Do You Regret Your University/College Major?

Despite dropping out after one term myself, I’m a huge fan of co-op programs. Besides graduating with little or no debt, you know whether you want to do what you’re training for AND you probably have a job lined up where you’ve been working on work term.

(This applies more for sciences than humanities. A friend was in co-op poly sci and there were no work term jobs.)

My wife is one of the cautionary tales (not just for marrying me): she was in education, got to student teaching and realized she didn’t want to do it. Switched to marketing, did well. Ok, that’s basically the co-op story again, but not actually a co-op program.

I wonder how many people who regret their major got locked into it because their college made it hard for them to switch.
I officially entered in mechanical engineering but that was because I had to fill out my application before I took my high school computer class (long before this was normal.) No problem switching to CS, and I never regretted it. I know a math major who switched to poli sci (with the hearty approval of the math department.) He became a successful lawyer. I know someone who started in mechanical engineering who switched to economics, also with good results.
But I suspect there would have been regrets if they were stuck in their original majors.

No regrets.

I started in mechanical engineering but my youth was a hot mess and I dropped out after the first semester.

I tried again a year and a half later in physics, thinking to wind up in particle physics, but then took a class in astronomy and absolutely loved it. I love astronomy to this day.

Graduated with “physics and astronomy” and wound up in industry working on what you might call the science of processing machinery. I did a whole lot in aerosol science and filtration, micro contamination control, and for the last 23 years polymer thermal processing. The physics background sort of steered me into it all, and it’s been a most pleasant career. Now I have 49 years in industrial technology and I’m ramping down, working 3 day weeks and preparing others to succeed without me.

In high school, I thought I would become a Spanish language teacher. Wonder how that would have panned out…

It’s weird.

I enrolled straight from high school to College. Mechanical Engineering. This was 1979. Perfect fit really, I love all things mechanical. I’m good at math and have excellent drafting skills.

I had to take some electives, one of which was an art/drawing class. Loved it. Both my parents are art majors. It wasn’t that, but I was really struggling with the high level math for mechanical engineering. And frankly, partied way too much now that I was away from home.

I withdrew. Worked for a few years for drafting and other companies. All map related. And then GIS exploded. Computer mapping. There was no degree or even a class for it back then.

I had some computer experience too. I basically fell ass backwards into a perfect job for me. GIS. Before anyone new what GIS was.

I don’t regret it so much as wish I’d broadened it a bit, or taken a 2nd major.

I have a BS in Animal Science. I started in Wildlife Management, until I twigged that I was essentially a Forestry major and wouldn’t get to do any Wildlife coursework until postgrad. An Sci could have led to pre-vet, but all the math and intense chemistry was very hard for me. Add to that the realization that I would have loved the animal side of things but with pets come people … and too many people just suck when it comes to pets. If I’d been smart -or had a good counselor- I would have stuck with it and gone for zoo vet work. Ah well …

95% of my employment since college has been animal focused one way or another, and I’ve loved it. Most has been with horses (teaching, training, farm mgmt). However it’s not a great source of cash, and the skills don’t easily translate (on paper anyway) to more traditional and more lucrative work. At 60, I find myself in horseworld retail. I like it, I’m reasonably good at it, and I’m just damned lucky that I don’t actually have to live on what I make alone.

Had I also incorporated some sort of business or computer focus to my degree (1980-1984; the computer world was about to explode) I’d have been a good deal better off I think.

I got a BA in Anthropology at a good liberal arts college. I’ve never made a dime from that specific degree, but I’ve never regretted it.

Tuition was a fixed amount, regardless of course load. The anthropology major was extremely generous about accepting cross-credit for other classes, including psychology, biology, religion, history, poli sci, statistics, and similar subject areas. I had a blast loading up on a wide assortment of classes over my four years and still did well enough that I was “recruited” by a graduate school right before I got my diploma.

Just about the only subject area that I couldn’t get cross-credit for was fine arts. Buuttt…I worked as a projectionist for the college and attended a huge number of fine arts and film studies courses that I got paid to attend. I even used to do the readings for the classes.

TL;DR: No regrets. Got to take a lot of subjects and I’ve done just fine in my career.

I flirted with being a Sociologist, but I knew it wasn’t just for me so I took the “easy” route of an English degree. I should have stuck with journalism, politics or history and toughed it out. I’m intrigued by international relations, but I’m too old and crap with languages so :person_shrugging:

I breezed through my Bachelor’s program, doing a four-year degree in just three years. I was able to do this because I enrolled as a non-degree student while still at high school, taking a few classes at night or over the summer; then, after switching to a degree program, I never took a break over the summer semesters, instead filling them with as much as a full course load.

A disadvantage of doing things this way was that I didn’t have a very wide variety of courses to choose among; I basically had to take whatever happened to be offered at the time rather than what I may have preferred to take. Fortunately, I was able to fit in all the required classes for my chosen major in computer science, as well as the right combination of electives for minors in both mathematics in linguistics.

I’ve since moved on to a scientific career in computational linguistics, and I consider myself a lot more involved in (and enthusiastic for) the linguistics side of things than the computer science side. If I had to do my undergraduate degree over again, I’d probably aim for a double major in computer science and linguistics, even if that would have meant having to take the full four years.

I regret that I didn’t retake my A-levels (the exams that determine which university you can go to in the UK), and just went to a “no-name” Uni. In the UK, there is quite a lot of snobbishness related to universities, and thus which university you go to is more important, in terms of opportunities on graduation, than how well you did in the degree itself. I didn’t appreciate that.

I did a Master’s years later at a prestigious university…I didn’t notice any difference in teaching quality, so I think the snobbishness is unwarranted, but that’s how it still is.
(of course there are differences between institutions when we start talking about research work and facilities though)

I somewhat regret going to pharmacy school for a degree in pharmacy for premed. While the course background made med school easy for me, it provided almost no liberal arts education. I recall only 1 English, 1 psychology and 1 sociology course in 10 years. There may have been 1 or 2 more, it was a long time ago (19th century). No history, no art, no music, no basket-weaving, no cryptozoology—just a big blobby mass of science…with course names people have trouble pronouncing.

Man does not live by science alone.

I have a great interest in liberal arts subjects and don’t like being ignorant of them. Reading and watching The Great Courses lectures has brought me pretty much up to speed on the subjects I’m most interested in, but having early exposure in college would have been nice.

I was an English major for about three seconds and then switched to physics, and I’m happy that I did. My career didn’t end up being in physics, but it ended up being heavily analytical, and the undergraduate degree helped.

Nope. Got an engineering degree and have never had a job, until recently, that really used engineering (I’ve had a successful career). However, it was a liberal arts state school and the GER/GURs and non-major electives I took were fantastic in giving me a broader view of the world, and almost taught me a second language which I still attempt to learn to this day, 30 years later. I’m a slow learner apparently.

I did NONE of that, and luckily it turned out I didn’t need it. I ended up in an entirely unrelated field.

People ask what my major was, then crinkle their noses “Well, what good did going to college do you, then?”

“I learned to learn. And found out how much I loved it.”

The college I attended was almost purely a nerd school with mostly science and engineering majors available. We used to joke about “failing in”, which was the state of someone who went to the school with the intention of majoring in engineering or science but discovering a year or two in that this was not for them. Usually, this discovery was accompanied by a crappy GPA, which meant that transferring to a school of similar quality was probably not going to happen. So one’s choice seemed to be to switch to one of the very few soft science majors at our school or go to the local community college and start from scratch. For that reason, when people asked me if they should consider that school, i always advised them to instead attend a well-rounded university where there were a variety of programs available, in case their first choice was not for them.

I don’t regret my major (biology).

I wish, though, that I’d taken advantage of my college’s semester program in London. Mrs. J. and I could’ve had a lot of fun.

No regrets about my B.A. in Communications, even though my radio production career never got off the ground (I probably dodged a bullet). Sometimes I think I should have taken a journalism class or two, because that might have been a good fit for me, but I wound up becoming a technical writer – despite never hearing that term until I’d been out of school for 4-5 years – and went on to get an M.A. in English. I’ve gone from tech writing to proposal writing to proposal management back to tech writing and now to project management, but on the whole I feel that things have worked out well enough.

I have an MA in Linguistics and no regrets about it.

However, there are two things I should have done differently.

  1. I’d change one of the two languages that I studied and pick Italian instead.
  2. I’d go through with my ambition of embarking on a PhD programme, but I’d focus on Typology instead of Historical Linguistics.

No regrets whatsoever. I have an honours BA in history, with a minor in political science. I’m now a lawyer. My knowledge of history and political sciences have matched my legal career perfectly, helping me provide necessary context to certain issues. I’ve cited historical information in my submissions, and I’ve sometimes had the pleasure of seeing the courts rely on the historical materials in their decisions.

No regrets here. I have a BA in Russian, with a minor in Linguistics. Not terribly useful, but I did not go to university to get practical skills training. I went because I had no other choice–my parents insisted on me attending university. I had no choice but to attend university. Anything else was off the table, as many screaming matches proved.

My study of Russian was my way of getting back at them: I didn’t necessarily want to go to university (really, I would have preferred to look into a trade school), but they were adamant that I do, so I majored in something that was sure to piss them off: Russian. It was the Cold War, and Russkies, who were naturally Commies, with gulags and political prisoners and without freedom, were the enemy.

Oh yeah. I pissed them off, all right. But I did learn the language and the politics of the USSR and the history, and I got a university degree, so they were happy in a “kinda-sorta” way. So I guess we both won the fight: I pissed them off and they got a son with a university degree.

I had an aptitude for writing (my Linguistics helped here), which I did for years, and eventually became an English teacher at a college. And my Russian degree was no bar to my acceptance at a law school years later. So–no regrets.

This. My major was what I wanted to study at the time. It turned out it didn’t lead to my long-term career, but there was no way I could have known that since my long-term career didn’t exist when I was in college.