I'm freaking out

Student Lounge College Life
1

So I keep hearing people saying “your major doesn’t affect your career.”
What? I’ve been leaning my whole life toward med school (growing up in a household full of healthcare professionals), but as I spend more and more time in college, I realize more and more that I don’t think I can handle the extra schooling that comes with being a doctor.

I’m at that point where I have to decide between I should go the pre-med track or not. I’ve been reading the articles, doing my own research, and I’ve been seeing that a huge proportion of people who apply to med schools (40%) don’t get in. As someone who might be graduating with an A.B. in Neuroscience or Biology, that leaves me with little to no choice but to go to grad school to get a good career… something I’m open to but I’d much rather prefer having a job straight out of college.

My school has a “five-year engineering program,” where you take an extra year after your four years of undergrad to get an AB and an ABET-accredited degree, so I was thinking that I could pursue that. I have time and some of the required courses, so I’d be able to finish the program much earlier, not having to take the extra year.

My question is, I guess, to people who end up getting jobs outside of their major. What job is it? How well does it pay? What was your major? How did you get it? Did you have to go to grad school?

2

You’re starting with the wrong end of the stick. What do you want to do?

When people talk about your major not mattering, mostly what they mean is, that in a liberal arts context, you don’t have to major in something directly or even indirectly related to what your career ends up being.

You can go to law school with a neuroscience major.

There are philosophy majors who go to med school.

So start by trying to figure out what you’re good at, what you like doing, what you’re interested in. Talk to the career services office at your school. They will likely have some ideas to help you figure things out. Internships and information interviews can be a good way to learn about various industries and career paths. And it’s ok if your first job or two ends up being something that helps you explore.

I know it’s a big, scary world with an endless number of different jobs. But it’s ok. You don’t have to know at 20 what you want to be doing at 30 or 50.

So some places to start thinking about things are:

Do you want to be a healthcare professional of some sort, even if you’re not up for med school?

Do you want to do science in a non-medical context?

Are you thinking about engineering because you’re genuinely interested or because it’s there and you’re grasping at straws?

Do you want to do something more science adjacent, rather than actually working in science?

What else interests you?

Are you dead set against ever going to grad/professional school or do you just want to work for a while to take a break from school or figure out what you want to do?

You’ll likely get some answers to the specific questions in your post, but I promise you, if you could talk to a broad sample of people who ended up in careers unrelated to their major, you’d hear every possible permutation of how they got from their major to their career.

3

The solution is to become a nurse!

4

Agree, you need to think about what you want to do first and then determine if it requires grad school My D started off thinking about pre-med but decided she didn’t want the long haul of going through the schooling/training needed to become doctor. She like the sciences so considered a number of allied medical professions – she found ways to shadow people in an number of fields she thought might be good fits for her interests/goals (ex. physical therapy, occupational therapy etc.) and is now in grad school for speech pathology (and loves it). It is still a long haul, but not nearly as much as med school. As another idea, a cousin’s kid did a post-bac and became a RN after graduating college so that is another option in the medical field…

So my bottom line is to take time to think about and research alternatives (including the engineering degree you mentioned) and then move forward. There are many options.

5

Some ideas on picking majors:

  1. Go to your college’s career center or HS Guidance Office and talk to them. They may have tests/tools that help you figure out what career (and therefore major) is best for you)

  2. What classes do you prefer? Science/Math? English/History?

  3. Read this article: What problem do you want to solve?
    https://■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/pulse/20140804104444-17000124-let-s-kill-the-college-major

  4. Take an online quiz…there are many
    http://www.luc.edu/undergrad/academiclife/whatsmymajorquiz/
    http://www.slu.edu/beabilliken/quiz-college-majors
    https://www.123test.com/career-test/

  5. Talk to the professor/teacher in your favorite class and see what they think

  6. Pre-med/sociology/public health/psychology are majors where you want to help people directly.
    Business/engineering/comp sci are majors where you want to solve technical/organizational problems.
    Which is more appealing to you?