Hello, currently I am a second semester freshman and I have to be honest I have no idea what degree or career I want to pursue. I’m currently undeclared but I am taking classes that would go towards a degree in either history or political science. Both of those are my interests but the job outlooks for careers in those fields are less than comforting. I have also considered doing something in like Public Relations but I honestly have no idea and would love any and all feedback from anyone who can give me some tips on how to choose a career and major.
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Degree=Bachelor_of_Arts_%28BA%29%2c_History/Salary and http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Degree=Bachelor_of_Arts_%28BA%29%2c_Political_Science_%28PolySci%29/Salary give some examples of what actual people have obtained with a BA in history (office administration, teaching, legal) and a BA in political science (legal and office administration), respectively. The Students Review dot com site has more examples.
Human resources management, health services management, social and community service management, college social science teaching and college administration are professions pertinent to a history/political science background and are expected to have distinctly better than average job growth and a robust number of job openings 2014-2024 (http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_102.htm). By the way, some colleges offer BAs in paralegal studies, human resources management and possibly other of those job areas.
It should be noted that web development and computer and information systems management are especially growing and sizable fields that appear accessible with just some IT coursework. They don’t require a whole major in IT. It frequently happens that humanities and liberal arts graduates go into computer work (http://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/stem/stem-html/ - choose non-STEM tab and put your cursor on Computer workers). There’s something to be said for preparing for that turn of events. There’s also much to be said for getting in some business classes, considering the odds of history/political science graduates going on to work in administration/management. The major isn’t everything - side courses can matter a lot.