I have two goals in life. What should I major in?

My two goals in life are to:

(1) Let people connect with one another in more meaningful and genuine ways
(2) Contribute to conservation efforts and climate change solutions

Because these two goals are relatively general, I feel that there’s many paths available. For instance, with (1), there’s research in sociology (e.g., effects of social media on loneliness), social work, building relevant applications, etc. For (2), it’s a bit more specific. Making a lot of money, then donating it and/or being an entrepreneur is also an indirect option I suppose.

I am rising to my sophomore year in college. What do you think I should major in to have maximum influence towards these goals? (Hypothetically, not taking into account passion and interest.)

Start a business or non profit that does both

Well, it kind of depends on which goals you want to fulfill in your career and which goals you would be content fulfilling with volunteering and other experiences. For example, I love to teach high school and college students, but my current job provides limited opportunities for doing that. So I volunteer on the weekends to teach writing classes to high schoolers in an enrichment program; my day job is mostly unrelated to that.

The other thing is that your career goals and the way you like to work, plus how much education you want to get, will decide what you choose. For example, to do sociological or psychological research of social media on loneliness (that sounds more like psychology than sociology, although you could probably study it in both), you’d need a PhD in that field (which takes 5-7 years) plus probably two years of postdoctoral research to get a position as a researcher at a university, a think tank, or a nonprofit organization that studies that. The other thing is that your contributions would be relatively indirect; PhD-level researchers write papers that are read by other scientists and practitioners, and it can take years for your ideas to filter down to people who actually take your work and build applications. Some people really love that high-level, basic, theoretical research! And other people get frustrated with it and would rather have a more direct impact.

There are lots of careers that accomplish #1 - like you already mentioned, social work (and clinical/counseling psychology and marriage and family therapy) can do that, but you can also do that through working for a social media company (potentially as a software developer but in a lot of other roles as well) or a company that does matchmaking, like eHarmony or Match dot com.

There are lots of majors that investigate #2. The obvious ones are environmental science, earth and ocean sciences (like geology, meteorology, atmospheric science, geography, earth science, etc.), chemistry, and physics, maybe biology as well (like animal science or wildlife biology). Some schools have majors that focus on sustainability and conservation. College of the Atlantic is a college that focuses on human ecology, broadly defined. There’s also majors like forestry, which are less often pursued.

But there’s other ways to do that, too - like political science could lead you into studying/working in environmental policy, or sociology can end up with you studying how people and groups interact with their natural world/environment, or math or statistics can lead into you analyzing big data to solve environmental problems.

I guess the point is - there’s no one major, or even a circumscribed set, that lead directly into either of the things you want. There are many routes there!

Thanks Juillet for the detailed response!

Have you considered a degree in Sustainability? There you would work with people in a meaningful way to make changes in how we use our resources that affect climate change.

https://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2014/06/11/are-sustainability-degrees-worth-it

I imagine you would find the interdisciplinary Cultural Cognition Project very interesting. http://www.culturalcognition.net/

Among other things, they have done a number of studies relating to what happens when communication about climate science intersects with cultural tribes and value systems. Although it’s headquartered at Yale Law School, if you dig into the People section of their site you’ll find professors in a variety of fields at other schools. That might lead you toward some potential majors.

I suggest majoring in Computer Science. Computer Science will equip you with a set of tools that you can use to solve any sort of problems you can think of in a diverse set of fields such as communication, education, environmental sustainability, health, etc. Any field you can think of, Computer Science can be applied to.