Since the college application process is complete for nearly all the students in the senior class, those who applied to colleges now have a new and arguably scarier concern, college admission decisions. However, one of the biggest impacts on any student’s college admissions includes the student’s applied major.
All students have different experiences with picking what major to apply for in college, from the time at which they picked it to their reasons for choosing it and the strength of their attachment to their major.
According to polling of a sample of ANHS students, the most popular majors for those students are engineering, biology, and computer science with over 60% of students applying under these majors. Following these STEM-related majors, another particularly popular major is business. In general, though, the least popular majors for ANHS students as well as likely all students remains various humanities majors, in part due to the lack of financial potential. Some even still have not decided what major they want to apply for, choosing either undeclared or general studies on their applications.
The ANHS students’ results in their most popular majors similarly parallels results from the country as a whole. This also explains why these are the hardest majors to get into schools for as well.
Shane Eicholtz (12) describes his process for choosing his majors, one of the more obscure, history and anthropology, “I’ve always known I liked history as I’ve always been a curious guy. However I never had the spark until fifth grade when I played “Battlefield 1,” a game about World War I. It opened my eyes to curiosity about what happened during World War I. The video game obviously couldn’t explain everything, so I used the internet and Youtube to find out. It spiraled into me learning about world history for the entirety of middle school. I got really into history, watching history videos while eating food and reading about history. I would also memorize maps and flags and pay attention to geopolitics. I feel like there’s a lot of good I could do with a history degree.”
Some students knew what they wanted to major in starting from a young age as their intended college majors come from long-term interests. Others only realize what they wanted to do very close to college applications.
This also determines the likelihood of different students actually staying in the major they applied for by their third year. Particularly for students going to community college first, the lack of major-specific classes allows students to switch majors much easier and thus quite a few end up changing their minds on what they wanted to dedicate many more years of study to.
Another poll respondent, Laura Richards (12), intends to major in business, stating, “I have wanted to major in business since I’ve been in high school because it aligns with my career plans and what I enjoyed most in school.”
Students decide at different points in their education what they would like to major in, and the most common factors that influence a decision is financial expectations, career goals, favorite class subjectsFF and genuine extracurricular interests.
