Hi! Is anyone here going into the College of Human Ecology, or is in, at Cornell, and can tell me a little bit about the Human Development major? Do most of the ppl who graduate with this degree end up going into advocacy and community service, or can I choose a different route? Also, is it easy to transfer from this school to, say, Arts and Sciences, if I find that it is not a right fit for me? Thanks!
Human Development is a very interesting area, IMO. I took a course in it some years ago, though not at Cornell.
It deals with how people change, physically but mostly psychologically, over their life-span.
I can’t say what is going on there now, but historically Cornell’s program in this area was fantastic. They had a giant in the field, Uri Bronfenbrenner, heading it up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urie_Bronfenbrenner
I don’t think “advocacy and community service” per se are really the most typical destinations pursued by people with this major. Other majors of the college like Policy Studies, perhaps, but not this one. It is really a sort of “applied psychology” major. I would think these majors more likely head towards careers like social worker, psychologist, education, guidance counselor, medical field of one sort or other.
Here’s an internship link that may give some ideas:
http://www.human.cornell.edu/career-development/career-exploration/upload/HD-Feb-2011.pdf
Regarding difficulty of inter-college transfer, maybe you can talk to a “peer support volunteer” from the Office of Internal transfers and Concurrent Degrees to get more information:
http://internaltransfer.cornell.edu/sample-page/internal-transfers/
But don’t give them the impression that you are trying to use Hum Ec to “back-door” your way into CAS, because that will not go down well.
There are minimum standards and procedures listed on that site.
I actually did an inter-college transfer there, but it was from engineering, not Hum Ec, and it was long ago.
At that time, one needed to have done reasonably well in courses taken at the target college, including in my prospective major there, and have a good reason for transfer. Providing these standards were met, transfer was generally approved. They weren’t trying to make it onerous, just making sure you knew what you were doing and could do the work in your intended college/major.
But IIRC a lot of HD courses are cross-listed with the CAS psychology department , so it might not make much sense to switch to a psychology major in CAS, in a lot of cases anyway.
I have friends who studied HD, and they’re all taking a variety of different paths post-college. A couple are headed to med school, one is applying to law school, I know one who went on to enroll in a PhD program (for some kind of psychology I believe). Not really sure what you have in mind with “advocacy and community service,” but there are a ton of possibilities with that major.