I am planning to have only 1 major, but I have a lot of classes that are outside of my major that I am interested in taking. I was wondering if graduate school and employers would like to see you take more than the minimum amount of classes you need to take for your major rather than if you take almost the bare minimum of the classes you need to major in your field but take several classes outside of your major and that applies to many other fields? Do graduate school and employers consider what classes you took and what clubs you joined in college? Thanks!
Graduate school will care about the classes you took to some extent, but few employers, if any, will look at that. Neither will care about clubs really unless you did something impressive in them. After high school, there isn’t really a concept of “extracurriculars” in the high school sense, but something relevant to your resume/application or not relevant.
That said, most colleges require you take courses in a variety of areas no matter your major, and you will have electives to use on any classes you wish, which is a great way to take more classes outside of your major or refine your major focus as well with additional upper division electives.
For what it’s worth, here are some basic courses I would personally suggest as electives, depending on your major:
Macroeconomics (or general economics if one class covers both macro and micro)
Psychology
Sociology
A communications course focusing on friendships and relationships (if available)
Philosophy
World History (if not done extensively in high school)
Personal Finance (if not comfortable/familiar already)
I think most curriculum’s are set up so that there are core classes for your major, electives for your major, and then other electives that fall into categories such as humanities, Global Studies, foreign languages, etc. So it won’t be a problem…you are expected to take electives.
One of the goals in going to college is to become more generally educated and well rounded. Depending on your career and life choices, references will come up in discussion/reading that assume at least an exposure to the topic. Examples - Plato’s cave, Machiavelli, general human biology, Maslow’s hierarchy, supply and demand, opportunity costs, etc. Those elective courses allow you to gain general knowledge and understand references.