@brantly, I guess I’m wondering whether many creative writers find the types of jobs you mentioned any more satisfying than any other job. On another thread a poster suggested that having to write all day was a bit draining to the energy for doing creative writing after hours and that maybe having a rather different day job was more conducive to writing. I really don’t know, but that sounds plausible to me.
My daughter would really like to be a Princess. A Disney princess. I consider her major in art history to be a rational choice. It’s all relative.
My aunt is a phi beta kappa from Pomona (many years ago). She’s been an author for about 35 years, but could never have supported herself in her current lifestyle if she hadn’t been married to someone supplying that lifestyle. However, she would have been happy without the lifestyle too. She would have been just fine living an an efficiency apartment and writing and never having a dime extra. That’s just her personality.
If you want a sure thing, major in chemical engineering. If you want a liberal arts experience, go for it. A world of opportunities await.
@mathyone Well, you don’t really write all day. You do other, related tasks more than you actually compose words on paper (screen). You go to meetings, you interview people, you gather information, you propose the next writing project, you ask for approvals, and you incorporate the edits that others give you. A lot of it is project management.
If you really love to write, all sorts of uses of the skill can be satisfying and pay well (that much, a number here have said.) The issue is that many kids, after years of structured education, are drawn to the seeming freedom of “creative” writing. They usually do this for their own satisfaction. I think it’s important to distinguish between enjoying, in effect, a hobby, a diversion, being holed up, indulging yourself with no one over your shoulder correcting grammar or asking you to refine structure, no grade pressure, etc, versus truly developing, working on and honing a level of skill.
In the end, if you want to make a living as a writer, you have to be able to draw an audience, whether it’s home readers, corporate, research publications, or whatever. Or a best selling novel with rave reviews. You may think you can write, but can you produce what the market wants?
Can you see how that’s different than the “doing it for myself?”
You don’t need to know starting out – take a range of courses your first year to explore interests, keeping in mind general ed requirements. You will be on track to get a degree on time.
Some majors do have longer prerequisite sequences or large volumes of requirements that must be started early in order to graduate on time, although this tends to be less of an issue with humanities majors that are not art and do not require learning a new foreign language.
The OP is headed to Princeton and leaning toward a creative writing. He’ll be fine.
While we can dream of anything in our lives, dreaming of becoming an Olympic athlete is NOT the same as dreaming of becoming a CS professional. Dreaming of having “a best selling novel with rave reviews.” more or less belongs in the “Olympic athlete” category, it has very little to do with the plan for financial independence that ALL parent would like to have while paying for their children college. This is a reality. We can have our heads in the wonderful clouds of dreaming, but we need to have our feet firmly in the reality or we will continue falling and sleeping and falling again…
As I understand, and I may be wrong, the requirement for a senior thesis in the major at Princeton makes it difficult to double major in two different areas. The thesis would have to combine both fields, which is fine if the student intends some kind of interdisciplinary major, but doesn’t work for the student who really wants both a “practical” and “dream” major where some combination just doesn’t make sense. For example, I could imagine a student at another school double majoring in accounting and creative writing, with the idea of being an accountant while they write the next great American novel. But a thesis that combines accounting with creative writing? (This is why I’m not convinced Princeton would be a good choice for my writer kid).
I believe you cannot double major at Princeton. At least in DH’s day, this was true. He was a double major in Physics and EE, but for the not-being-allowed-to-also-be-a-physics major
Those of us who graduated college 30 years ago entered a much different job market than today’s college graduates will enter. So our experiences may no longer be relevant. Many college graduates today are working at jobs that in previous generations would only require a high school diploma or no diploma at all.
I’m working at a career that has no degree requirements whatsoever… but I write… and writing was the skill I emphasized when getting started at my current career. I used to be a lawyer (degree required!) … and what did I do? Mostly, I wrote. It was a different context, but I wrote.
I am stunned at the exceptionally narrow view many posters in this thread have both of the employment landscape and the relationship of an undergraduate degree to employment… as well as earnings potential of all sorts of occupations.
It make no sense to push a young person toward a major where they have little interest or aptitude… they won’t do well and they will be miserable.
A degree is a not a slot that confines the recipient to a narrow set of choices … it is simply a credential, that may or may not be relevant or important in terms of an employment or career path.
100% agree. Ours is not the prevailing view nowadays. But I think it is the correct one. 
“It make no sense to push a young person toward a major where they have little interest or aptitude… they won’t do well and they will be miserable.”
- I cannot understand how the student who is accepted to Princeton will not do well. It is not possible. These type of students absolutely make sure that they do well even when they hate the subject…otherwise, they are not getting into Princeton. I know this type very well and usually they also aware what they may like and not and have options, they like to plan and they have VERY WIDE RANGE OF INTERESTS. Great writing skills are appreciated greatly, so there is a good chance that person with great writing skills actually will do very well in many fields.
To back up Calmom, but with a somewhat different argument, a college major will include only a fraction – perhaps only 25% – of the course of study. Students should approach college as an adventure in which they will discover and be able to explore a wide range of subjects, and may well follow up on interests that are only at an incipient stage now. Most students change their majors at least once. A 17-18 year-old entering a superior college like Princeton is going to discover possibilities that are not in mind at this time.
Certainly you should spend time exploring in college, and I don’t think anyone here thinks otherwise. On the other hand, if you wander aimlessly and don’t develop any useful base of knowledge in college, that really won’t be good for you in the long run. Writers who can only write are a dime a dozen and are treated as such - to be successful as a writer (or insert profession here) you have to have something more. And employability often does have a lot to do with learning practical applications of academic knowledge, which is a great thing to learn in college.
I wouldn’t pooh pooh what the diploma says. For a writer, one attractive day job is teaching because it allows more time than just about any other job to pursue writing. My daughter is considering a double major in psych and writing. If she decides she wants to be a teacher at some point, it may be a problem for her if her diploma does not also say BA in “English” or at least “writing” on it. As I understand it, some (many?) states require a college degree in the field being taught, for hs teachers. I can count the number of psych teachers in our entire school system on one hand.
^At least in NY it is not the degree name, but the courses taken that count. I know because at one point I thought about teaching HS Physics and Math, even though my BS, MS, and PhD are in Electrical Engineering. But those degrees required enough Physics and Math that I was deemed qualified to teach both of those. It probably varies state to state, and certainly you would need the number of classes equivalent to a BA major.
OP hasn’t even started college. He or she can take a freaking writing class, a math class, etc. Even some courses he hasn’t taken before, explore. Then see how things develop.
What’s the rush to declare?
90% of the advice in this thread is irrelevant to a Princeton student. Princeton does not offer any double majors or any business majors (unless you consider Operations Research “business”). It has one of the best undergraduate creative writing programs in the world. It doesn’t offer a creative writing major per se. It offers the equivalent of a creative writing minor, plus students majoring in something else can get approval to do a creative writing thesis under the supervision of the creative writing faculty. “Creative writing” includes nonfiction writing as well as fiction, poetry, screenwriting, and translation.
Anyone can apply to creative writing seminars, and no one is entitled to be admitted. It’s competitive.
Nothing will stop the OP from taking a couple of the introductory writing courses and seeing where he stands. He – and all the other students interested in creative writing – will also be studying other things. There aren’t a lot of Princeton graduates who are unable to earn a living, if they want to do that.
It’s also the case that many more people are interested in creative writing when they start college than finish college trying to earn a living as a writer, especially a writer of fiction. My daughter wanted to be a writer, and entered college with a portfolio hundreds of pages long, mainly of short stories. She won prizes, she won admission to programs as competitive as getting into Harvard. She took creative writing courses in college, and did a lot of arts journalism for campus papers, an alternative weekly, and a women’s rock magazine. She knew a lot of writers, and studied how they lived. She’s not a writer. She got interested in other things. She has had a series of great, substantive jobs working on big social problems. She uses her writing ability all the time, but she’s not trying to support herself that way.
I know a couple of creative writing majors who are (or were) chefs, and one who is a successful (and very hip) event florist. And its no secret that the nation’s law firms and DA’s offices are stuffed with people who write novels on the side . . . and sometimes even publish them.