I don't know what academic major I'm fit for. So I have a solution. Is it the right solution though?

I don’t know what to major in in college, because I don’t know what I’m good at. So my solution is to take a career assessment at eureka.org. Is my solution the right way to figure out what the proper major for me is?

Have you started college yet? If not, don’t worry about it yet. Hell, even if you’re starting your freshman year now, don’t worry about it. Take general education courses. You’ll probably like a few of them. Next year, take more classes in those subjects. Narrow it down that way. The career aptitude test is useful, but experience and enjoyment trumps all.

Well, from your previous posts, you’ve already done some work regarding film studies. Your best bet is to request a meeting with a counselor at the college you think you might go to; they have questions and tests that can narrow down what you’re good at vs. what you want to do, and hey, sometimes they match up in a way you wouldn’t have thought about.

Unless you’re going to be a doctor, lawyer, or go into some other profession where a Bachelor’s is absolutely necessary in order to continue in school … don’t bother.

Go learn a trade. Be a plumber. You’ll be making good money within a few years and won’t be drowning in student loans.

Your college major is not there to point you toward a specific career. Your college major is a combination of developing critical thinking and research skills (any major will do that) with something that is of interest to you (not all majors will do that). Most careers either require a graduate degree or else no degree or else will work with any major.

If you decide partway through, you can always shift major#1 to a minor and change majors, or add a minor in #2.

Really: the choice isn’t as deterministic as you think it is.

College majors, like your SAT scores, are a lot less relevant to your life than you think. Take your school’s basic liberal arts classes and some wacky electives and figure out what you enjoy. Put your summers to good use (apply for every unpaid slave internship under the sun) and have fun. A university education is about learning how to think. It is not job training. There are technical and professional schools for that.

One of the best ways to screw yourself over is to start college with no idea what you want to do. At best you waste a couple of years tuition figuring out what it is you want to do. At worst, you end up with a degree that doesn’t get you anywhere. Either way, you end up with student loans that you have to pay back (unless you happen to be wealthy enough to pay for college out of pocket, which most folks can’t do). It’s an extremely expensive way to waste a lot of time.

If you don’t know what to do with your life, then take some time off and figure it out. That doesn’t mean mooching off of your parents while you try to figure out your major (not sure if this applies to the OP but it’s just advice in general for anyone at this stage of their life). Children are taken care of. Adults take care of themselves. If you’re an adult (which you should be by the time you get to college, unless you are Doogie Howser), then get a job and pay for your own rent and food. If it takes you a year or two to decide on a major then so be it. Just don’t mooch off of anyone. Too many young people these days expect college to be taken care of for them and don’t really become an adult until afterwards. They don’t take responsibility for themselves.

You don’t go to college to figure out what you want to be. That’s doing it completely backwards. You figure out what you want to be then get whatever training is appropriate for it. If the career you decide on needs a college degree then you get that college degree.

Just my 2 cents.

the previous post by engineer_geek says it all.
But I’ll just add one little bit: look at the words I bolded above.
In real life, you don’t major in something, you DO something. And you do it a lot, for a long,long time. Eight hours a day,every day for 45 years.

If you don’t know what you want to do, then don’t try to major in it.
Stay away from college for a while. Get a job (even a Mcjob is okay), live on your own for awhile, and graduallyas you grow and become independant, you’ll learn a lot about yourself.

College is expensive. Don’t go deeply in debt untill you know how you’ll get out of debt.

My advice about college/university: find a place that offers a co-op program. Seeing what kind of work you’ll be doing is a real eye-opener, and it’s great to graduate with some experience on your resume.

The only real disadvantage to taking a year off between high school and college is you won’t get to use any scholarships you earned. If you haven’t earned any scholarships, take a year off. Get a job, save up for a deposit, find some roommates, and move out.

With due respect, engineer_comp_geek, this is wrong. There are ways to waste time in university: go only for the classes, and don’t take advantage of any of the other social or intellectual resources the university has to offer. Get so focused on your future career that you don’t explore any other options. Spend four years thinking on what you’ll be doing for the forty-five to follow. Not knowing what you want to do after university isn’t on the list.

Like all good systems, the university is designed with a little redundancy. If you “waste” a year in the wrong major, you’ll still get some benefit from the experience.

Edit: I do agree with the gap year thing, though, just for different reasons. People who take a short amount of time (1-2 years) between high school and university generally do better because they’re a little more mature and value the experience a little more.

I’ve got to agree. Many majors have a four year path without a lot of room for non essential classes. Engineering, for example, requires Calc I & II, Physics, Chemistry, and engineering electives in the first year. If you enroll in basic gen. ed. classes, it is probably going to cost you a year. While it may not be a total waste, because I’m sure that art history class was interesting and opened your mind like never before, it is costing a lot of money that will have very little monetary return.

If you’re just going to college as an investment to make more money once you’re out of college,

DON’T GO.

Be a plumber or a mechanic or open a small business or something instead.

Taking a year off can be a great way to mature and find yourself. It can also be a great way to get stuck in a dead end job, saying for year after year “I really ought to go back to school…” while being just comfortable enough that you don’t actually do it, until you hit the point where you have no other choice and the you have to find some way to carve four years out of mid-adulthood, with the potential family responsibilities, geographic constraints, consumer debt and other issues that will make it very, very difficult and limit your options in some very will days.

Despite the “Hey, tradesmen are all rich” rah rah-ism, the reality is that the economic prospects of an American without an undergrad degree are statistically grim. The unemployment rate for high school grads with no college is 8.4%, compared to 3.8% for those with degrees. Even in blue collar work, the lifetime earnings of someone with a high school degree are something like $750,000 less than someone with a bachelors. In office work, you are looking at a $2 million lifetime earnings gap between “high school diploma” and “4 year degree.” Some ways of managing your education are smarter than others, but it’s still a good idea to get a degree.

In other words, you need to weigh your choices very carefully. If you are the type who can focus and bring it together after a year off, consider it. But if you have any tenancy to drift and lose motivation, I would advise you to keep up your momentum and get it done with. In most universities, you can spend your first year completing your GEs and exploring electives. Universities have career centers and trained personnel whose primary job is to help students find that focus. And even in the worst, worst case scenarios, there are plenty of undergrad majors that have enough flexibility to mold your career as you go along. Realistically, very very few people actually do work directly related to their undergrad major. Indeed, with the average American switching careers seven times in their lifetime, your undergrad is just one small part of a work in progress.

That’s not to say that having that focus isn’t better than not having that focus. It is. Universities have an ENORMOUS amount resources for students, from internships to research opportunities, that you won’t have outside of school. If you have the focus to take advantage of these resources, build your relevant career experience, and really zone in on your career in undergrad, it will be a huge help. But if you don’t have it and you are a little fuzzy, it makes things harder but it’s not the end of the world.

It’s not a choice between full on college and entering a trade. There are also specialty certificates that will slot you into tech careers. Some of them are dodgy and some aren’t.

Our local community college has a certificate program in operating and maintaining electron microscopes. Rumor is that, for students willing to relocate, that certificate will get you a decent paycheck.

To the OP - the career assessment will do no harm. I once took the Campbell Strong Interest Survey (administered at regulated sites) and it did a pretty good job of narrowing the field.

You can also ask people who know you what sort of job they can see you doing well and enjoying. People, here, includes older relatives and family friends, who have met people doing different jobs.

One thing I like to do is go on LinkedIn and look up people who are working jobs I’d love to be at 10 years down the line. Then I look at what their career path has looked like up to that point, including what organizations and positions lead where.

Engineering is an unusual case, though; the vast majority of majors offer more flexibility. (And I’d venture to say that if the OP doesn’t know what he’s good at or what he wants to study, any major with a very strict path to degree is not the right choice for him.)

Which, actually, suggests another way of approaching the question: Go to the website of a college you think you want to attend. Find the online course catalogue and look up the requirements for majoring in a specific field. Then look up the course descriptions and any syllabi and reading lists you can find online. Now, do you feel like you’re at a fantastic all-you-can-eat buffet and you can’t wait to get started filling your plate, or do you feel like you want to shoot yourself? There’s your answer.

(This, by the way, is how I figured out I was SO not going to be able to major in education, no matter how much I thought I wanted to be a teacher.)

What you are good at is more important than what you enjoy. If you wind up stuck in a job that you like but suck at, or worse, aren’t good enough to get a job in your major at all, you’ll be miserable. Kind of like unrequited love or something. If you love butterflies but can’t hack cell biology, it’s better major in something you kick ass at, and then take up lepidoptery as a hobby.

But don’t play the future job market guessing game too heavily. Yes, underwater basket weaving is always going to be a rude awakening, but plenty of real majors have boom and bust cycles. Right now, there’s a job waiting for everybody with a degree in “hot new thing X”, but in 4 years, there will only be jobs for the guys with a 3.9 GPA in “warm kind of old thing X”. Be reasonable, and aim for the top of the class.

Bear in mind that not all basic studies classes are created equally. Most schools have, for instance, “Chem/physics/bio/calc I & II” and “Chem/physics/bio/calc for non-technical majors”. Any of those would fulfill the basic studies requirement, but the I&II sequence is required for pretty much any BS or engineering degree. There is a similar split for English/history/etc.

My advice is: Take a variety of courses that will fulfill basic studies requirements for a broad range of majors, particularly things you didn’t learn in high school. Go for the more challenging versions. After 2 semesters, you’ll have a much better idea of what you excel at, and be in position to make a more informed decision.

Worst case scenario 1: You decide to major in Chemistry, but you took “Prerequisite for all Physics majors” instead of “Prerequisite for all Chemistry majors”. Suck it up and enroll in summer session to make up for lost time. Look on the bright side-at least you got part of your chem requirement out of the way.

Worst case scenario 2: You decide to major in Physics, and you unnecessarily took the slightly harder “British Literature 1800-present” instead of the slightly easier “Literature for people who don’t like to read”. Big whoop, a little extra learning won’t kill you.

And never, under any circumstances, whine at a TA “Why do we have to learn this? It isn’t even in my major.” Complain to the department chair, not the grad students.

Well, yeah, but it’s still the same issue. Spending two years learning to maintain electron microscopes is a waste of time and money if you realize that what you really want to do is be a lawyer. And there is a non-zero chance that ten years from now, electron microscopes will be replaced by nanorobot imaging or we’ll be outsourcing all our imaging to Ghana and your training is no longer worth much. Learning a specific skill is great if you want to do that specific skill, but it’s a bad choice for someone who doesn’t have a plan.

In most cases, a liberal arts degree won’t open a lot specific doors for you, but it won’t close a lot of them either. A political science undergrad can do just about any office job, work in any number of political fiends from NGOs to lobbying, go on to a professional degree in law or business, teach various things, etc. It’s not a smart choice if you have a strong bent toward architecture (well, you could get into urban planning…) or physics, but if you can get as far as “white collar and vaguely within the realm of governmenty stuff,” it’s not a horrible choice.

Anyway, undergrad with a vague plan isn’t the absolute ideal thing to do, but if you keep your student loans sane and have a good chance of figuring things out by your 3rd year, it’s not a completely horrible plan either.

As a current undergrad senior with little direction and much debt, I strongly agree with those who have suggested you take a year off.