Is Marketing a good major?

In My Humble Opinion
41

To be fair, I did sort of point that out upthread. :slight_smile: If you do, actually, want to go into sales, it’s a pretty darned good major.

Some people are really cut out for working in sales – it really does take a certain kind of personality. If you’re that kind of person, and you enjoy that sort of job, it can make for a great career; my father is an example of that. But, if you’re not cut out for it, or it doesn’t interest you, then, no, majoring in marketing probably is not what you should be doing.

42

True, good point. I have worked with people who are naturals at Sales and they make insane money – like $400k + per year. But it is not for everybody, that’s for sure.

43

Here’s the thing nobody really tells you:

Every job, no matter how “cool” is going to have a large chunk of tedious, boring grunt work until you get senior enough to do the fun stuff.

Find something that you can stand to do all day every day, and make a career out of that. Don’t choose something where at the highest levels, the practitioners are doing really cool stuff, because in all likelihood, your career will derail somewhere along the way and you’ll end up doing some proportion of grunt work.

To use an example, doctors get paid a lot, but not all of them are Greg House and diagnosing and treating rare and exotic diseases and syndromes. The vast majority are seeing 20 snot-nosed people a day for months on end and saying “You have allergies. Take some Claritin.”. Or they’re doing physical exams and telling their patients to stop smoking, lose weight and eat less fat. Or if they’re surgeons, they’re probably cutting moles and warts off people’s feet and asses all day long.

Lawyers make a lot of money, and the big time ones do cool stuff like prosecute Charles Manson. Many other lawyers do traffic tickets all day, or are ambulance-chasing plaintiff’s attorneys, and still others are deathly dull civil litigation attorneys.

For every IT guy you read about starting his own internet company to do something cool, there are at least 10 goons in cubicles writing code to produce reports on daily metrics for some executive who doesn’t know how to interpret the data in the first place. Or they’re answering questions about why fields are needed on the dirt-simple ETL process.

Some video game people may be doing cool game design and neat graphics design, but there are a lot more that slave away for ridiculous hours doing seriously intricate and dull code. Or playing the same level of the game over and over and over in testing.

For every marketing major who’s determining the market segments and helping design the ad campaigns and pricing structures for them, there are probably 20 sales guys with marketing majors cold calling people all day and trying to sell them stuff.

THAT is why it’s important to “do what you love”, or as I described it, what you can do all day every day and enjoy.