<p>Follow The Reaper: “But a major in Psychology isn’t going to help me get anywhere. Sure, I could try Psychiatry, but I’m not interested in the Sciency-aspect of Psychology. So I’m not going to waste my time and money with a Psychology major.”</p>
<p>I’m 30 years out of college, and have a psychology degree. So does one of my roommates. Both of us have had long business careers. I’m now a business consultant, and my roommate runs the renewable energy lending department (working nationally and internationally) for a major bank. Most psychology majors don’t wind up as psychiatrists (who are medical doctors by the way, and aren’t permitted to choose psychiatry until they are accepted into a psychiatry residency program late in their fourth year in medical school). Another of our roommates used his history degree as the launching pad for a career in medical and optical imaging devices. The Chem E in our 7-man suite wound up as a senior exec on Wall Street, as did one whose degree was in politics. The anthropology major is not running a museum, but is running an urban renewal nonprofit.</p>
<p>Please don’t try to decide your major and your career before you go to college. 70% change their majors after entering college, and most people my age aren’t working in fields related to their majors. This is especially true for those graduating from Ivies and other elite schools.</p>
<p>PS: I also know a religion major who is now an orthopedist and a Chem E who is now a surgical oncologist as well as the surgical oncology department head for one of the Harvard teaching hospitals (which also makes her a part-time professor at Harvard Medical School). </p>
<p>And the only philosophy major I knew wound up as a Wall Street bigwig.</p>
<p>Well I know I want to do either engineering or physics, so I kind of chose engineering because of the money aspect. However, it’s not like I don’t want to do it, it was more of a tie-breaker.</p>
<p>I know physics majors who are working as engineers and engineering managers, to further befuddle the conversation. But there’s nothing wrong with choosing engineering, which you’ll find will provide more hands-on coursework beyond the theory.</p>
<p>But wouldn’t it be harder for a physics major to get a job in engineering? Would they take all the engineering majors first and only then look at physics majors?</p>
<p>Physics may not be an economically beneficial major (even though it is, I’ll explain later), it is supremely fun and exciting.</p>
<p>Physicists can almost certainly get jobs at any of the labs or colliders. Imagine working at the LHC…what an exciting job! I wish I could’ve been one of the people behind the Higgs Boson discovery.</p>
<p>I’m passionate about Psychology and I’m passionate about English, so I will probably double major in those. And I don’t care if I can’t do anything with those majors because it will be my drive and my motivation that leads me to success, not what I majored in when I was in college.</p>
<p>My grandfather is a shining example. He majored in philosophy when he was in college because he knew that he was going to college to become a better person, not to determine his plan of action. He ended up running for a seat in the Senate and lost by a narrow margin. He then taught at Stanford, had an award named after him, and now teaches Engineering at Princeton after having been an assistant professor at Harvard. The way I see it, he became successful without the extra time and pain of an Engineering major or whatever.</p>
<p>(To be fair, however, he did get a PhD at Stanford…)</p>
<p>I hate to be the Grinch of this thread but for me money is the deciding factor for me. If I have money, I can always buy things to make me happy. I once wanted to be an engineer, but I still wanted to earn more than 100k. So I looked at dual J.D/M.B.A programs and surgery programs as they make 500k+. Sure it’ll be work, and I won’t necessarily like either more than engineering, but engineers are often caught in politics at work, have insane work-hours and don’t always have the most interesting work to do. Sure the conditions and flaws that I just listed would probably apply to Wall Street Analysis (That’s what I meant by the J.D+M.B.A; I know several people with that combination making 500k-2 million, and it would only take 4 years, similar to the length of med school) or as Neurosurgeon, but I’d accept that for 5x the salary of an engineer.</p>
<p>Just so you know, it isn’t money that makes people happy or unhappy. It is always wanting more that makes us unhappy. The richest man could be as happy as the poorest man if they both stop wanting things out of life. Unfortunately, usually the rich folk just keep on getting richer, which leads to unhappiness because too much money is just never fun, trust me…I come from a very wealthy family and I fully intend on not being rich when I’m older.</p>
<p>I still worry that I won’t have enough to live on, though. Or that I won’t be able to get any kind of job. Or that I’ll end up regretting whatever decisions I made and wishing I had just gone for whatever made the most money. I’m pretty sure I’m going to have several hundred thousand dollars of loans to pay off. I want to be able to do that without starving.
I want to be a math major, if I turn out to be smart enough. Some people tell me it’s very versatile and I’ll get a lot of job offers and such, but other people say it’d be better to go into physics or engineering because that’s the only kind of job I’ll be able to get anyway. So I dunno.</p>
<p>Well, I stand by the belief that if you really are doing what makes you happy, you’ll find a way to live off of it well.</p>
<p>So halcyon, if you want to be a math major, be a math major. If you love it enough, it becomes easy to come up with a way to make money off of it. Because, unfortunately, as we all know, this world runs on money.</p>
<p>Don’t let ANYONE tell you that you won’t get a job if you go into Math instead of Engineering, or ANYTHING along those lines. What you major in while in college does NOT determine what kind of job you will get. They are looking for qualified applicants. I’d say that most people don’t go into the field they majored in. It is a huge pet peeve of mine when I see people wasting their lives doing something they don’t want to do because they have this unrealistic view that it would help them get more money, which is also a dumb aspiration, IMHO.</p>
<p>Halcyonleather: Yes, it is easier to get a job as an engineer with an engineering degree. I was just pointing out that I have seen people without engineering degrees in engineering positions. A lot of those people have physics or math degrees.</p>
<p>When it comes to a lot of other fields, such as business or investment banking, I have seen no end of people working in these fields with liberal arts degrees in completely unrelated fields.</p>