Musing on majors

Winter break is a unique period in college; it is the only time when it is perfectly acceptable to do nothing for three weeks. In fact, the most productive thing I did over break was declaring my major, an experience that I found to be more pensive than necessary.

As I filled out my long range plan, I began to reflect on just how unfair it is that Duke awards Latin honors at graduation at the school-wide level and not within majors (a topic for a future article, no doubt). I ended up pondering the differences among majors, and how my opinion of certain majors has changed since coming to Duke.

As a freshman, I was one of those kids who believed that you could divide majors up in to two categories: real and fake. The real majors naturally include those that have very clearly defined post-educational occupations, like engineering, biology and economics. The fake majors are those areas of study with less obvious occupational relevancy: Philosophy, English, women’s studies and cultural anthropology all fell into this category.

In this mental scheme, there were not just two types of majors, but also two types of students. On one hand you had the career-driven students, those who figured out what they wanted to do in middle school and designed the rest of their life around obtaining that goal. On the other hand, you had the much more idealistic, undecided student. This archetypal student comes to college with an open mind, taking classes that genuinely stimulate his or her intellectual curiosity and hoping to graduate with an enlightened view of the world primarily, and a degree secondarily. Of course, the first group—the ones with their acts together—tend to have real majors, and the screw-offs in the second group tend to have fake majors.

As hard as it is for me to admit this, my perspective on the division between the two types of majors did not begin to change until late last semester. One of my good friends was discussing with me why she was choosing to declare as an international comparative studies major as opposed to a public policy major. I was immediately appalled by her regrettable decision to declare a fake major, and warned her of the negative effects that it would have on her career prospects. To make a long story short, she schooled me. Offended, she launched into a well-argued invective about why ICS is a real major, listing off the numerous successful lawyers, politicians and international businessmen and businesswomen who graduated from college with degrees in international comparative studies. As I began to backtrack, I said that ICS was certainly more “real” a major than something like women’s studies, whose graduates’ only real job opportunities are in academia. To this statement she seemed no less offended, arguing that many students who pursue this major have post-educational goals just as real as mine, many of them working in international NGOs, fighting for women’s rights.

I finally had to concede to her, and in the process, found myself engaging in my least favorite activity: admitting that I’m wrong. Maybe the line dividing real and fake majors isn’t as clear as I once thought. In reality, it probably doesn’t even exist at all. By the same notion that I’m not that different from a women’s studies major, I’m also not that different from the idealistic student who comes to college without a pre-existing career plan. After all, he is the one considered the idealist for a reason. College shouldn’t just be a means to an end, it should make you question what you blindly hold as fact and open your eyes to new ways of viewing yourself and your relationship to society.

You might still be wondering why the act of declaring my major prompted this moment of clarity. Well, when I came to Duke, I was your typical pre-med biology major, with clearly defined expectations of being a dermatologist. I’m still a biology major, but with a concentration in pharmacology and a certificate in markets and management studies. In the short one and a half years I’ve been at Duke, I’ve realized that the traditional medical profession isn’t for me. I want to be a pharmacologist and eventually transition into the business side of pharmaceuticals. To a student with the same perspective that I had when I came to college, my path into business might seem just as “fake” as all of the majors I was so quick to dismiss.

Here’s how I see it: You define your major, not the other way around.