Anyone who has had the misfortune of speaking to me about my academic journey within the past three years can probably recall how aggressively conflicted I have been about declaring a major. Spanning from the college research stages in my junior year of high school to the last few weeks of my spring quarter as a first-year at UCI, I have been agonizing over what majors to consider and how to finally settle for one.
Background
First, let me illustrate my particular background and reasoning for being Undeclared. Like many young people, I do not have a career path I’m trying to pursue; none of my “dream jobs” point towards a specific major or academic field at all. Speaking of dreams and passions, I simply didn’t feel like I had any. That may be quite dramatic to say, but again, my interests were never in something I would be studying at UCI, or consider as a career. Academically, the subjects I was consistently interested in during high school were the humanities, specifically history, English, and the arts. However, the assumption that any humanities or liberal arts-type degree would be “useless” discouraged me from seriously considering anything within these fields, but because I was absolutely confident that I was not going to be a ~ woman in STEM ~, I settled for being a student in the Social Sciences, which I deemed the least “soft” or “useless” field.
Students are Undeclared for various reasons, so I can’t speak for everyone, but looking back on my first year, here are what I suggest thinking about if you’re also an Undeclared undergrad.
Take advantage of your Undeclared and First-Year status to sample different subjects
As a first year, you have some flexibility in your course scheduling. Between general education and school requirements, even if you come into your first year with plenty of credits, there will most likely be a few classes that you cannot escape taking. Since many of those requirements offer multiple classes to fulfill them, I recommend taking courses within your potential majors (or any course that sounds interesting to you), rather than those that sound easy. If you take courses within the majors that you’re curious about while fulfilling GenEds, you’re essentially killing two birds with one stone: you can sample majors while fulfilling GenEd requirements, guaranteeing that you’ll get credit for them. It sounds obvious, but it can be tempting to take the simplest or Easy-A GenEd courses. This is perfectly fine when Gen Eds are simply that, general credits, for you. But if you know you have to try out majors beyond completion of your GenEds, you may end up taking classes in those majors, decide that you don’t want to continue with the major, and have those course credits count towards nothing, basically wasting your time, credits, and tuition.
Use your resources
Many schools have academic, career, and personal counseling centers. Use all of them to help you, even if the most that come out of each meeting is that you were able to bounce your ideas, concerns, and feelings off of a professional helper. Enter them with your questions, concerns, general thought processes, or anything!
To be transparent, I have come out of many counseling meetings feeling more unsure about the big picture of my major deciding, BUT more confident about a smaller aspect of it, like what I don’t want, which career paths I should take a closer look at, or which line of thought has been unconsciously hindering my journey. Every step you take in figuring out what you want to study is a part of your journey, even if it’s only a small revelation. At any rate, these resources are included in what you pay through tuition, so you should definitely use them and make the most out of them.
Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket
Some of you may be Undeclared because you’re deciding between a few majors that you’re confident about. Some of you may be more like me, where you just don’t have any solid options to choose between. So, the first time that I thought I found a major that I would be interested in and fitting as a career, I fully committed myself to it, basically taking all major-related classes the next quarter (this was unintentional, but my schedule eventually took this shape after a few course scheduling mishaps). When I had landed on this major, I felt a small concern that things were moving too fast for me to be sure about declaring this major, and sure enough, about one month into the classes, I realized that this major was better suited for me as a minor.
In reflection, I saw that I was so excited to have finally found something that I felt remotely confident about after such a long period of time where I felt lost with no solid interests, that I jumped right in, just out of relief that I may no longer be Undeclared as long as I committed myself to this discovered major. While my experience may be a dramatic example, I still caution you not to commit too heavily to any major as a first year. Keeping in mind that you have plenty of flexibility in changing your mind as a first year, you want to make sure that you never get too deep into any one major until you are positive that you will commit to it to avoid your classes counting for only elective credits or no credits at all like I mentioned previously.
Trust your intuition
I’ll be honest, this piece of advice often annoyed me. I felt like it was such an unhelpful thing to say to someone, yet people said it all of the time. If my gut knew what to do, do you think I’d be here struggling with the decision?
While I used to take this advice and focus on how my intuition didn’t know what path, major, or career was right for me, now I focus on tuning into my gut feelings about what feels wrong. I would notice how I felt overwhelmingly intimidated by certain major classes, rather than excitement. I saw trends in what the major emphasized and decided that it was not the emphasis that I wanted to pursue. As I mentioned in my previous example, I could feel the hesitation to pursue that particular major due to my newfound confidence stemming from making a decision, not the major itself. Had I listened closer to that feeling, I may have made smarter planning decisions to try out other major interests before the year was over.
I don’t mean to suggest that every negative feeling you have in response to a major means that you should eliminate it from your list of potential majors. All majors will have cons. But ultimately, your major is what you will be spending most of your college years studying closely, so you want to enjoy it (or dislike it as little as possible, if that’s your way of viewing it). Could you see yourself doing research, hours of lectures, readings, and labs on that topic? Do you feel like it’s the most enjoyable/least miserable experience you could have? Your gut answer to that question is something worth listening to, rather than ignoring it in favor of what sounds good on paper.
Keep doing the work for yourself
At the end of the day, only YOU can make this decision. Frustrated with my lack of direction and indecisiveness, I took a bazillion career assessments and personality quizzes, hoping the results would give me a better starting point. I scoured the internet for other people’s accounts of their majors and how they decided on them (much like some of you may be doing now), hoping that at least one of these sources would simply give me an answer about what to do with myself as if a horoscope or Buzzfeed quiz could have told me what major would be perfect for me. As expected, I was never satisfied with any of these methods, primarily because I searched externally for some sign, reasoning, or clean-cut decision about my major. Even the major and career suggestions that came from official career fit questionnaires never felt fully right because those considerations didn’t come from me.
At the end of the day, once I finally realized that I can’t keep waiting for an answer to fall into my lap, I was able to move forward in considering what majors genuinely interested me.
Deciding on your major is a unique journey for everyone. Some people have known since they were children who they wanted to be and what they wanted to study. Others, like myself, still have no idea even while in college, working towards a degree. It can feel intimidating to be surrounded by people who have already declared their majors like you’re under pressure to catch up and be just as certain in your academic career, but your journey in discovering what you want to study at university will proceed at its own pace — you just have to let it do its thing.
Remember that your major doesn’t define you as a person or student. No matter how you decide to commit to a major, at the end of the day, it is only a degree and your career prospects are not set in stone over what you studied as a university student. I wish all of you Undeclared students the best of luck in deciding your major!