So I’m a first year student at UW Seattle and am in my second quarter right now. I haven’t decided on a major yet, I’ve been absolutely clueless on what I want to major in because I’m just worried about making such a huge decision and regretting it later on. However, last quarter I randomly ended up taking a linguistics class and really loved it and the professor. I didn’t do poorly or super well, but I still loved it and was super interested. It made me think about majoring in linguistics but I know that’s kind of a limited field that many people don’t find jobs from. So I’ve been thinking about what else interests me and came up with marketing and psychology (I’m taking my second psych class at UW right now!). What do you think about double majoring with one of these? Or any advice on what route I should take/how I should figure this all out? Thanks!
I don’t expect that any of us know you well enough to opine. You generally don’t have to declare a major until the end of your sophomore year so for now I would take more classes in majors your are considering and see where your interests and aptitudes lie. I would not choose a major based on one great professor.
As an aside, it would probably be difficult to double major in marketing as you would have to get into the business school, take the business core curriculum etc.
A couple other related areas include CS (computational linguistics has employment potential) and Behavioral Econ (not offered everywhere, dunno about UW).
The 105 + 5 quarter rule
Students are expected to declare a major by the time they have earned 105 credits and completed 5 quarters. Both conditions need to be met in order for the satisfactory progress rules to go into effect.
Students who have completed 90 or more credits and 4 or more academic satisfactory progress quarters will receive an email warning that they should plan to declare their major soon. No hold is placed at this point.
Students who have completed 105 or more credits and 5 or more academic satisfactory progress quarters but have not declared a major will receive a registration hold and will not be allowed to register for the next quarter. Transfer students who enter with 105 or more credits are expected to declare a major before registering for their second quarter at the UW.
Straight from UW’s website. How many units have you complete? If you’re only in your second quarter you have a lot of time left to figure out what you want to major in. However, if you’re starting to find things you’re more interested in, take courses in those, and try to fit them into your general ed requirements.
For what it’s worth, one of my close coworkers has a BA in linguistics. We work at a tech company. Her work is tangentially related to linguistics, but she’s a program manager. So you don’t have to double major if you don’t want to. (She actually also went to UW.)
But if you want to double major, UW has a wealth of majors that could be useful or interesting:
-Psychology, yes
-Marketing, yes
-CS, because of applications in computational linguistics
-Informatics. Linguistics can be very useful in the study of human-computer interaction and information architecture - which is basically the study of how we should present information and tech in a way that humans can easily use it?
-Speech and hearing sciences, if you are interested in speech-language pathology or audiology (but you need a graduate degree to work in that field)
-Communication
A lot of these majors are competitive at UW, so plan accordingly!