Criteria for choosing a major

Good news! The university of your choice has accepted you for admission! Now you can begin the enrollment process. As part of that process you have to choose a major. How does that work?

Based on many conversations with the Chinese Mainland students, a few criteria drive the process of selecting a major.

1: Doing what mom & dad advise. (This includes doing what the grandparent advise.)

2: Picking one of the most popular majors.

3: Picking the same major as one’s friends and classmates.

4: Picking a major that leads to a well-paying job.

5: Picking a major in a hot field where graduates get snapped up soon after graduating.

All of these methods have their virtues. However, I will add a few other approaches to this list as a way of helping students and their parents to shape a choice based on a variety of factors byemphasizing intrinsic rather than extrinsic factors.

I find the approach for selecting a career or a university major based around生き甲斐 (ikigai) — a Japanese term meaning “life purpose” — useful.

This diagram comes from an article wirtten by Chris Loper titled “How to Use the Ikigai Diagram to Find Fulfillment.” You can find this diagram and the accompanying article here: https://becomingbetter.org/ikigai/

Note the four pillars of ikigai: your passion, your ability, sociocultural demands and socioeconomic demands. It’s not enough to feel passionate about something; that something has to make sense to others. It’s not enough that a particular activity makes sense to you and to others, you have to be good enough at it to stand out. And after all that, someone has to pay you to do thisactivityto make the whole system cohere. Meeting all four criteria simultaneously realizes ikigai, the ideal state.

Further complicating matters, things change over time. For instance, during China’s building boom of the 90s and 00s, architecture became a hot field. (Within the ikigai framework, this means “what you can be paid for” and “what the world needs.”) However, in the post-Evergrande world of 2024, opportunities for architecture graduates have dried up.

It’s not all bad news: changing conditions can open doors. Students with a knack for statistical analysis and coding, but little interest in programming, can thrive in data analytics, a major that didn’t even exist five years ago. (I will have more to write about new majors in an upcoming column. Stay tuned…)

To get a firmer handle on what you love and what you’re good at, I recommend talking in-depth with persons who know you (or the student that you are guiding). I also recommend taking a range of psychometric assessments. As to the former: informants could be teachers, university professors, and former job or internship supervisors, as well as the people they know. Go beyond the basic question: “What should I study?” Unpack the reasons for taking up a particular field and how the hard skills and soft skills fit (or don’t) your temperament and character. If at all possible, shadow someone who works in a given field or firm that seems interesting. You may enjoy many aspects of a given job or firm, but when you actually learn the fine details of that job or how that job operates within a given firm, you may decide that it’s not such a solid fit.

Psychometric assessments and aptitude “tests” have become more popular among young Chinese job hunters and human resources workers in recent years. The Sixth Tonenotes this in the article “Young Chinese obsess over Myers–Briggs Type Indicator, the 60s American personality test.” However, the MBTI comes with many problems, most notably that human beings do not fit neatly into the 16 types described by the MTBI. However, when used in concert with other criteria and methods such as those I describe immediately above, they often produce useful insights — and sharp questions — that students and their parents can apply inmaking sound choices about major courses of study. For instance, an MBTI assessment that indicates a tendency toward introversion may nudge a student toward strengthening presenting skills to compensate for a tendency to shy away from public speaking.

Students that have taken courses with me often seek my counsel after three or four years later after holding a job. Simply put, these years on the job made it clear that the job, the firm or the industry did not make for a good fit for that person. Given this, I remind students that your first job is not your last job. That is, you can change your mind about your career options, even if it means going into a field quite different from your university major. The university major says much more about where and how you will start your career rather than how you will end you career. Don’t feel that you’re locked-in. Don’t turn choosing a major into a trap.

Furthermore, you can change your mind about your major while still studying at a given university. Many of my friends changed their majors: from biology/premed to astronomy or biology/premed to literature.

As for me, I never changed my major. However, I changed the final goal as I pursued afield of study.

After a year of study, I declared economics as my major. I saw an undergraduate degree in economics as a solid foundation for completing an MBA. However, after getting a better sense of MBA culture, I reassessed this direction. I realized that I liked economics, so I stayed with economics… all the way to a PhD.

Mind you, continuing on a given study track to a PhD will not appeal to many students; my point here is that one adjusts — often more than once or in different ways — on the path to completing one’s studies. As part of this process, seek the counsel of those who know you best, but use multiple criteria for selecting a major — passion matters, but so do job opportunities and your underlying skills and temperamental characteristics — and keep an open mind about the quality of fit for that major for the life you want to lead.