Changing major super-senior year (5th year) [should have changed senior year]

College Search & Selection
1

I am planning to change my major in my super-senior year (I am 5th year) from Communications: Global Media and Communication to my previous majors I have had (American Studies or Social Science: Community Mental Health concentration major) or to Information Technology Management. I have worked for my college’s IT department’s Help Desk so I thought maybe I do have skills in that.

Unfortunately, I have not been given clear career advice from my college at Ramapo College of New Jersey. I started out as an American Studies major with hopes of becoming a history teacher, however, my education professors told me that there’s only teaching jobs for science, math, and languages. They told me I cannot find a teaching job with a humanities degree like Literature or History.

So I switched majors. A friend of mine told me that Nursing was in demand. However, at Ramapo, they do not allow anyone into their program easily. Either you come in as an Associates Degree of Nursing or you have to start right at Freshman year of college to be accepted into the Nursing program.

Because of this rule, I could not switch into Nursing my sophomore year of college. Then a friend told me about an Accelerated Nursing program you can do after you graduate college. You do pre-requisite courses (such as Anatomy and Physiology 1 & 2, Microbiology, Elementary Probability and Statistics, etc) while you are still at school, then when you graduate, you go to another school, do clinical there for a year or two, and the school would award you with a Second Bachelor’s degree in Nursing. This seemed good for me at first, and I did some of the pre-requisite courses and switched to a Social Science Major with a Concentration in Community Mental Health (not sure how great this major even is in this poor job market). But then I found out how the Accelerated Nursing Programs cost about $50,000! I cannot afford that, nor would my mother allow me to take a loan that big. She has made sure I always stayed away from taking loans in college and only took a very small couple $1,000 loans. So I hardly have any debt, and we want to stay that way.

The other issue is that if I get a second bachelor’s degree from this accelerated nursing program, I don’t get anymore financial aid from the State of NJ or Fafsa. Plus I am an EOF student (Educational Opportunity Fund) which is financial program for families under a certain income level in NJ. My mom is a single parent, and we don’t have much money for college.

So once I realized that, I decided that maybe I should not do this accelerated program after all if I cannot afford it.

I thought maybe I would try to switch to another major…Communication Arts: Global Communication and Media Concentration…thinking maybe this will be a more employable major.

However, I keep hearing that I may not be able to find a good paying job with Benefits needed to survive in America.

So now

I want to find a job in healthcare or technology where I can get benefits and still make good money or work in a business/marketing job.

My choices are:

Option 1:
go back to Social Science: with Community Mental Health concentration (1 or 2 courses left)

Option 2:
Change back to my first major, American Studies. (6 courses left + 1 Language School Core course = 7 Total left

Option 3:
Change to another major and just suck up to many more classes I have to do (15 courses)

Option 4:
Stick with my major Communications (12 courses left)

Option 5:
Transfer to another school or community college to find a degree that is more in demand.

If you have other options, please write about it.

Thank you all.

2

Or with Option 1 I can be a social science major still but have a different concentration (Labor studies for example) then pick up a minor in Information Technology or some other minor.

3

I would suggest starting over with your assessment of your options, because I don’t think you’ve received, so far, enough quality or quantity of information.

I will begin with the teaching career.

What I have found today searching for teacher jobs online shows your education professors’ statements to be far from true.

When I searched “teacher” on the jobs site Indeed.com I got a phenomenal 100,000 results (2,750 when limited to New Jersey). I looked at many of the results and saw no more emphasis on science and math than in the New Jersey teaching credential requirements (http://certificationmap.com/states/new-jersey-teacher-certification/#req). Other sites I looked at were www.teachers-teachers.com, www.k12jobspot.com, www.jobs2careers.com and www.ihireelementaryteachers.com. Because the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) (http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_102.htm) predicts more job growth and openings for elementary and middle school teachers (12% growth & 684,000 openings in 2012-2022) than for high school teachers (5.55% growth & 340,00 openings in 2012-2022), I particularly looked at elementary and middle school jobs. (BLS’ predicted job growth average of all occupations is 10.8% for 2012-2022.) By the way, the BLS remarks that, “Opportunities will vary by region and school setting. Job prospects should be better in the South and West, which are expected to have rapid enrollment growth. Furthermore, opportunities will be better in urban and rural school districts than in suburban school districts.” According to http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/elementary-school-teacher, the national unemployment rate for elementary school teachers was 3.1% in 2013 or later, decidedly below the average for all occupations. Incidentally, a lot of applicants for entry jobs isn’t, I think, all that significant, because a lot of people (who weren’t well aware of what it would entail) become disenchanted with the profession, or at least in certain areas.

If you like the idea of being a teacher (do research on what it entails, e.g. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/randy-turner/a-warning-to-young-people_b_3033304.html and the comments at the bottom of http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/todays-newest-teachers-face-tough-job-odds-high-turnover/) and you’re prepared to move to another part of country likely to need teachers especially, it makes sense to see how much work you would have to do now to get a teaching credential.

(It should be noted that instructors have no qualifications for giving career advice in their field other than their own experiences, the experiences their colleagues might have shared with them and what they have picked up in publications, meetings, websites or other communication media they visit. These sources are likely to be dated (obsolete), based on little data and absent of objective data analysis.)

4

@Marvelfan,

I recommend putting your post (also) in the College Majors forum, since many people who like to help with major choices go there.

I’ll re-post here comments of @juillet I earlier submitted on creativewriter4’s thread:

juillet asserts that every one of the majors you are considering is good enough to get a job. If you post on the College Majors forum, you’ll likely get a reply from her tailored to you.

5

Now to address other issues in your situation.

(I’ll refer to Social Science with Community Mental Health concentration as SSCMH, American Studies as AS, and Communications as C.)

There is little difference in employability with these 3 majors. Unemployment figures on Students Review dot com for sociology, history and communication (the majors listed there closest to SSCMH, AS and C, respectively) are 4.1%, 5.6% and 6.8%, respectively. The salary ranges given on Payscale.com for sociology, history and communication are almost identical ($32,000 to $65,000). Both these websites indicate that sociology majors are apt to become administrative assistants and/or work in human resources or recruiting, a large minority of history majors teach in some context, while the other history majors work in a wide array of white-collar occupations, and communications majors are apt to work in marketing.

So the big reason (in addition to a couple of small ones) I recommend that you finish your undergraduate college work with a SSCMH degree is that you only have “1 or 2” courses left to do that way. I consider it unlikely that the trouble you will have to go to to get a job with a SSCMH degree (supplemented by the C and AS courses you’ve done) will be as great as the trouble of doing 12 or more courses in a new area. I therefore see it as much more sensible for you to investigate the job market for a liberal arts person than to start over with a new bachelor’s degree.

The difficult part of employment as a liberal arts person need only be in getting the first few months of work experience in an occupational track that is fairly secure. You will have to: 1) research the job market for someone with your liberal arts education, identifying jobs that are in demand and likely to stay so or artificially have security, like public school jobs, 2) coach yourself to be patient while you are seeking employment, 3) learn the activities necessary to be successful in job hunting, i.e. finding job openings (not only through advertisements, but also through friends, family and other people who know you), resume creation, cover letter writing, interviewing, 3) apply for MANY jobs and 4) make sure you build work experience in secure, and otherwise desirable, directions.

I think that only in the (unlikely) case it does not happen to work out well with just your liberal arts degree, consider doing something to augment it, such as a human resources course or a teaching credential. (By the way, there is forgiveness of common types student loans if the student goes on to teach in certain areas for 5 years, described at https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/repay-loans/forgiveness-cancellation/teacher.)

6

12% and 5.55% are very small percentages though that’s too small to take a risk. I would rather look for jobs that have higher percentage such as 50% or 75%. Also the teaching jobs for hunmanties majors are in urban cities that have low pay, unruly kids, and political controlled administration that harbors job advancement and makes your job worse. I knew someone who taught in Paterson that had that problem, less than $30,000 a year, kids treated her like crap, and they would not give her more pay for dealing with these horrible disobedient kids. Education has become a business now a days. Not catered towards the individual. They don’t care about the students individual needs and only care about the administration making the most money. It’s just not worth it to me. I don’t want to teach in urban areas and in schools with corrupt administration.

7

But at least there is some hope for liberal arts majors and finding jobs.

8

Thank you so much for your advice I appreciate it a lot.

9

12% and 5.55% are the amounts the BLS expects the field (number of people employed) to grow in the period 2012-2022. Even for the recognized very hot field of “Computer and Information Analysts” they predict only 26% growth (http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_102.htm lists their predictions for all occupations.) They do predict nearly 50% growth for these: interpreters/translators (46%), home health aides (48%), personal care aides (49%), occupational therapy assistants (43%), diagnostic medical sonographers (46%), industrial-organizational psychologists (53%), insulation workers, mechanical (47%), helpers–brickmasons, blockmasons, stonemasons, and tile and marble setters (43%). Only two of these are huge fields; you can probably guess which ones they are.

(I include strange things in the interests of being thorough and providing complete information - it doesn’t mean I’m taking the position of advocating them for you.)