<p>Minor should be fun! My D's minor is Music, she is pre-med. She loves everything about medicine and all science classes and so forth. Music relaxes her. Her Music Composition minor does not require to take performance class, though. She wanted to and got thru little audition, but decided that requirements to keep GPA very high in her major will not allow her to take piano class, so she takes private lessons just for fun in a summer, and she takes theory/history music classes that are required by her minor during school year. She has no plans to have carrier in music.</p>
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Any accredited communication school requires that students either choose a minor or double major outside of the school of communication.
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First time I heard of that. D is majoring in COM at USC, a supposedly ACEJMC Accredited Program, and is not required to have a minor. The whole school pushes the minor concept pretty hard, as a means of encouraging students to broaden up a bit, but as far as I can tell it is not required. I am sure that there are 10,000 accreditation organizations in the field, some of them probably do have the minor requirement.</p>
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Minor should be fun!
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Probably, but it is even more important for the major to be fun. I have never seen a person who works for a paycheck do well. Perhaps this is not true in finance/business where money is both the reward and the medium, but in engineering where my experience is concentrated, those who do well and get paid well tend to do it because they like it. The size of the paycheck does not determine how they approach the job.</p>
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Minors are relatively unimportant.
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The same can be said about the choice of major. Except for a very few fields with very narrow scope (medicine, law), the choice of major does not determine the job one gets. Any science major can get an engineering job, and a major in one field of engineering can usually land a job in another. It is even more squishy in the humanities. Don't freak out over your student's choice of major, let them do what they love, be brutally honest with them (tell them if they want to be a rock star but they suck at guitar), but let them live their own life. Yes, we pay the bills, but hopefully most of us do it because we want to, not because we think we need to have it "our way or the highway".</p>
<p>^Agree with all the valid points. However, the purpose of this specific thread is to discuss minors. Majors are discussed in plenty of other threads.</p>
<p>GroovyGeek: Very interesting....When my D was choosing between USC, Northwestern and Newhouse, we were told by Dean Rubin up at Newhouse that one of the stipulations of the COM accredation process was that COM students had very specific liberal arts requirements (he mentioned required minors).....maybe that is translated into certain core requirements at some schools while at others minors or double majors are required...</p>
<p>As a practical note, it can be difficult to complete a minor in a subject that has high demand for its courses at some universities because an early step in enrollment management is often restricting registration in key courses to majors. Minors can be useful as noted in above posts--e.g., if it is a complementary field, such as a specialization for communication or evidence of a second competency in business or in a language--because minors are easier to highlight on a resume, but probably don't matter so much if it's a "fun" course concentration like the one S has in film studies.</p>
<p>BTW, many students getting minors in functional business areas at the U where I used to teach declared the subject as a double-major and dropped down to a minor before graduation; I'm not sure if it was a strategy to bypass the enrollment restrictions or just a desire to finish up once they had enough credits for a primary major.</p>
<p>"As a practical note, it can be difficult to complete a minor in a subject that has high demand for its courses at some universities because an early step in enrollment management is often restricting registration in key courses to majors."</p>
<p>My D wanted to minor in an area that was not particularly popular and not particularly competitive. Her advisor told her flat out that she'd never get classes unless she declared a Major in the area (which she could later drop back to a Minor). So now she has a double major. My take on this is that some departments restrict registration in an effort to raise prestige.</p>
<p>When we were at summer orientation, one of the presenters talked about a whole menu of attractive minors that students in the College of Health Sciences often pursue. D. especially seemed interested in Spanish for the Health Professions. But then -- alas -- the presenter pointed out that students in D's accelerated six-year program don't have much space in their schedules for extra classes. Minors can be done but require summer work. That dampened her enthusiasm quite a bit.</p>
<p>Son is a computer engineering major with a minor in Japanese. Brutal workload but he hopes it might help him work in Japan or with a company doing a lot of work in Japan one day.</p>
<p>Contrary to an earlier post an engineering Major and a minor is very difficult to fit in.</p>