I’m currently a junior in high school in California; planning on attending a university somewhere on the east coast. I want to work for the FBI after college, and they require at least one college degree to even be eligible for application. I want to triple major in Law, Psychology, and Sociology (Master’s in Psych and Sociology, PhD in Law), but I’ve heard different things from different sources. I’ve heard that triple majoring is not recommended because it shows “lack of creativity”, but I’ve also heard it is recommended, because it shows a strong work ethic and intellect. Does anyone have any input on this?
College coursework is nothing like high school courses. Triple majoring is really not necessary. Trying to meet the graduation requirements for 3 majors is not going to be simple. It’s really hard.
FWIW: The FBI comes to you if they want you. They recruit at the colleges and tend to go to the ivies for their best candidates.
to your original question Rachel: the idea of triple majoring seems needlessly obsessive to me. A double major is cool – a triple seems like trophy hunting. If you want to be a lawyer one day, focus on a major that forces you to read a ton and develop your writing and analytical skills. There is no such thing as a major in “law” – please adopt this as it discredits you immediately when you say such a thing. Good luck to you.
But don’t narrow the field down to one possible employer too early. The world is a big place and you may find many potential careers, let alone employers, that interest you - even if it feels scary to leave that box empty for the moment. If you like sociology and psychology, and want to do criminal law some day, that’s certainly a viable path to start out on. Just leave space to detour along the way for that amazing professor’s class that isn’t in your major but sounds really interesting. (Steve Jobs talked about how glad he was to have taken calligraphy because of it’s impact on design decisions he later made at Apple. You never know what’d going to be useful in your toolkit.)
PhD in law? While doable very few places offer that specific subject. Yale is one of them, the good news, is that if you are accepted it comes with a full fellowship and stipend, worth easily over 80k a year. Bad news, its incredibly selective, and you will need a J.D., bar admission, and some notable work. Best—
You are a junior in HS. It is way too early to think about this. Here are a few steps to consider first…
Get into a college that is affordable and a good fit. Then go to college – meet new people and have some fun. Start taking classes in your areas of interest – you may find on closer inspection that they do not all interest you as much as you expected… Figure out what majors and classes are offered (law is generally a graduate degree, not undergraduate major). Then look at graduation requirements at your schools and see exactly what you can do in terms of having multiple majors and still graduate in four years (ex. colleges have a large core curriculum and it could be impossible to triple major, in other schools it might be do-able).
In short take one step at a time. Don’t box yourself in to a program that may or may not wind up being right for you.
Stop thinking about grad school if you aren't even in college.
Stop narrowing down to one employer before you have even started a single college course.
Focus on finishing high school strong and actually getting into whatever school you want to go to first.
Pick ONE major to start with and if you feel like you can handle it look into a second one and/or a minor.
Remember that everything has a price.The idea of triple majoring (Probably 5 or 6 years for those Bachelor's at least) and then going on for a masters in one area and a Ph.D in another will burn a hole in you with so much debt you will never get out of it, not to mention all the time obsessing in school when you could be working.
In Summary: Focus on where you are and getting into college after high school.
You are revealing that you are very uninformed about college and grad school, not to mention about working for the FBI. Take some time to learn about how it all works. Read some bios of different people in different positions.
Multiple majors are generally unnecessary. Only does it make sense in certain circumstances. Getting a grad degree in 3 different areas doesn’t make much sense at all, not to mention the time and cost which would be hardly possible to manage. You will be like Buster on Arrested Development, collecting various degrees as a perpetual student while still being a complete idiot, however he had the advantage of a rich mother to pay for it.
Also you don’t pick your grad school when you are in high school. You pick it as an informed college student. It isn’t picked the same way as an undergrad school is and the ‘ranking’ of any particular grad department may have nothing to do with the strength of the undergraduate college. You have to get accepted to a department for a particular major. You don’t get accepted to grad school in general, then get any degree you want. And you don’t get to do much with a MS in psych. And who gets a PHD in law? People who want to teach it, not join the FBI. Keep reading and learning.
Much would depend on the university and if those majors are in the same college. Psych and Sociology? Probably. Many of the core courses would satisfy the requirements for both majors. Unnecessary to have two majors, but it’s fine if you want to.
The FBI might prefer an accounting major or CS, then law, then apply.
OP, you’re making a mistake that has oddly come up more than a few times recently on CC. When you go to the buffet of course choices college offers, you do not need to overload your plate with gobs of each tasty looking thing, eat it all and be the last person sitting at the table. You can sample reasonable bites and then decide what you want to commit to. You could do psych with a few sociology courses and later decide if you want to minor.
More important, you have to seriously know what the fBI expects, be the sort who can get the right facts. https://www.fbijobs.gov/eligibility
If you want a position that needs your judgment skills and ability to focus, start by learning what this is really about and requires.
And, its not a law PhD. The degree is JD and the PhD is another thing.
To explain it a little more plainly: first you go to undergrad and you pick a major. A double major is usually doable with a little planning and is not uncommon. A triple major is hard because you just don’t have enough time to take all the courses that are required for each major. That is why people are talking about taking 5 or 6 years to finish. You go to grad school after you graduate from college and you can only pursue one graduate degree at a time - there is no doubling or tripling up in grad school.
You don’t need to triple major to study several things you’re interested in. You’ll be taking about 1/3 of your courses in distribution requirements, sampling lots of different classes. From there, you’ll figure out which classes you like AND are good at and that’ll be your major, which will include about 10-12 required classes (another third of your classes). Finally, there’ll be about one third to explore subject to do a minor.
The information you heard was likely from other students, or perhaps uninformed adults.
The FBI will prefer you have some technical skills or sometimes fluency in languages or both. Accounting, engineering, CS, forensics, are all considered best.
The best way to prepare is to have a strong high school background - A’s in a rigorous courseload with 4 years of English including AP English language, math up to precalculus or calculus, 4 years each of history/social science, foreign language, and science, with 5 classes each year being either Honors or AP.
Get as many A’s as you can. Continue at least one varsity sport and make sure you’re fit.
Then, look for colleges that are recruited by the FBI.
(Start with colleges in Virginia and Maryland).
Run the NPC on all of them. Find some that are within budget.
Among all your colleges, make sure you have:
2 where you’re an automatic admit or in the top 10% of applicants AND you like it AND you can afford it
3-5 where you’re near or at the top 25% threshold and that you can afford.
I don’t think a triple major shows work ethic or intellect. 120 credits is 120 credits; you don’t necessarily show more work ethic by completing three formal major programs than you do by completing one and taking some classes in other areas.
The FBI, being a competitive organization, actually [has information on its website](https://www.fbi.gov/saltlakecity/jobs-1/employment_info) about the kind of majors they are looking for. Here are the most important bullets:
To be eligible for a special agent position, you need 3 years of work experience. Even if you have a graduate degree, you need at least 2. The work experience needs to be relevant to your area of expertise.
The FBI’s critical skill areas are in the hard sciences, engineering, computer science, international studies, business, finance, and accounting. They explicitly say that “Those with political science, criminal justice, and psychology degrees must have another critical skill in order to be more competitive (for example, military intelligence background, a graduate degree, or a special skill).”
The FBI also seeks people with critical foreign language skills - Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Swahili, Albanian, Indonesian, Pashto, Punjabi, and Vietnamese. Spanish can count, but only if you have proficiency in it, and frankly so many people in the U.S. speak Spanish that you’d be much more competitive coming to the table with Arabic or Russian - or Pashto or Indonesian.
Most FBI agents have extensive experience in law enforcement or military intelligence somewhere else first. It’s an elite agency; they have no reason to take people straight out of school (graduate school included). Even if their minimum requirement is 2-3 years, more realistically most of the most competitive applicants will have 5-10+ years in their area.
So honestly, if you want to work for the FBI, but you want a social sciences major, you’d be much better off majoring in international studies than psychology or criminal justice. Instead of triple-majoring, spend your extra time and classes learning a critical language, interning, and studying abroad (look up Critical Language Scholarship Programs and think about studying abroad in a non-Western European location where you can increase your language skills in one of those critical languages). Do get a master’s, but not in psychology & sociology (you can;t even get a concurrent master’s in those fields easily). Try one in international affairs in which you can continue your language studies. Then spend a couple years working in your field.
Forget about the PhD - it’s absolutely not necessary for what you want to do, and can actually hinder you. A PhD in law is designed for people who want to do legal studies research. You need the work experience to be competitive, not the PhD. The PhD will just take valuable years that you could be cultivating your network and earning that experience.
Actually, no. Sociology and psychology are completely separate fields and majors, and the only class in one department that are likely to satisfy the requirements for the other is a statistics class. Even the way sociologists approach social psychology is completely different from the way psychologists approach it. In terms of the number of classes taken and the amount of overlap, double majoring in sociology and psychology wouldn’t be a whole lot different from double-majoring in psychology and chemistry or sociology and math.