<p>When is the best time to select a major? In order to ensure that you don't have to add a semester or a year, especially if you come into college with a handful of APs, don't you have to declare a major pretty early?</p>
<p>It depends on the major.</p>
<p>Majors with few or no sequenced prerequisites (e.g. some humanities and social studies) can often be started late without delaying graduation. Some can theoretically be started as late as the 6th semester, although that is not advisable (you would have to completely fill your remaining semesters with your major, which can create scheduling issues, and if you have not completed your breadths, that can throw off your schedule).</p>
<p>But majors with sequenced prerequisites (e.g. sciences, engineering) or lots of requirements (e.g. music) often have to be started early to avoid delaying graduation.</p>
<p>Of course, starting the prerequisite courses for the major is typically done a few semesters before declaring the major, unless you enter the college already declared in the major.</p>
<p>It is generally a good idea to plan your schedule so that you will be able to declare any of your possible majors in your 5th semester at the latest. Of course, as you progress, you may find that you are no longer interested in some majors and can drop them out of your course planning.</p>
<p>It can also depend on the school. At my daughter’s school, there’s a lot of commonality among the majors and there aren’t deep pre-requisite chains, so you can put off choosing a major or change a major pretty late in the game.</p>
<p>It also depends on what else the student wants to accomplish in school. If you want a semester abroad junior year, that sometimes takes more advance planning to accomplish without adding a semester (or more) to the college experience.</p>
<p>Many schools require a choice of major by the end of the 4th semester. However, this does not have to be the major that the student eventually graduates in.</p>
<p>The schools with which I am most familiar, and admittedly they are SLACs, require students to declare a major at the end of their sophomore year.</p>
<p>Sometimes there are benefits to not waiting until the last possible moment to declare a major. Declared majors may get preference in registration for required courses, for one. Declared majors may get assigned a faculty advisor from the department, and having that advisor to meet with well before the end of sophomore year can be a good idea.</p>
<p>Also, my son declared his major about a month before the deadline, and was promptly invited to a barbecue for everyone in the department that weekend. He said it was awesome. (But this sort of thing happens a lot more in small departments than in large ones.)</p>
<p>DD declared her major as a second quarter sophomore (engineering) as she wanted an advisor in the engineering department. However, she had taken all of the same required courses as a student who enrolled as a freshman engineering major. </p>
<p>She declared a second major at the end of her junior year (when she realized she had most of the courses to do so)…biology.</p>
<p>She graduated in four years.</p>
<p>Her university required a declared major at the end of sop year.</p>
<p>Both S1 and D3 knew from Day 1 what their major would be, but D2 had until second semester soph year to apply to a major (she chose two). At her school, all students were required to choose a major at that point.</p>
<p>If you know what you’re majoring in, why wait? After all, you can always choose to change to another major later on if you discover it’s not a great match. It tends to be the folks who switch out late in junior year or senior year who end up having problems.</p>
<p>My older son declared his major when he applied since Carnegie Mellon has a standalone Computer Science school. I don’t think he officially declared his required minor (he chose physics) until he had to, which I believe was at the end of sophomore year.</p>
<p>My younger son was pretty sure he’d at least start off majoring in International Relations. IR at Tufts requires 8 semesters or fluency in a second language so he had to get started on that requirement right away. He’s kept an eye on fallback majors and says now he might well have been better off as a history major with a concentration on the Middle East. The biggest wrinkle from his point of view is that IR only allows 3 courses taken outside of Tufts to count in his major and he’s spending the whole year abroad.</p>
<p>Way back when I was required to choose my major at the end of freshman year since many majors had special sophomore seminars. It didn’t bother me at the time and certainly plenty of people did switch majors without huge issues.</p>