<p>I'm very interested in these 3 majors but I m having a hard time choosing one. I know it depends on what I am passionate about but in your opinion what is the most useful major and the one that has more career options? Thank you so much guys :) </p>
<p>1) Psychology
2) Sociology
3) Film studies</p>
<p>Not many schools have a film studies major I believe, but sociology and psychology are pretty much worthless unless you are willing to go to graduate school.</p>
<p>Sociology is kind of a branch off from Psychology. The two are very serious. I know a lot of my friends who said they wanted to be Psych majors and then as seniors in high school, they took Psych and they hate it. It can be very technical and very boring. I feel like from TV, people think it’s just about counseling people. But, there is a lot of science involved. Conducting research, looking at statistics, knowing the parts of the brain, knowing diagrams of sensory parts such as the eye and ear. I personally thought it would help me “better understand people” as a future Journalism major but I hate it. The thing about film studies is it’s a great career. Shonda Rimes studied Screenwriting or Film at USC and look at her now, creator of How To Get Away with Murder, Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, all HUGE hits. So, that’s an example where a degree helped hone the skills needed to really hit it big in the entertainment. But, you have to be very talented to be successful. Do you watch a lot of films? Do you want to be a critic, film, write? Have you been practicing in that area?</p>
Industrial/organizational psychology is, I hear, the most employable branch of psych, and probably more employable than any branch of sociology or film studies, unless maybe you do a lot of statistical methods courses in sociology, because statistics skills are useful for lots of stuff. But with an undergrad degree in any of these three fields, it’s probably going to be the things you do outside of class that get you a job, far more than what you study.
Ugh.
Psychology and sociology are not worthless unless you are willing to go to graduate school. People have repeated this over and over again here on CC. First of all, this operates under the assumption that these majors are unemployable and that a major is only worth something if it gets you employment. I don’t feel like a major’s worth is only predicated upon its employability, but regardless of that psychology and sociology are no less employable than engineering or computer science. Here are the unemployment rates of recent college graduates (< 5 years of work experience) in different majors:
Psychology: 7.6%
Sociology: 8.6%
Mathematics: 6.1%
Chemistry: 6.6%
Electrical engineering: 7.3%
Biology: 7.7%
Computer science: 7.8%
Civil engineering: 8.1%
Mechanical engineering: 8.6%
Economics: 9.4%
So you can see that the unemployment rates for these two social science majors are not significantly different from the unemployment rates for other majors traditionally thought of as “more employable,” and are actually slightly lower than economics and engineering (often cited as some of the most employable majors). Where the ajor differences come in are starting salaries; social science majors start at around $30-35K a year, which is about the same as the naturl science majors. Those computer science and math majors start at $40-50K, and the engineering majors around $50-60K.
(Film studies, on the other hand, has an unemployment rate of 12.9%. Graduate degrees do not improve this like they do in most fields - it’s still 13% with a graduate degree.)
Whether or not the degree is employable depends on what you do and learn in college. You could select either (or even film studies), but if you build skills that are in-demand and do internships, you can be a competitive job applicant. Both psychology and sociology do require the acquisition of survey research skills and statistics, which are actually in-demand by many kinds of employers - businesses, human resources, marketing and market research, advertising, etc. There are many nonprofits and think tanks that focus on government contracts to study social phenomena - like the RAND Institute or CATO Institute - and they hire BA-level social science majors to do their basic work for them. Tech companies often hire social science majors to do marketing and user experience testing for them (most of these positions do require a graduate degree, at the big firms like Google and Apple, but at smaller tech companies they may not or they may have larger teams). The reality is that most employers don’t really care what your major is; they care about what you can do for them, what value you bring to the enterprise.