Freaking out about choosing a major!

Sorry for the lengthy post, please help!

Hello, I am currently attending community college and I have a 4.0 GPA. I will be transferring to a university in my state in the fall of 2018.

The problem is that I don’t know what to major in. Right now I am “majoring” in Economics because it’s an ok career choice and makes money. But I have no passion for it, or anything else for that matter. If I could, I would go to film school or something creative but I am not going to take the risk because I want to make money in life.

I am not very good at math but I am going to have to take it up to Calc II. I want a major that I can get a good job with only an undergraduate degree. Any math intensive majors like engineering are out because I will not survive!

I’m basically going to college and getting a major as a prerequisite because after college I want to do one of the following…

  1. Teach English abroad for a while
  2. Go to air traffic control school
  3. Open my own small business
  4. Go to graduate school in another country

Is Econ a good choice? I’m also thinking about applying to the business school and majoring in international business or marketing, I am more interested in these. I just need to graduate and have a good chance at getting a job in the future but not right away. What major has the best career prospects in case my other plans don’t work out or I need supplemental income?

Thank for your answers!

Any of those good-paying jobs that you can get right out of undergrad with an economics degree are going to require a lot of math/quantitative thinking. There’s a reason that they require you to take all that math.

There are lots of things you can do as a creative that can make you a good salary and support your lifestyle. There’s marketing/advertising, industrial design, graphic art, web design, commercial video filming/editing, all kinds of things. There’s art all around us in all of the business things that we do - most people just don’t realize that it’s art.

You can teach English abroad with any major - through Fulbright or a specialized program (like JET or EPIK). But unless you plan on doing that as your career, you’ll have to come back and do something else after you’re done. And if you are planning on doing that as a career, why not major in English education with a focus on bilingual education?

You can also open a small business with any major, but you have to have a business plan and offer something that is of value to people.

You can go to graduate school in another country with any major, too, but if you want to go just to live in another country for a few years it’s better for you to find another avenue through which to do that. Fulbright grants, interning or working abroad are better bets. Graduate degrees are expensive and if you want to come back to work in the States afterwards, an international degree might not be that useful.

That’s not really how majors work. Employers hire for skills, not necessarily major. When they do select students on the basis of their major it’s because of the skills they assume were learned during that (e.g., hiring a CS major to be a software developer. Lots of employers will and do hire other majors in software development positions as long as they know programming and computer science fundamentals).

If you are more interested in marketing or international business, those sound like better majors for you.