Ok, so I go to college in NYC, and I am ending my freshman year. I started off being a management major…HATED it after I took an accounting class…I switched to Political Science and I love it. Problem is, there isn’t many jobs in that field, and law school is a huge investment…it is always in the back of my mind though. Others areas that interest me in that field are policy and research. I know I am still young, but I am trying to be practical and give myself an edge-up against my peers. I am involved in many clubs in school. I will have enough room to add another major. I was thinking economics but its a BA like Poli science, which is essentially the same degree. I was thinking to add another major in IT, Marketing,or public policy(economics), or finance(which is in the economics department in my school). I want to have great job prospects and a stable job with good pay. Is a double major even worth it?! and which one is ideal from the options above? Thank you! P.S I have experience in journalism, sports journalism, and sales, but I know Journalism in a dying field.
Your major does not determine your jobs; your skills and experiences do. You also don’t have to work in political science with a political science degree. You can take a PS degree into business, into tech, into nonprofits, into anything with the right skills and experience and interest.
So you don’t need another major. But if you want to add another major, what’s ideal depends on what you want to do. It makes no sense to double-major in finance if you hate math and find mathematical models boring; even though the field is relatively lucrative (for now, anyway), it won’t matter if you hate your job or - worse - you’re simply not good at it and struggle to find employment in the field. Moreover, we can never tell what’s going to be the hot moneymaking jobs 5-10 years from now. When I started college in 2004, Facebook was a small website for college students started by some kid at Harvard and there was no such thing as Twitter or Snapchat, and Lehman Brothers still existed and the housing bubble was still rising. The hot moneymaking jobs were finance on Wall Street and real estate and architecture; computer science was a boring nerd job, especially in the wake of the mid-1990s dot-com bubble. HA! II thought briefly about majoring in computer science and decided I didn’t want to build computer OSs at staid Microsoft or IBM. That was my concept of CS at the time. Nobody could anticipate how big social media was going to be. Nobody knew that data science was going to explode. And I think the hot languages to learn back then were like…Japanese and German. Now they’re Arabic, Korean, Chinese, Hindi…
The point is…you can’t pick a major based solely upon what is lucrative right now, because the lucrative fields shift and change all the time. I mean, there is some stability - finance gurus on Wall Street will probably always make more money than social workers - but basically, you never know what new field is going to rise (sometimes from the ashes of an old one). Furthermore, skills can be learned. You could major in political science but learn statistics (which is actually really important in poli sci), learn how to program, learn SQL.
You have to pick your major based upon what you love. The money and the job prospects come with skills and experience.
Besides, political science majors have lower unemployment rates than economics majors and information systems majors. (https://georgetown.app.box.com/s/og6p8y9x1yeacejk1ci0)