Don’t Be Afraid to Switch Your Major

As an undergraduate student, your major might as well become part of your name. It’s a badge of honor sorting students into camps based on their career interests and aspirations. 

This means questioning your major can feel a lot like questioning your identity. 

Major changes are more frequent than our anxieties allow us to believe, as one in three college students change their major, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Even though this situation is as common as finding a penny on the sidewalk, it doesn’t make it any less daunting.

The earlier students can gain experience, the more likely they are to pick a major and career path they’re passionate about, according to Forbes. Yet only 2% of high school students have completed internship programs, according to U.S. News. 

High schools should offer more opportunities for internships so students can gain firsthand experience in their desired field, and colleges need to do all they can to help students who switch their major still graduate on time.

For me, a career in journalism became synonymous with my idea of myself. And for a while, I was determined to keep it that way. 

The walls of my childhood bedroom are covered in cutouts from National Geographic magazines. Every surface in my apartment is littered with some kind of book or magazine. Friends text me every Wednesday with kind words about my newest story in The Phoenix. 

So one can imagine the shock on my family and friends’ faces when the girl who wrote her college essay about wanting to become a professional journalist realized it was no longer her passion.

For a while, I tried to pretend I was just burnt out from school and taking it out on my major. I thought if everyone around me wanted me to become a journalist, I could want it too. I’m nothing if not stubborn, and letting go of a career path I was once so certain of felt like giving up on myself.

While making my class schedule each semester, my friends would watch me experience a midlife crisis about a career that wasn’t even mine yet. I’d scroll aimlessly through different major requirements, trying them all on like new pairs of shoes. 

But a career path isn’t a facade to be maintained. Passion can’t be faked. All the same, it can be extremely difficult to figure out what you love to do when given so little exposure to the corporate world before being thrown into it. 

It’s ridiculous to expect teenagers to pick the career path they’ll want before their brain is fully developed. It’s like asking a newborn which car they’d like to drive someday — the answer means absolutely nothing because there’s no baseline experience for how they’ll feel once put in to the real situation. 

This is why it’s important to let your major change with you in college. You don’t leave college the same person you came in as. Students should let their interests and passions grow over these years because that’s how to find the right career. At the end of the day your family and friends won’t be the ones doing the work — it’ll be you. 

It can be easy to lean on the expectations of others when you’re young and don’t quite know what you’re capable of. But never let these presumptions made by others, or even your past self, dictate what’s best for your future.