Applying/choosing a major

I’m a sophomore in high school and I’m just curious about how you actually choose/apply for a major. How exactly does it work?

People choose majors in a few ways.

  1. Their parents tell them they’ll only pay for college if they do a certain major (lol).
  2. People decide what kind of job they want to have, and cater a major towards that. For example, if you want to work in consulting you’ll probably opt for some kind of financial degree instead of art history or slavic studies.
  3. People decide what they want to study for 4+ years, and simply base it off their interests without worrying what kind of job they’re going to do in the future.

Applying to majors can be more complicated.
At some schools, all majors are “open admission” so you simply ask to switch to it, and it’s given. At some schools, there’s minimum pre-requisites to be admitted into the major. For example, you might apply for freshman admission to U Michigan - with a finance major. And U Michigan admits you, but Their business school (Ross) doesn’t. Therefore, you’ll have to apply to the business school later on, and you’ll be competing with external and internal transfers for the spots inside the business school.

@philbegas do you need any special prerequisites when applying for college? and if a major is in high demand, are some people not able to “be in” that major? for instance, if i wanted to be a drama/theatre arts major, would i need to audition or send in something extra at all?

That will depend entirely on the school, you’ll have to look into that on a case by case basis.