LiberalArtsOnline Volume 4, Number 5
May 2004
by Frederik Ohles
Vice President for Advancement
Council of Independent Colleges (CIC)
It was just a few years ago that I realized I had chosen the wrong major. A quarter-century after graduation from college, I could see that it should have been English, not History. But never mind; it makes no difference.
I suppose there were times when it could have made a difference. In hyper-self-critical mode, I imagine that there were class discussions I led and lectures I delivered when I was a History professor that were literary and abstract and impressionistic to a degree than might have fitted them oddly to the subject. My confessional inner voice rambles on to tell that there were essays I chose to write and articles I did not because of where my true interests lay. Outside of my work, there is fiction I have read in recent years, with much joy, that I might have found my way to years ago.
On the other hand, as an English major I doubt that I would have set to work learning German as well as French in college. It was my advisor, Diethelm Prowe, a History professor whose teaching focuses on European topics, who provoked that decision. And things German have interested and enriched me every since. Had I majored in English, I suspect that I would not have studied in Germany, nor taught in Australia, nor married in Malaysia. It was my continuing fascination with some aspects of European history as a graduate student that set in motion that exceptional, wonderful, formative chain of events.
For that matter, History was not the major I envisioned when I was eighteen years old and heading to college, nor was an academic career what I expected of my adult working life. What I imagined about college and career at that age, framed in terms of a major, is not worth recounting now. It would have been a different life. But never mind; that makes no difference either.
Kimberly Maxian Franklin, who directs career services at Illinois College, has a wonderful aphorism about the separation we ought to maintain between the major fields we select in college and the work that we do afterward: Let your major be what you love most; let your work be what you do best. The point cannot be made too strongly that our college majors and our lives are incommensurate with each other. It does no one any good to confuse the two of them. Lives are major matters. Majors are minor stuff.
Who cares that I chose the wrong major? Wrong though it appears with the aid of my optically corrected hindsight today, it was right enough then.
The puffed-up, self-important major, that solipsistic plague of American higher education, could be eliminated altogether and learning outcomes would improve. Now there is a hypothesis that some college faculty should dare to test. Are you with me still? Here is my eighteen-part illustration in support of that entertaining idea:
Twenty, twenty-five, and now thirty years after we were juniors exhibiting deep involvement in our majors, among my classmates at Carleton College it has become increasingly difficult and pointless to match up majors with careers. I can identify the Classics major who became a geologist, the Philosophy major reincarnated as architect, the Biology major who manages kitchens for a public school district, the Mathematics and Sociology double major (more than one major was a rarity then) who is a divinity school professor, the French major who is an investment portfolio manager, the International Relations major who is a consultant on corporate communications, two English majors who became successful building contractors, the Sociology major who was a gynecologist but is now a public health service medical director, the English major at work as an emergency room physician, the Classics major turned dean of students at a prep school, another Classics major who last I knew was director of operations in Europe and Africa for a major manufacturing firm, the History major who became an organ donation network executive, the Psychology major who is a minister in the United Church of Christ, the Chemistry major working as an OSHA statistician, the Physics major who is a homemaker, the Psychology major who is an attorney, and the History major who ended up as vice president of a science center. There are ten women and eight men in that group, all of them interesting and able people. Even if each of them had chosen a different major then, all of them would still be able and interesting people now.
Over the course of thirty years my principal interests have mutated just as theirs have. For most of us there have been multiple changes. If I were going to college for the first time today, I might make many different academic choices than the ones I made then. Those other choices would not be, by comparison, more delightfully right, nor more dreadfully wrong, but merely different. What does that say for my choice or anyone else’s choice of major?
In the end, the wrong major is the one that we give too much significance.
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Direct personal responses to Fred Ohles at fohles@cic.nche.edu.
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LiberalArtsOnline is an occasional email essay on the liberal arts, provided as a public service of the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.
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The comments published in LiberalArtsOnline reflect the opinions of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Center of Inquiry or Wabash College. Comments may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author(s), LiberalArtsOnline, and the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College.