As we now roll into the fall, with incoming freshmen anxious about their first year of college and returning students excited to be reunited with friends, I’d thought I’d share one piece of advice I have as a recent alum: Choose your major wisely.
One of things that attracted me to WashU was how easy it was to switch between the different undergraduate schools. In most other schools you’d have to reapply as a transfer student and in some schools, this process is even more competitive than the normal admissions process. In WashU, it’s as simple as signing a piece of paper.
But looking back on it, I don’t think this is a right message to send to students. It’s basically telling students that they don’t need to worry so much about their major choices and they can “shop around” till they find something they desire. Well it shouldn’t be taken like that.
Even given this flexibility WashU allows, switching majors is costly. College is only 4 years (Assuming you don’t want to put in extra money for additional semesters), and that’s not a lot of time, meaning you can only “shop around” for what you’re really interested in for only so long. But more importantly is the cost of switching: let’s suppose you decide to change majors after freshman year, and the major you want to change to doesn’t have much overlap with what you initially chose; that means you’re going to have to finish your new major’s requirements in three years! Even worse than that is if you chose a major that (for whatever reason) you completely bombed in and destroyed your GPA the first year or semester. GPAs are always hard to bring back up but very easily to destroy; even if you got 4.0s every semester after a horrid GPA (<3.0) the first year or semester, you’re still going to fall behind peers who have been rocking a 4.0 every semester.
Bottom line: think about what you want to major in before fully committing to it. If many of you are like the other overachievers flooding the campus, you were probably top of your high school class taking very difficult math and science heavy courses. But this isn’t high school, and you can’t base all your curriculum just based by what’s the most challenging. This is really a time to think about your interest, and a chance to think very carefully, because if you don’t consider the cost of switching majors to be that high, it’s at the very least still a major inconvenience.