“What’s your major?”
That’s a question I’m sure you will hear at least 100 times within your first week of arriving on campus. For me, it was a question that got old fast: How can you proclaim what you’re studying when you’ve (most likely) never taken a university-level course on the subject? Even more so, you likely can’t even officially declare a major until you’ve taken the pre-requisites courses, so most people are actually just taking a shot in the dark, a temporary placeholder for the time being.
On one hand, the question’s prevalence can indicate a society oriented around the value of work: The first question you often ask someone is what they do for work, not where their passions lie or what things they love. Of course, there’s an implicit assumption that their work is their passion, but I would argue that this claim only rings true for a limited number of people.
On the other hand, a potentially more positive outlook is that the question asks people to share their interests. What sparks curiosity? What do you desire to dig deep into, to start to become an expert in? How do your personal passions translate into an educational system?
Your outlook on this question, and therefore the approach to choosing your own path of study, determines what you can truly get out of the experience you’ve just committed yourself to for the next four years.
Education is something that people have sought for centuries. It is almost a guarantee to several positive life outcomes, such as social connections, a healthy lifestyle and even happiness. But today, many people merely see it as a path towards a job. The means to an end. You become an economics major because you want to work in business, a biology major because you want to go into health care or an English major because you want to be a journalist.
While it’s certainly not wrong to view education in this way (considering money constraints and a society that values work above all, I would challenge you to consider education not as a means to a career, but as a means to developing a personhood.
The field of study you pursue will inherently change the way you view the world: the questions you naturally begin to ask, the methods through which you find the answers and even what you choose to believe in. How you analyze and take in information, or approach problems. These all sound intangible until you remember that every time you walk down the street you take in information. Each time you speak with someone, you decide how to respond. Even when you decide what to eat for dinner, you’re essentially solving a problem to the classic question of what to eat. This doesn’t mean that a chemistry major would have a completely different decision-making process than an anthropology major, but I would argue that your educational journey does shape who you become, and the larger choices that come with life.
As someone who just finished four years with three majors in three different fields of study, I’ve come to appreciate the ways in which different disciplines approach knowledge.
My major in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology is first and foremost a mouthful. Once you get over the obnoxious name, you’ll find yourself in class after class focused on understanding the fundamental units of life. A majority of these teach this understanding through what you could consider classic classroom learning: lecture, homework, exam. Rinse and repeat four to five times, and you’ve got 75% of the curriculum down. The other 25% will find you in labs investigating the world through complex and specific methods, in addition to gaining skills in reading and presenting scientific papers.
The rigidity and structure of these classes taught me to be critical of the world. I learned to understand things by breaking them apart and focusing on the function of each constituent element. The major taught me to ask the right questions about the world, and some methods for starting to find answers. But it did so primarily through an assay-like manner. Just as we run tests on things in the lab, I was tested time and time again through exams to gain the understanding needed to succeed.
I experienced a completely different world through my English major. There, instead of running assays, we wrote essays: The difference in the words is minute — just one letter — but the outcome is major. Instead of the right answer dominating how I came to understand the world, my education focused on trying things. Experimenting — not with cells or chemicals, but ideas. What does literature add to the world? How can language shape a nation? What power does the pen have?
My education in English rarely tested me through memorizing a pathway, but it did challenge me to think differently. To question why things were the way they are, and what it means to be a collection of the cells I studied so closely. In many ways, I credit my English major with being the reason I know how to find meaning in life, and what happiness will look like for me (though I have to say, another part of that comes from their unique New England Literature Program — a reminder to always investigate what your department has to offer).
With the natural sciences and the humanities out of the way, that just leaves the social sciences. While it may be natural to paint them as the middle ground, my major in sociology taught me this isn’t quite the truth. Social sciences attempt to bring “scientific” methods to the naturally untamable madness of human behavior. In this pursuit, this discipline balance dehumanizing realities of quantification with a real value that represents the complexities of being human.
Sociology classes have challenged me to dig deeper than the individual and find the patterns that underlie “natural” phenomena. They’ve pushed me to use curiosity as a tool for uncovering the hidden currents that dictate how we make decisions and how we find our place in an ever-changing world. Thanks to sociology, I feel confident understanding how our society can continue to shape us in ways beyond our control, and how to react accordingly.
At this point, I don’t expect you to have had a major “aha” moment and immediately know what you want to study. It took me three full years to fully determine that. Nor can I claim that your journey will be identical to mine— regardless of what you study, we’ll take different classes, complete different assignments and take away different things. But I do hope you can begin to see your major as more than just a list of requirements to meet.
The discipline you ultimately choose doesn’t determine your future career — that’s far too malleable and under your control. But it does determine the kind of person you become; how you interact with and make sense of the world.
Daily Arts Writer Ian Gallmore can be reached at gallmore@umich.edu.
