What Major Should I Choose? A Guide for Nonlinear College Paths

At Gofman Therapy and Consulting, our career coaching with young adults often centers on a decision our clients have been struggling with long before they arrive: what to study.

They’re in good company: about 30% of undergraduates change their major within their first three years, and most college graduates end up working outside the field their degree named.

While those numbers should be reassuring, they often aren’t. When you’re a year or two down a path that isn’t turning out how you imagined, knowing that plenty of other people changed course doesn’t make it any easier to figure out your next steps, or to maintain optimism that it will all work out in the end.

Why Choosing a Major Is So Hard to Think Your Way Through

The most important thing to remember is this: Three semesters of struggling through engineering isn’t a wasted year and a half. Neither is spending a few years out of school working jobs that haven’t led anywhere. With the benefit of hindsight it can feel obvious that you made the “wrong” choice, but you were really making the best choice you could based on what you knew at the time. And these experiences can become the most useful information to inform your next step, even if the lessons aren’t clear right away.

While it’s tempting to sit and weigh pros and cons of different major options until you come to a conclusion, the missing ingredient to help gain clarity is your own experience. We know that human beings are actually not very good at predicting whether we are going to like something, so the best way to find out is through direct experience.

When I was a kid, I was going to be a veterinarian. I loved animals, and that felt like all I needed to know to feel certain. Fortunately for me, my parents had the idea for me to spend a morning shadowing our family vet so I could see for myself what actually being a vet was all about. It took just one morning for me to learn that loving animals and wanting to be a veterinarian are not the same thing. The job involved a great deal that had nothing to do with the part I’d been imagining, and a fair amount I hadn’t considered at all. One morning did what years of thinking about it couldn’t.

Questions to Ask Yourself Before Choosing a Major

Before getting into what new experiences can help increase clarity, looking back on your own experience can be a great place to start. What matters is getting specific. Saying “I didn’t like it” when describing a whole class or your whole time at a job is too broad to be useful, and while that may be your overall sense, it misses the details of your experience that are actually useful in learning something.

A few questions worth sitting with, ideally with a pen rather than just in your head:

• What majors have you considered, and how did you arrive at them? Trace each one back. Some will have come from a class you liked, some from a parent or a teacher, some from an idea about the kind of person you’d be if you did it.
• When do you tend to lose track of time? What were you actually doing? Solving something on your own, explaining it to someone else, building, writing, organizing, being around people.
• What do you dread? Be specific here too. The reading, intensive memorization, the group work, the presentations, the long stretches of sitting still, the math.
• When something has been hard, what kind of hard was it? There’s a difference between not being able to understand something and not wanting to sit with it long enough to understand it. Both feel difficult in the moment, but they mean very different things.
• What comes easily to you that you assume comes easily to everyone? We tend to discount our own strengths, especially the ones that don’t have a class or a job title attached to them.

You’re looking for patterns that show up across a few different experiences, rather than one dramatic answer.

Four Experiences That Move You From Confusion Toward Clarity

So what should you do if you don’t feel like you’ve had enough experiences to draw conclusion from? Or if the ones you have had feel inconclusive? Here are four steps you can take right now toward experiences that will teach you something about yourself:

1. Take a career assessment that measures aptitude, not just interest. Most of the free quizzes online only ask about your interests. While the results can be helpful in giving you the words to describe what you are interested in, it’s missing the other side of the coin: what you’re actually good at. A proper assessment looks at your strengths alongside what appeals to you, and the combined view is often where the most useful information lies. Your school’s career center may offer one, and it’s something we do with many of our clients directly.

2. Start paying attention to your own experiences, and write them down. For the next two weeks, pay attention to the moments where you are most engaged, curious, or reluctant to stop what you are doing. When you notice one, write it down and keep a record. Include the unglamorous details of what was actually happening. Two weeks of tracking will uncover trends you may not have noticed otherwise, and it gives a fuller picture than what you’d come up with from memory alone.

3. Read a syllabus from an upper-level course in a major you’re considering, or sit in on the class. There’s a difference between finding a subject interesting at a distance, and feeling drawn to engaging with the course material day in and day out. Most people never look at what the full spectrum of their academic course-load involves before declaring a major. Pay attention to your reaction when reading this: are you excited and maybe a little bit anxious? Or does something else come up?

4. Find one person doing something that interests you and ask them about it. This can be a family friend, a relative, someone’s older sibling, or anyone else. Ask about what the work is really like on an ordinary Tuesday, and ask questions that help you understand how they got to where they are today. Most people’s paths wandered more than you’d guess from the outside, and hearing the experience from someone directly can really help clarify your own expectations for your path.

What If You Still Can’t Decide?

Sometimes you do all of this and still don’t have a clear answer. There are a few different reasons that can happen, and each one needs a different approach.

Sometimes the options really are equally strong. If two or three paths share similarities on your top priority characteristics, more research isn’t going to separate them. At that point the deciding factor can shift toward what you want your life to look like rather than what you’re best at. How much do you need to earn, and by when? Do you want work that ends when you leave for the day? How much uncertainty can you tolerate in the early years of your career? These questions can often help you narrow down your options more effectively than another round of research.

Sometimes what’s in the way is comparison. You have a roommate who has had a plan since freshman year, or a cousin who is two years into something impressive, or a feed full of people announcing their latest internship or big city move. It’s hard not to measure yourself against that, but it’s also important to remember that you’re comparing how it feels on the inside to how it looks from the outside. Their path probably has more doubt in it than you can see, and focusing too much on what others are doing can often have a negative impact on your own ability to gain internal clarity.

And sometimes the difficulty isn’t about not having enough information at all. There’s a difference between not knowing enough and not being able to tolerate the discomfort that comes with not knowing. If you have researched this well past the point of usefulness, or made the decision and then reconsidered it more than once, or found that the thought of committing to anything brings up real anxiety, then more information is unlikely to help. You’ve probably noticed by now that it hasn’t.

Where to Go From Here

Whether you’re a few semesters into a major that isn’t working, coming back to school after time away, or starting out and hoping to get it right the first time, the important thing to remember is there is a path forward. Take an honest look at what you’ve already been through and what you can learn about yourself from your experiences. Develop a plan to cultivate the experiences you haven’t had yet. Pay attention to what they tell you about what’s most important to you and the types of contexts you work best in.

It’s important to acknowledge certainty isn’t the goal in this process. What you’re aiming for is enough to make a decision you can stand behind, and the ability to keep adjusting as you learn more.

If you’re still feeling stuck or would find it helpful to have some support navigating this process, we’d be glad to talk with you about it.