More About Majors

My colleague Jamie Merisotis, president at the Lumina Foundation, wrote an interesting article in Forbes recently. Lumina was a major funder of the Gallup-Purdue Index, which I was the lead researcher on and have talked about on this blog before, so although we had known each other previously, we were on the road together speaking about those findings.

The article makes a great point about majors. Majors should not be seen as defining what area your career will be in, but as a starting point to learn about learning most of all. Some majors do point towards careers in that field, like engineering and business. Other majors have broader applications, such as English. In the article Jamie writes about how an English major used the skills he learned in that major, such as effective communication, to get a job in a field not ordinarily seen as connected to English.

College students need help recognizing what skills they have acquired through their college classes that go beyond the subject matter knowledge. I spoke about this a bit in my TEDxUCLA talk. Career Services can help college students articulate what career skills they have from not only the classroom, but activities and teams. Unfortunately, many students do not realize this, and do not take full advantage of the resources in Career Services. A good piece of advice is to visit Career Services early on in your college years. Don’t wait until spring term of senior year. Go in your first year of college so that you can frame your experiences through a lens of future employment.