Five Things To Consider When Researching College Majors

How are your student's college search and list of schools going? We've shared our tips on how to build your college list and start researching schools (complete with questions students can ask themselves to help refine their lists), but it's also important to hone in and research the specifics—specifics like college majors.

Researching majors and choosing the one(s) for you can be a difficult task, especially for students with diverse interests. Here are five of our tips to help your student as they consider their options:

1. Explore via extracurriculars

Firsthand experience with a field of study is always an effective way for a student to understand where their interests truly lie—and where they don't. If your student is early in their high school career, this is the time for them to participate in various activities and figure out which ones intrigue them more. For students who may already have an extracurricular resume, this is the time to reflect deeply on your experiences and think about which aspects you enjoyed and why you enjoyed them. Say your student loved their internship researching historical archives at a library: was it the data analysis, the environment, and/or the academic content that interested them? In which majors, then, could your student find more of that?

2. Narrow it down

Your student may think that, because they enjoyed their biology courses and want to pursue life sciences further, biology is their natural choice of major. However, "biology" is an incredibly broad field. Ecology, zoology, marine biology, biochemistry, biomedical engineering—the list goes on! Diving deeper into specific kinds of a broader field can help your student not only explore options they may not have considered otherwise, but also possibly find a major that better suits their specific interests and can more clearly steer their applications.

3. Think about how your interests can combine or overlap with one another

One thing we've noticed in recent admissions trends is that students who differentiated themselves by showing overlapping interests stood out. For example, a student interested in psychology and computers would combine those two things into a project (creating a virtual reality environment to help kids work out emotional obstacles) or future goal—so what major would best suit a student with intersecting interests like these? Perhaps Artificial Intelligence, or Media, Arts, Data, and Design? While double majoring is always an option, it can be eye-opening to look into interdisciplinary majors and see down which roads they lead you.

4. Understand that majors are not the same across schools

This is even the case if all the schools in question are known for those majors! One school's English department may operate entirely differently from another school's English department, and that will affect your student's experience in that major. If your student already has a college list draft or knows a handful of schools that they're interested in, and also has a loose idea of some majors they'd like to pursue, research how those majors differ across those schools. 

What is the department's approach to the field? For example, the University of Chicago's Economics courses are known for prioritizing theory, which may not be the best fit for a student who prioritizes practice. What kind of professors are in the department faculty, and would you be interacting with them directly if you were to go to that college? What facilities and other resources are available at that school for that major? Check what kinds of research opportunities and even faculty with related research topics there are at your colleges of interest.

5. Make sure you’re not mixing up undergraduate and graduate major programs

Many top colleges are institutions with world-renown graduate programs, and students often confuse a school’s graduate program prestige with what it offers to undergraduate students. Don’t make the mistake of wanting to go to Stanford to study business, which does not exist at the undergraduate level at Stanford—only for MBA programs. Make sure you’re searching within undergraduate circles.

To learn more about researching majors and schools, as well as how we at ILUMIN can tailor a specific application plan for your student (helping them utilize their individual situations and strategize applying to different schools under different majors, for example), feel free to set up a free consultation with us!