Everyone knows of Bryant University because it is one of the top business schools in the area and of course that is something to be proud of as a student that attends this school. If your major isn’t business though, there might be a slight catch to how proud you are of attending the number three school for business, management and marketing according to College Factual/USA Today in 2017. If you are a liberal arts major at a primarily business school you know what it feels like to be asked why you chose to came here as a liberal arts major when your school focuses on business. It is true you will be the minority. It is true you will see a lot of familiar faces in your classes as the years go by because your major is likely a lot smaller than the business majors. Because of this you will get to know the people in your major pretty well and it might feel more like a community than the bigger majors tend to. It is nice to constantly see the familiar faces time and time again and it is special that you can get to know your peers in your major on a more personal level.
My story doesn’t begin with being a liberal arts major at a business school though. My college career began with me as a management major attending a huge southern school. The day I got to orientation I decided to change my major to psychology and spent the year at Clemson University as a psychology major. I then transferred to Bryant (applying as a psychology major) but when I got here I decided to change my major to marketing because I had lost my interest in psychology. I spent the next year as a marketing major and then on the last day of school last semester decided to change my major for the fourth and hopefully final time. This time I had settled on being a communications major in the liberal arts school. So basically I have a complicated back-story of being four majors over my two years in college. I now partway into first semester of my junior year as a communications major and am loving it.
After spending a year doing psychology classes and discovering I had no intentions of going onto graduate school to become a therapist or psychologist and then spending the next year struggling in my business classes (especially accounting) I knew I needed to sit myself down and figure out what I really wanted to do and what major I could declare as to help myself get there. In the end I decided on communications because of how broad it is and how many different job fields you can go into after completing that major. Personally, I want to work in PR so I am hopefully on the right track now.
Despite my personal struggles with finding a major I am very happy to have finally decided on my major, even if it isn’t considered ‘conventional’ at a business school like Bryant. I do get asked a lot by people that know I am a liberal arts major as to why I am attending an award winning business school and not pursuing a career in business. When they ask me this I just tell them that the school you choose isn’t about what it is known for (whether that be business or something else) but it is about that feeling you get when you step foot on campus for the first time and know you have found your home for the next four years. I can safely say that at this award-winning business school I have found my home and feel so connected to this place and everyone in it. When a school is right for you, you just know it and it doesn’t matter what labels that school has. You can take this from someone who knows that it’s like to attend the wrong school. Nothing should stop you from attending your dream school. So Bryant may not be receiving the kinds of awards for liberal arts that it receives for business but that doesn’t mean you won’t be getting a quality education anyway. It might even help you stand out when applying for jobs that you went to a business school and didn’t go down the path of business, you have more of a story to tell because you didn’t do what everyone else at your school did.