<p>We have oodles of time before we declare our concentrations, but has anyone so far figured out what they really want to do? I'm very, very, very confused myself, because the subjects I like are on polar ends of the academic spectrum. </p>
<p>Also, does anyone know when they just decided to end joint concentrations in the Econ Dept, and possibly why?</p>
<p>It’s good to be unsure. You will be more satisfied when you finally pick something. I didn’t know what I wanted to concentrate in freshman year.</p>
<p>How good it is to be unsure really depends upon the direction the individual is considering. For certain concentrations, if you are not actively preparing for it while considering it, it would be very difficult to achieve it or to achieve it with depth. </p>
<p>I have two children. D, a sophomore at Harvard, had a general area of interest - she wanted a degree from the life science department, including CSN, Neurobio, and HDRB. Each is these have very specific structures to their freshman and sophomore curriculum. Many of the courses must be taken in order and/or are only offered in the fall or spring. Because D did not yet know her concentration, she prepared for all three simultaneously. In her first three semester’s, she has taken only one course that did not count towards graduation. The benefit is that by being focused and keeping on track, she is going to be able to take extensive courses in her concentration. In November she declared her concentration, Neurobiology with a Mind, Brain, and Behavior track. She’s glad she prepared and knew her direction. She is currently on campus because she was approved to live on campus while interning in a Neuroscientist’s lab.</p>
<p>S graduated from college in 2009. His intended major was one that we knew was his from the age of two. He entered the Tufts engineering program to study computer science. There the CS program is offered in both the engineering dept and the school of A&S. It has a VERY specific contiguous structure for it’s first two years with some courses offered in only spring or fall. S enters as a freshman planning to take the courses he had been planning on for years and to take the courses required by the CS department. Instead, he was basically forced by the assistant dean of engineering to take the very structured engineering track since “he could not know what he wanted to study”. Taking her advice, he started that track not knowing the consequences. Because of the contiguous nature of those early CS courses and their limited availability, he got off track and did not get fully on track until his junior year. Though he is happy with the courses he took, he would have been even happier if he did not miss some pertinent limited release courses during his sophomore year when he had unfortunately not fulfilled the pre-requisites. Allowing the dean to claim my son was unsure did have consequences.</p>
<p>I will speculate that Dwight’s areas of interest allow for more lateral movement than my children’s concentrations/majors.</p>
<p>Thanks for the different perspectives! </p>
<p>I had gotten the impression that many students have figured out their dream career well before their concentration. A single concentration can lead to several types of careers, depending on other factors as well, but ideally, when should have students finalized their career ambitions?</p>
<p>D has picked her concentration but will not figure out her career until much later. She will graduate with this life science concentration, but she could take it many directions. The following is a list published by her Neurobiology department. It shows you the range that a single concentration can have and the same will apply to whatever you are considering: <a href=“http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic134565.files/What%20can%20I%20do%20with%20a%20degree%20in%20Neurobiology.pdf[/url]”>http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic134565.files/What%20can%20I%20do%20with%20a%20degree%20in%20Neurobiology.pdf</a></p>
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<p>Before they retire.</p>
<p>^ Too funny. I had wanted to write that but chickened out. :)</p>
<p>History!</p>
<p>As explained to me by a senior economics professor, they ended joint concentrations in the economics department because a joint thesis must totally fulfill the requirements of each department. This is difficult. Also, and perhaps more importantly, the economics department is really stingy with handing out high grades and honors for graduation. When people do joint concentrations, College policy is that if the departments cannot agree on the grade and the honor, the person will get the lower of the set. So you’d have a lot of cases where, say, someone would write a thesis in HAA-Econ. HAA would want to give them an A and a magna. Economics would be like, what, no, this is a B+ at best, and we give like 20 magnas (or whatever small number it is). This ain’t one of ‘em, for sure. So the person would end up with a B+ and less honors. Economics decided that this was not in the best interest of the students. (My class and I then proceeded to razz the professor about how he, as a libertarian-leaning member of a department that is certainly not overwhelmingly interventionist, could support forbidding something unilaterally because it was not in the students’ best interest, vs. letting them make their own mistakes. His response was basically, “Yeah, well.”)</p>