<p>Sorry for making this really general, but I think it could help a lot of people on this forum that way.</p>
<p>In what career paths does your major actually matter?
In what career paths does it not matter much?</p>
<p>Say you majored in "A" but wanted to go to grad school for "B". Is this possible?</p>
<p>Well some grad school options sort of require that. Going into medical school requires you to meet requirements and generally people major in Biology and Chemistry and the like, but people have majored in Mechanical Engineering and have gone into Medical School.</p>
<p>Same thing with Law School, Pharmacy School and Dental School.</p>
<p>As far as getting your master’s in a related field, that sort of thing is done all of the time. Undergrad Physics, Graduate Astronomy or Astrophysics. Undergrad Math, Graduate Computer Science or Physics come to mind.</p>
<p>In some ways your major doesn’t matter. Becoming a Police Officer or Military Officer generally requires you to have an undergrad degree but you’ll go to school or recieve addtional training that will actually prepare you for your job. In the Air Force, for example, you can major in ANYTHING and be a pilot, because you have to go through 2 years-ish of pilot school.</p>
<p>I’d think that Majors like Engineering probably matter moreso than, say, education. My grandma teaches math at a Community College but she has a PhD in English (Her undergrad was an English major/Math minor). My HS Geometry teacher majored in Geology. My HS Physics teacher majored in Molecular Biology I think it was? And so and and so forth.</p>
<h2>Sorry for making this really general, but I think it could help a lot of people on this forum that way.</h2>
<p>Sorry for making this general, but generally speaking, you should ask questions that you want answered, not on behalf of the general public…</p>
<p>Sorry for making this general, but nobody really owns the internet.</p>
<p>Ok, so could you major in History and take a few math/statistics classes on the side, then go do a masters in Statistics? Or would that require at least some credentials, like at least a minor in stat/math?</p>
<p>well it’d be like starting over again… generally humanities isn’t a very good route to go if you want food on your plate.</p>
<p>Look at the requirements for masters programs you’d be interested in. Most of them will specify what sort of courses or majors/minors they expect you to have completed.</p>
<p>i have heard (on this forum) that MBA schools take students from much more majors than just business. some make conscious efforts to accept a solid percentage of kids from other undergrad majors.</p>
<p>jax90291, do you think what they are doing is right/good for society? i mean, what would be the motives behind such selection, do you think?</p>
<p>Undergraduate work does not have to connect to graduate work or preprofessional work necessarily and there are a lot of reasons why this is the case. It’d be a lot easier to understand how to answer your question beyond that if you were more specific about your situation or the question you’re really getting at. I get the sense there is an underlying specific question that drove this one.</p>
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<p>If I may also answer…</p>
<p>They are probably interested in enrolling students with a wide variety of perspectives and approaches to business problems. This can benefit all students in the MBA program. I entered a professional graduate program (not MBA) that recruited people from all kinds of majors, and I think it was very broadening. And think about what business entails–finance, marketing, organizational behavior…they draw on a variety of fields.</p>
<p>dshinka: Law school has no pre-requisite courses or majors to be considered for admissions. Just a Bachelor’s degree and LSAT scores.</p>
<p>Student01: there are very, very few careers which are directly impacted by what you major in. Some majors have a higher feed into certain careers (e.g., Political Science ----> Law; Economics/Business -----> Business), but no one’s to say you’re barred from a career because you didn’t have a pertinent major. Med school, as said before, requires certain courses to be taken, but there’s no required major.</p>
<p>And in terms of graduate school, you can get a masters in someone you didn’t major in during undergraduate, but I don’t think many people do this. It just doesn’t make sense to start all over.</p>
<p>Medical schools generally don’t care if you didn’t major in biology or chemistry, so long as you took the appropriate prerequisites. In fact, from what I have been told, sometimes medical school admissions like to see passion in a different area, especially if it demonstrates a more human side of an applicant (in the sense that they’re looking for bedside manner in addition to the science prerequisites).</p>
<p>Ok so, specifically in my case, I was originally looking at going for a statistics/applied math degree so that when I graduate, I would have the option of becoming employed in EITHER the technology sector(cs,it,engineering) or the business(finances,ibanking,actuary) sector.</p>
<p>I know that if you come from a somewhat-above-average school, majoring in an unrelated topic isn’t impressive. But let’s say, Stanford or Upenn or Northwestern, if I were to major in something like… journalism (for example), do you think the school name itself still carries impressive weight into a tech/biz job market?</p>
<p>And is a stat/applied math bachelor’s enough to enter the job market, or do people usually go for masters to be decently competitive?</p>
<p>Something like statistics and applied math do have wide applications across the fields you mention and you would not have to have a degree in CS, engineering, or business areas to find a position with a strong background in those areas of interest.</p>
<p>However, you’re not going to find it easy to get a job working for a CS firm with a degree in journalism unless it’s in the PR department-- you’re simply not going to have the skills necessary. That area is highly skilled in general and without the ability it doesn’t matter where you came from. As for business-- they generally higher out of any sector of a top school but may look for certain course work demonstrating basic familiarity and skills and you may need to be far more successful the further away from a skillset which can apply directly you are.</p>
<p>So really it depends-- business tends to be very open to people in almost any area of study, the tech field tends to be far less forgiving. Similarly, your success with just a bachelor’s depends on the field as well. It’s quite common that people in the STEM disciplines are quite employable with a bachelors.</p>