by May Plaige

Created on: November 10, 2008

Choosing your major in college can be overwhelming; there are so many majors available and so many careers available through them. You may not have found your "calling," or you may feel fairly evenly spread in skill and interest across many areas of study. The good news is that accomplishing this task can be simplified by asking yourself a few questions and taking a little extra time to pay attention to your answers.

If you are searching for colleges or deciding which college acceptance letter to respond to, knowing what you want to major in can be a big deciding factor in where you go. One place you can turn to first is your transcripts; what classes did you earn the highest grades in? For many, earning high grades consistently in a subject is a sign of aptitude and interest. Even if you don't know specifically what major you want, knowing that you do well in math might mean that you should be looking for a college that has an array of choices in math and science majors.

Of course, if you always earned high grades in math but you hated it all through school, you can probably be sure that you won't be signing up for a degree in physics. If this is the case, the next thing you should look at is what you actually enjoyed doing. If it seems you never liked any subject, which classes did you least mind showing up to? Being honest with yourself about what exactly you liked about the classes can even help you narrow your options down. For example, if you realize that you never minded English class because oftentimes you got to read in class, and you enjoyed that, then looking at your colleges' literature courses and majors might prove valuable to you.

What if you are already in college, undecided, and looking at your course catalog like it's one of those 15 pound dictionaries permanently sitting in the library? If that's the case, you're already going in the right direction by reading the course catalog; you just need to learn how to decipher it so that it works for you. You can start by looking at the college courses you have already taken and/or are taking now. Which do you enjoy? Which are you doing well in? The purpose of general education courses is twofold: to ensure that you, as a scholar, receive an adequate amount of general knowledge in addition to your specialized studies, and also to give you a chance to sample the many disciplines and help you decide which one is right for you.

Look at the courses in the same disciplines as the ones you most enjoy, and then

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