challenging, the reputation is usually based on the workload, not the challenge of the material itself. Also, what’s hard for someone else isn’t necessarily hard for you. Thus, our unfortunate conclusion is there isn’t any feasible way to use self-improvement as a factor to compare majors, since we can’t predict how much the major will challenge you.

That leaves us to consider transferable skillsets. Will you build useful skillsets in this major? Will those skillsets transfer to other fields you may wish to study in the future? Will they be useful in getting/doing a job? Will they build upon your existing strengths or shore up your weaknesses? Although your motivation for gaining a skillset will probably be to enable you to better study the subject matter (such as learning programming so that you can study the science of computers), it’s great if the skillset can also help your future career.

Bullshit Requirements

Just like in high school, you won’t have complete control over your academic experience in college. All majors require some number of bullshit classes, whether that means the classes are useless, irrelevant, or so poorly taught as to be pointless. The goal, then, should be to try to minimize the number of bullshit classes you have to take so you can maximize the number of opportunities for learning and transformative experiences. When you’re evaluating majors, you need to look at more than just the classes that interest you: You need to look at the complete requirements of the curriculum. Ask yourself, how many of the classes required for this major will/could turn out to be bullshit?

Passion

If you were to survey successful adults about how to choose a major, one common answer you would hear would be to “follow your passion”. For most high school students, this advice isn’t very useful since they don’t know what they’re passionate about. Even worse, it sets them on a path to try to “find” a passion. I’ve found it more helpful to think about passion not as something you’re going to discover about yourself, but something you’re going to build. The founding editor of WIRED Magazine, Kevin Kelly, advocated a similar approach on The Tim Ferriss Show:

Kevin Kelly: You just have to do a lot. That’s the only way you can find out what you’re good at. Many college kids say, “I don’t have a passion. I don’t know what I’m good at.” The only way that I know to find out your passion is to actually work at it by trying lots of stuff and becoming expert at something.

Tim Ferriss: Right. Instead of discovering yourself, you’re creating yourself. Young people graduate from college and then want to sit down and journal for ten minutes or take multiple choice tests to figure out their Myers Briggs and have their passion revealed to them. That’s not how this works. You’re not a block of ice that is being chipped away to reveal the sculpture underneath. You’re actually just a small piece of clay, and all the other bits and pieces need to be added. There is a kernel that is you, but you need to construct the rest of it. And the way you do that is by doing experiments and trying X, Y, and Z and everything else in between. [edited for clarity]

So, let go of any anxiety you might have of needing to find your passion before it’s too late. Computer Scientist Bret Victor recommends that you:

Make many things, make many types of things, study many things, experience many things, and use all these experiences as ways of analyzing yourself. Take each of these experiences and say, “Does this resonate with me? Does this repel me? Do I not care?” [edited for clarity]

So, this factor is really an anti-factor. Resist the advice to “follow your passion” and instead stick to the other factors we described above. It’ll help you make a better choice, and it’ll probably reduce your stress levels too.

In Closing . . .

If you want to pursue the self-improvement path, you need to be your own advocate. Position yourself to be challenged, engaged, and improving every day, but don’t get bogged down with trying to “find” your passion.

Considerations for Everyone

Finally, let’s discuss the concerns that are relevant to everyone (regardless of reason for college).

Free Time

If your high school experience was like mine, you rarely had free time. What we had was more accurately termed “downtime”: Time in which we could restore our sanity by watching Netflix or hanging out with friends. The type of free time I’m talking about is productive free time, in which you have the consecutive hours and the energy required to get things done. It’s time for clubs, hobbies, and side interests, whether those be pottery sculpting, playing club soccer, advocating for your favorite political movements, or reading historical fiction novels. While it’s easy to focus on your classes in college, the non-class activities have a substantial impact on how much you actually enjoy the experience. There’s so much more to life than just preparing for a career or studying a subject, so it’s worth making sure your major will leave you the time you need to be a well-rounded person.

So, how compatible will the major you’re considering be with all the other things you’re hoping to do during your college years? If you’re not 100% sure of what you want to do with your life, will this major leave you time to explore other options? If you’re hoping to study abroad or pursue a minor, will this major be accommodating?

Scholarships

For some people, there may be another worthy consideration: scholarships. Many of them are aimed at students pursuing specific majors, and so it is certainly worth taking their availability into account. I don’t advocate for selecting a major solely because it enables you to apply for a scholarship, but it should be a factor in your decision. If you are hoping to win any scholarships, will the majors you’re considering help you or hinder you in this process?

Motivations

Finally, let’s consider your motivations. For each major you’re considering, you probably have a jumble of different motivating factors in mind. If you’re like me, those factors will include a few that you don’t fully understand and would struggle to explain to someone else. In The Defining Decade, Psychologist Meg Jay gives a name to motivations of this type: “Those things we know about ourselves but forget somehow” are unthought knowns.

Unthought knowns are the dreams we have lost sight of, the truths we sense but don’t say out loud. We resist acknowledging them because we are afraid of what other people might think. Even more often, we fear what acknowledging them will mean for ourselves and our lives. [edited for clarity]

Although everyone has different motivating factors, yours might include pressure from your family or biases based on your past experiences. One particularly insidious motivating factor is prestige, as Computer Scientist Paul Graham describes in an essay:

Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like. . . . Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That’s the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn’t suck, they wouldn’t have had to make it prestigious.

Graham was referring to the danger of prestige when it comes to tasks, but it applies to college majors too. And prestige is only one of the many factors that may be influencing your opinion, even if you don’t want them to.

So, it’s best to make an effort to be honest with yourself. If you’re one of the many students who hates math, don’t pretend otherwise. If you feel a strong desire to please your parents, don’t ignore it. What are your honest reasons for considering each of these majors, and do you want to prioritize or suppress those reasons? Are you giving any of the majors undue weight because of implicit assumptions? If you want your decision to be grounded in good reasons, take the time now to observe and question your motives.

In the next section, we’ll try to uncover a few more factors worth considering by asking “What If . . . ?” questions.