Hi! I am having a very difficult time picking a major for college. I’m highly interested in applying to medical school so I definitely want to choose a challenging or an impressive major (though at the same time I want it to be a major I can succeed well in). Additionally, since medical school is extremely competitive, I want to be able to make sure that I can still get a well-paying job with the major that I do choose. Here were my options: Neuroscience, Chemistry, Biological Sciences, or Communication Studies. What do you all think? Any suggestions? If it helps, I will be attending a top 20 university according to US News and though I am definitely more of a science and math person, I have a variety of interests- I really love creative writing, I want to create my own blog, and I enjoy dancing and performing. I just really want to be happy and successful with whatever major I choose. Thank you!
Communication majors tend to end up working as administrators in offices (http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Degree=Bachelor_of_Arts_%28BA%29%2c_Communication/Salary). So, unless you are quite happy with that, a communications major would be contraindicated. I don’t find there’s much variation in the opportunities for neuroscience, biology and chemistry majors, which usually lead to some kind of technical work, typically, in the absence of a professional health degree, in laboratories. I think, however, you will get the most useful information out of a neuroscience program, which to a large extent covers both psychology and biology.
You don’t need a challenging or impressive major to get into med school. Med schools largely do not care what your major is. On the contrary, a good strategy might be picking a not-so-challenging major so you can get high grades, because high grades are far more important to med school than what you actually majored in.
Payscale is not a good place to figure out where certain majors “tend” to end up, as it’s a convenience sample made up of people who happened to go there for something specific (salary data). For example, for the specific linked page, there are just over 200 people who responded. I’m fairly certain there are many more than 200 people in the U.S. who have communications degrees. They’re not a representative sample at all. Besides, working as an “administrator” in an office can be wildly different - I’m a UX researcher; I work with software developers; we both work in offices at computers but have vastly different jobs. Even just from that list, a marketing manager or director is a VERY different job from an administrative assistant!
Most professionals these days work in offices.
Also, I would wager that most natural science majors actually don’t work in laboratories. Majors don’t lead neatly to jobs in that way, and most biology and chemistry majors probably actually aren’t qualified to do technical work in laboratories.
The bottom line is, I think you could pick any of those things and do well and be happy - you just need to be planful about developing skills and gaining experience that would be valued by employers. If you are a chemistry major but you learn how to program, maybe you can go into biotech; or if you do two marketing internships, maybe you can go into pharmaceutical marketing; or if you get a good grasp on math and stats, you could go into biostatistics or epidemiology. Or you could do something completely unrelated to the natural sciences at all - there are lots of chemistry and biology majors who have non-science business jobs.
I think Payscale would have SOME representativeness. Anyway, it’s reasonable to expect that the odds of going into various employment fields would be somewhat different when one has a science degree than when one has a non-science degree.
The very many microbiology and chemistry laboratories that do food and/or water testing in the US, I know from much experience working in them, don’t normally expect more academic qualification than a bachelor’s degree in chemistry or a life science from the people they hire to do the tests. They’re often prepared to take less. The first two “lab technician” job advertisements (dairy products, Wisconsin, Idaho) I find on Indeed.com today call for “Associate’s Degree with an emphasis in chemistry, microbiology or other related discipline required. An equivalent combination of education and experience may be considered”, “Required: High school diploma or equivalent…1-2 years experience as laboratory technician or equivalent experience preferred.” The job specifics the hires need to know they learn on the job. (Not all laboratory work is all that fancy. In at least that sector of the laboratory world, ALL biology and chemistry majors are considered qualified to do technical work.)
Representative simply means that the people in the sample accurately reflect the people in the population.
Payscale is a convenience sample. It’s not drawn from people who are randomly selected from society; it’s drawn from people who fit a specific set of criteria: probably job hunters; job hunters who used Payscale to look at salary data (as opposed to another website like Glassdoor or the BLS). The field of study and degree questions are also optional - you don’t have to enter them in order to get the salary information you’re seeking. And also - there’s no way for them to identify you as the same person who has already filled out the survey, so I can fill out the survey multiple times. I could even fill out the survey right now for each job I’ve held in the past 5 years and Payscale would treat me like 5 new people.
There’s no way to know, therefore, whether Payscale accurately represents the population or within the specific major in question.
I have no doubt that biology majors are more likely to go into laboratory tech work than, say, art history majors. However, that’s different from saying that degrees in these field usually lead to technical work in laboratories, which I think is inaccurate. I would guess that the majority of natural science majors actually do not work in laboratories.
In fact, I don’t have to guess. The Census Bureau has a more representative sample of the U.S. and they actually have some [url=<a href=“http://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/stem/stem-html/%5Ddata%5B/url”>http://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/stem/stem-html/]data[/url] about this. The majority of biological, environmental and agricultural sciences majors actually do not work in the life sciences (or any STEM field) after college. A large chunk of them go into health care, but the non-health trained ones go into all sorts of other positions.