This is the thread where you help me sort out my woes related to college majors.

the people i know who did double majors were just really focused on a couple of areas they wanted to study, and didn't take too many bullshit classes outside of that. a lot of them took advanced classes in high shcool, which freed them up from having to take boring required courses in freshman year.

double majoring: i don't think it's for employers because i don't think employers would care, it's just a way to be indecisive that some people enjoy. my school has no minors, so lots of people major in unrelated things like chemistry and art. (i'm double majoring because i picked a "real" major and then realized that due to my plan to continue with a language and study abroad, i'd be taking 9/10 required courses toward a second major so i might as well just double. i don't think it will be any more useful than a language certification.)

OTOH, you hate everything you studied, and you don't know what to focus on.

In my case, I could relax in the sense that whatever field I picked, I would enjoy it and probably do well in it.

In your case, you should also relax because whatever field you pick you will probably hate it. Focus on the field where you think you can earn the best grades.

You're essentially resigned to the fact that your degree will be useless anyway, so in the long run it won't matter what field you pick or if you do a single major, double major, or whatever (unless you're thinking about grad school, but until you find a field that you're interested in then you can't even entertain those thoughts). Finish your degree and find something that you actually enjoy doing.

One of them was. Insisted the only philosopher we ever needed to read was Kierkegaard and then proceeded to talk about his world travels the majority of the time. A bit amusing, but utterly worthless (and a bit odd, considering this was a "philosophy of religion" class). Probably need a different word to describe the others.

the people i know who did double majors were just really focused on a couple of areas they wanted to study

That's mostly what I've concluded, but a lot of students feel it's necessary now for employment reasons and some weird work ethic. Doesn't seem to me like it would make an iota of difference, unless the two fields were somehow linked. But a lot swear by it, and I was wondering if there was any validity to their claims..

unfortunately i thought most of my undergrad courses were dreadful and the school didn't offer anything i wanted to study in-depth

So you just sorta slugged it out during your time there? I might end up doing this to, since I think enjoy my time there for other reasons aside from the actual classes. They seem like secondary concerns, anymore. It's not hard to do well in them, and if all liberal arts degrees are pretty much equal (at least my areas of interest are), then it wouldn't really matter what I end up majoring in.

Well, I do have some interests, but like I said, most of the classes I take make the subjects into such a dry act of regurgitation, that it becomes painful to sit through them. I do think, though, if I got out of introductory courses and the questionable professors, this would be fixed. So I might attempt stabs at philosophy or economics again, and hope for better.

But you're probably right in that I'll dislike/be indifferent to most anything else (outside of these couple of areas).

You're essentially resigned to the fact that your degree will be useless anyway, so in the long run it won't matter what field you pick

Should I be resigned to this, though? I've more-or-less assumed this was the case judging by what I've seen and read, but I certainly don't have the full picture. Would an economics degree, for instance, be more "useful" than a degree in philosophy?

And should I even be evaluating a B.A. degree in terms of its usefulness? I hate to bring in this Newman-influenced liberal education vs. instruction discourse, but it is a hard question to answer.

I wish I had more interest in other fields, but I don't think taking introductory courses here is going to change this. I've dabbled in about eight different departments, and aside from the ones I already had an interest in, nothing really jumped out at me. If I were able to do this with more departments, I might hit upon something that really hits me, but time is beginning to run out. Oh well.

Future employers probably won't care whether you took three credits in field X as opposed to four credits in field Y. They'll probably just want to know that you have your BA, and the school you got it from. That's probably the central "use" of your degree -- in five years, once you have a job in a field that you hopefully enjoy, you'll just be happy that your BA helped you get a decent job and you won't give any thought to whether you hated your courses or not.

Your other option, of course, is to take more intro courses in the hope of finding something that you really like, but that will come at a price -- more years in uni. But it sounds to me that you don't enjoy school, and would rather get your degree as soon as possible and move on to something else.

School's reputable enough, I think. At least, I think UNC-Chapel Hill still carries a fair amount of clout in comparison to most public universities in the nation.

And I like university enough to want to stay for four years, but no more than that. I like the area, and I'd rather do this for a couple of more years before worrying about jobs/money, etc.

dahlin:

I definitely need to do more ec activities. If there's anything I feel I'm lacking in, it's that.

The only way I'm going to grad school if somebody offers me assistance to do so, and I wouldn't hesitate to quit if I found the experience unsatisfactory. And I'm certainly taking a break after uni is finished, cause I'll probably be in no mood for it until a few years later, if I ever am.

I think this double/triple major trend can be handily avoided. I didn't even do a minor; it wasn't required at my school, and I couldn't be bothered to take a few requirements just to prove that I minored in something, when there was a lot more interesting things I wanted to study.

I would try and get into the smallest classes that you can--the reading material will be more interesting, and on the whole it will a much more flexible experience than in a large lecture course, and you will get to know the prof, and they you. Also, ask around to your friends which professors they like. A great professor can make a dull course interesting, and vice versa. Good luck!

Eventually it just comes down to doggedness in finding a job and in presenting yourself in a way that will make you seem, to the employer, suitable for that job. I, of course, do none of these things and thus even w/ a Master's I can't find a job.

Its so easy to get into studies later in life if you need to (easier than right of school, to my mind), you are more worldly, you can have spent time travelling and working, saving up money.

Unless you have a specific aim to be a doctor or teacher or network engineer or somesuch, I never understood the point. Philosophy? Wha? Whats that going to do for anyone's career unless they perpetuate the cycle by becoming a philos prof themselves?

FWIW, I'm not getting any debt from this experience. I have a scholarship that pays $8000 a year, and between my meager work income over the summers and my parents willingness to pay the slack (which is a paltry amount, verily), it's all taken care of.

I never said my time here isn't "useful." It's just not spattering over into my classes and majors. Why? Well, the only thing I can offer is that I think the best students here are the ones who self-study in addition to classes. And I've always loved how I can self-study, while I don't have to worry about what I'm going to eat, how I'm gonna pay the rent, etc., etc. So when an area interests me, like English or philosophy does, the classes often give me a focus area, on which I can learn, but they also include a lot of dry, boring assignments and regurgitation, which is what I don't like. Despite a couple of great professors, most of the classes have been like this. So it's a sort of love/hate affair about the classes (and as a result, the majors).

I do not understand why anyone would go to a liberal arts school if they knew what they wanted to do (especially if it's a trade skill or something you could get at a community college/vocational school). That defeats the purpose of a liberal arts education, which in my mind, is there to give one an exposure to a variety of subjects, as well as simply getting them to use their brains. Most of the things they teach here have no "useful" application.

For a lot of kids here, this place IS an extended form of high school: all of the usual fuckin', drinkin', druggin', etc. Hangovers, circles of friends, scenes, all of that. Not really my thing -- I've avoided it for the duration of my stay here. If you're paying for most of it, like I am, it's a total waste of money and I'd rather spend my time on more productive areas.

If there is anything to lament, it's this view that universities like Chapel Hill exist only to get someone a good job after they graduate. If you want to approach them this way, then fine. But I didn't come here only for this reason, nor am I paying only for this reason. I came here to get away from my parents, to live in a new environment, meet some new folks, extensively study/learn, and have some fun before I have to worry about so-called "real life concerns." I would like to think my BA would help out in future job hunts, and it either will or will not -- it's not, however, my primary reason from coming here.

I was simply looking for advice on how to pick a major when you don't want to choose one at all, and I think asking here has helped me out quite a bit. Sorry if I came off as somewhat defensive -- wasn't really meaning to.

this is partially what one of my anthropology profs said last semester! (he didn't say that it isn't an education, just that it is a ridiculously long rite of passage.) i agree in that liberal arts education really doesn't seem to be at all related to job training, it's something you do to have some degree of independence while thinking about...stuff. your life, your degree, your class readings, whatever. and it often lets you put off some decisions, like career choices or marriage (cf. post-graduation summer marriage outbreaks).

that professor also told me that a degree in anthro would be useless and unconnected to my future career unless i wanted to be a professor, so it didn't really matter whether i decided to major in it or not. how very encouraging! (i am majoring in it though, because i like it.)

There is nothing wrong with taking breaks, either. I know a fair number who become part-time students, or take a year off, then come back when they're reading to tackle the classes again.

i did two degrees as an undergraduate, but under somewhat different conditions than you. i was never under any time-related pressure to decide about them, and knew going in what i wanted, though i did switch two years in from studying math and english to studying math and philosophy. i suppose there were some career-oriented among them, but most of the people i knew who pursued two majors or two degrees did so either because they wanted the training and credentials appropriate to two closely related fields (e.g. lots of math and physics double majors), maybe because planning to go on to graduate school; or because they wanted to avoid limiting their education because of the choice of a more technical field more beneficial to later employment or study. the latter reason was mine, though after i finished my undergraduate degrees and spent a year studying math i changed my mind and went to grad school for philosophy, which wasn't really something i had planned well in advance (i had never planned to go to grad school for literature, for example, before i switched to philosophy).

i always insisted on the two degrees sort of for identity-related reasons that i don't really expect to apply well to others.

if you're not at this point seriously committed to going to grad school, and you're not interested in what i consider to be the less useless liberal arts majors (math, physics, chemistry, biology, and computer science; on a good day i would quickly add the foreign language majors), then i think that for the most part the particular field named on your degree will be of little significant for finding a job (there are some exceptions that i'm sure you can imagine, depending on closeness of fit with the job). i think there are then three main considerations to choosing a major.

1. do you need the professors' help, to help you figure things out or fill you with knowledge?
2. will greater depth of learning in this particular field lay a better foundation for continued self-education in this field after school?
3. will the broader survey of materials (of this field, as opposed to others) afforded by focusing on this field lay a better foundation for continued self-education in other fields after school?

i put the considerations that way because the distinctions seem relevant given that your relation to the majors you're thinking of will be different from mine. personally, when i was an undergrad, i considered (2) and (1) a lot more important for math, whereas for english and philosophy i was more concerned with (3) and had little worry about the first two. and now, i often find that what i would like to have had more of from my undergraduate years is more breadth (despite having a lot of it).

i seem to meet lots of people who learned something or other in college, but whose most pressing concern now, regarding being educated or knowledgable about something they didn't study much, is how to know where to start, or know what's what, or get a good sense of where everything is situated in a field.

i guess i am inclined to say that you should not expect much depth from a college degree in many fields. and if you can't take courses in something because they don't seem to provide you with that depth, and thus tend to ruin the subject for you, try to focus more on using your remaining time to get a good look around, and study more deeply on your own.

having looked over chapel hill's philosophy department web pages a bit, i would not really expect, personally, to be satisfied with an undergraduate degree from there, given the above criteria.

i arrived at uni not knowing what to do, took classes that interested me, which ended up being all over the place (but generally in random liberal arts subjects like 'musicology' or 'comparative religion'). my junior year, i had to go talk to an advisor and pick a major. i really couldn't decide, so he suggested a general studies degree. it suited me down to the ground. it isn't as much of a 'dabble' as people seem to think, you only get credit for upper-level coursework, which means you get fairly advanced in several departments. the only downside to this was that i couldn't decide to try to graduate 'with honors,' but it hasn't seemed to matter much.

when job hunting, i would put 'BGS, with a focus on...', changing the ... depending on the job i was applying for. nobody seemed to mind my focus on women's studies and political science, not the most useful degrees in a practical sense.

i also agree that groups and clubs and things are key. by the end of uni, i had experience running events with big budgets, fundraising, and managing groups, all of which i think looked good on my CV.

after school, i floated around in a load of jobs trying to decide what to do. took the LSATs like every liberal arts kid that doesn't have a career in mind, worked at a law firm for a year. decided i would want to work in a nonprofit as a lawyer, couldn't make the sums match ($100,000 in debt to earn $20,000 a year?) so decided to hop over to england to get a masters in managing voluntary organisations. and here i am, pretty happy with my job most days and very happy with the fact that i've ended up in london.

see? all that from a BGS...

but i'm happy with the 'brand name' that i bought, and it led to me having a job/work permit here in the uk, so that's all good.

The Hot Major
For Undergrads
Is Economics

By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
July 5, 2005; Page A11

What's your major? Around the world, college undergraduates' time-honored question is increasingly drawing the same answer: economics.

U.S. colleges and universities awarded 16,141 degrees to economics majors in the 2003-2004 academic year, up nearly 40% from five years earlier, according to John J. Siegfried, an economics professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., who tracks 272 colleges and universities around the country for the Journal of Economic Education.

Since the mid-1990s, the number of students majoring in economics has been rising, while the number majoring in political science and government has declined and the number majoring in history and sociology has barely grown, according to the government's National Center for Education Statistics.

"There has been a clear explosion of economics as a major," says Mark Gertler, chairman of New York University's economics department.

The number of students majoring in economics has been rising even faster at top colleges. At New York University, for example, the number of econ majors has more than doubled in the past 10 years. At nearly 800, it is now the most popular major.

Economics also is the most popular major at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., where 964 students majored in the subject in 2005. The number of econ majors at Columbia University in New York has risen 67% since 1995. The University of Chicago said that last year, 24% of its entire graduating class, 240 students, departed with economics degrees.

The trend marks a big switch for the so-called dismal science, which saw big declines in undergraduate enrollments in the early 1990s as interest in other areas, like sociology, was growing. Behind the turnaround is a clear-eyed reading of supply and demand: In a global economy filled with uncertainty, many students see economics as the best vehicle for a job promising good pay and security.

And as its focus broadens, there are even some signs that economics is becoming cool.

In addition to probing the mechanics of inflation and exchange rates, academics now use statistics and an economist's view of how people respond to incentives to study issues such as AIDS, obesity and even terrorism. The surprise best-seller of the spring was "Freakonomics," a book co-authored by a University of Chicago economist, Steven Levitt, which examines issues ranging from corruption among real estate agents to sumo wrestling.

Pooja Jotwani, a recent graduate of Georgetown University in Washington D.C., says she is certain her economics degree helped her land a job in Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.'s sales and trading division, where she will earn $55,000, not including bonus. She says the major strengthened her business skills and provided her with something very simple: "financial security."

"People are fascinated with applying the economic mode of reasoning to a wide variety of issues, and these forces are causing them to study economics more and more," says Lawrence H. Summers, president of Harvard and former secretary of the Treasury.

According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, economics majors in their first job earn an average of nearly $43,000 a year -- not as much as for computer-science majors and engineering majors, who can earn in excess of $50,000 a year. But those computer and engineering jobs look increasingly threatened by competition from inexpensive, highly skilled workers in places like India and China.

"Historically, the trends [in college degrees] are largely connected to perceived job prospects," says Marvin Lazerson, historian of education and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education in Philadelphia. He cites the recent example of computer science majors, whose ranks swelled in the 1990s and quickly subsided in the early 2000s, soon after the dot-com bubble burst and many companies started outsourcing computer-programming jobs abroad.

In contrast, economics and business majors ranked among the five most-desirable majors in a 2004 survey of employers by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, along with accounting, electrical engineering and mechanical engineering. It wasn't just banks and insurance companies that expressed interest in economics majors -- companies in industries such as utilities and retailing did so, too.

Like many people whose eyes glaze over at a supply-and-demand curve, Nicholas Rendler, a 19-year-old student at Brown University, in Providence, R.I., says he finds economics boring. But he has gravitated to the topic anyway: He chose a major combining economics, sociology, and anthropology because he thinks economics is crucial to understanding the world.

"Economics can be very frustrating, but it is the world we are currently operating in and we need the basic framework," he says. Roberto Angulo, chief executive of AfterCollege Inc., a San Francisco online recruiting service with 267,000 registered users, says an economics major has practical job value. "Students are more employable if they study economics," he says. He graduated from Stanford University with an economics degree five years ago.

It isn't just the job calculus that is drawing students to the major: It also is the rapid spread of economic globalization. Many students around the world are wondering what effect global economic trends will have on them.

Foreign students studying in the U.S. are flocking to the major. Sabrina De Abreu, a student from Argentina about to start her senior year at Harvard, says her country's experiences made her choice easy. "When I grew up in Argentina, my country plunged into a recession," she says. "Understanding economics has become a fundamental part of my life."

Indeed, the rising popularity of the economics major appears to be a global phenomenon. A recent McKinsey Global Institute study found that the share of degrees in economics and business awarded in Poland from 1996 to 2002 more than doubled, to 36% from 16%; in Russia, the share jumped to 31% from 18%.

John Sutton, chairman of the economics department at London School of Economics, says the school's popularity is at an all-time high, in part due to interest from Eastern Europe. Dr. Sutton says that as these countries undergo capitalist changes, "bright young students are beginning to see economic issues highlighted."

Write to Jessica E. Vascellaro at jessica.vascellaro@wsj.com

If your in IT, a CS minor won't get your foot in the door.

And economics is the most popular major at my school, 50% more students than the next most popular (english). It's ridiculous.

thanks, maria, it's been a fairly windy path, but i enjoyed it. i still expect to go back to do another major in a different subject sometime and just start over, because i think it would be fun.

At high school, I was a big continental philosophy nerd. I read Sartre, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger etc. and was completely convinced that my true calling in life was to become an academic philosopher. So I applied for a philosophy degree at Edinburgh and got accepted. I start in September this year.

However, I'm now frantically researching possible escape routes. Why? Because at the time I applied I was blissfully unaware of the analytic/continental divide, and the fact that pretty much all Universities in the US/UK/Australia are analytically oriented. If you've never read any analytic philosophy, you should find an anthology of contemporary papers e.g. this one. Because, most likely, that's the stuff you will be studying.

Personally, though I'm fascinated by much philosophy in the continental tradition, I find most analytic philosophy to be aimless, arid, sleep-inducing drivel utterly divorced from the world. The difference between Kierkegaard or Foucault and Saul fucking Kripke (big name in analytic philosophy) is the difference between night and day. Beware!

And yet I can't shake off the sense that something has gone awfully wrong. Not so much with Hughes's book (though I'll presently have bones to pick with some of his main theses) as with the kind of philosophy that has recently taken shelter under Kripke's wing. There seems to be, to put it bluntly, a lot of earnest discussion of questions that strike my ear as frivolous. For example: 'I have never crossed the Himalayas, though I might have done. So there is a non-actual (or, if you prefer, a non-actualised) possible world (or possible state of the world) in which someone crosses some mountains. Is that person me, and are those mountains the Himalayas? Or are they (non-actual) individuals different from me and from the Himalayas?' Or: 'Water is the stuff that is in the Thames and comes out of the taps. The stuff that is in the Thames and comes out of the taps undeniably contains impurities (bits that are neither hydrogen nor oxygen nor constituents thereof). So how can water be H2O?' But how could it not? Is it that, chemistry having discovered the nature of water, philosophy proposes to undiscover it? In any case, could that really be the sort of thing that philosophy is about? Is that a way for grown-ups to spend their time?