<p>I'm an ILR '15/'16 RD hopeful (depending on possible deferment). I've been doing a lot of premature research on minors/concentrations I might be interested in pursuing. Apparently, a lot of ILR students choose to minor in Law and Society or Economics. I'm mostly interested in business and government, but I've considered law as well. However, I don't find economics particularly interesting and I don't think Law and Society would allow me to fully explore my interests.</p>
<p>The Policy Analysis and Management program in the College of Human Ecology is very intriguing as it applies to careers in both business and government. Is it possible to minor in PAM while majoring in ILR? Is this recommended? Any and all insight would be greatly appreciated.</p>
<p>This is wayyy over simplifying things, but I’d say that an economics major is going to study theory and a PAM major is going to study that economics theory (amongst a few other things, one of which I’ve heard is a lot of public health stuff and things like aging) in the context of and as applied to public policy. In fact, the intro microeconomics lecture is a PAM course taught by a PAM professor, who, to give you an idea of the upper level stuff, teaches another course called “The Economics of Social Security.” Honestly, two things:
A) Don’t worry about things like minors now if you haven’t even applied yet. Most freshmen here haven’t even thought about them yet and if they have, nothing is set in stone.
B) Your best bet if you want to get a feel for a department or major or minor is to go through the course catalog and read the descriptions. You can also usually find old or even current syllabuses on the internet and check out the readings the class is doing. Much better than going off of anecdotal second hand accounts on CC.