Ms. Career Girl Confession: When I was in college I hid behind my major- big time. I felt smart and respected saying I was a finance major. I was proud that I was in a traditionally male dominated program and industry. I felt that having this major meant I was going to become an investment banker and make six-figures in my twenties. I was a self-proclaimed martyr for cute finance women of all kind.
HA! Who are we kidding here? I’ve never achieved straight A’s in my entire life even though I really did practically live at the library during college. The finance program really wasn’t that male dominated. And as if I could really handle working in an office for 120 hours per week! I am way too social, creative and ADHD for a career in i-banking.
I’m not sure who I was trying to prove all of this to but in hindsight, I was clearly on a mission to fill a hole in my soul.
I brought my pretentious attitude with me to my first job in financial sales. I assumed I would have the best sales and be the first to get promoted simply because I had a finance degree and the others didn’t. I was only fooling myself.
Clinging to your major is holding you back
In many cases, your major doesn’t mean much after you graduate. It may give you peace of mind or an ego boost, but beyond that it’s pretty benign.
For the lucky few, a college major correlates directly to an initial career path: elementary education, nursing, etc. For the rest of us, a major is simply a jumping point.
What were YOU doing when you were 18? 20? Regardless of how ambitious and career focused you were, I’d bet money on the fact that only a handful of you knew yourself well enough to pick a lifetime career path. Even if you DID know yourself inside and out, you didn’t have enough experience to know what you don’t like.
In other words, squish your guilt with your stiletto.
Keep in mind that:
- Your major is not your career. GET THAT OUT OF YOUR HEAD RIGHT NOW!
- The question that haunts every student is, “what are you going to do with your major?”
- This question is very annoying, especially around this time of year. So rather than throw something, assume people are asking, “what you want to do?”
- After a while, you may start thinking you will never get a job unless you do something within your major. Not true. At all.
- Be Flexible. Accepting a job that is outside of your major might be the best thing that ever happened to your career. You never know what you’ll learn, whom you will meet, and what other things you are passionate about until you try.
When writing this post, I made a list of my friends and family’s college majors and their current occupation. On paper, each seemed completely unrelated. Weird? No. Most people don’t end up going into what they majored in anyways. They may start out on that path and thanks to an unexpected event, their career changes course.
The Unexpected Event
Many successful job seekers take their major out of the equation and pay attention to what is going on around them instead. These people most likely faced an unexpected event that they were open-minded enough to pay attention to and look at as an opportunity rather than a detour from their cookie cutter predetermined career path.
Sometimes this opportunity comes in the form of a person you unexpectedly meet. Other times you land an internship that seems random at first but then you fall in love with it. You may sit next to someone on an airplane that suggests you should interview with her firm. Or, you may finally start listening to your gut and admit that you really don’t want to pursue what you majored in for the rest of your life.
What role did your major play?
- What role does your major play in your job search or current career?
- Are you using your major as a crutch to cover up the fact that you have no idea what you want to do after college?
- Did you end up completely switching gears? Why?
- Are you having a tough time finding a job? Have you considered companies and roles that seem unrelated to your field of study upon a first glance?
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If anyone can relate to where you're at in your career, it's Nicole Crimaldi: Nicole spent 5 years in corporate America, switched career paths, worked at a start-up, survived a layoff and is now self-employed. Nicole believes that career satisfaction is a huge part of overall happiness. Therefore, she started Ms. Career Girl to help other women get off the treadmill and onto a more fulfilling path.
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
Oh Nicole how I wish I had someone like you telling me these things 10 years ago! Oh well, you’re here now, telling us. Thanks!
You are absolutely spot on about not knowing what you don’t like right out of school. At 30 years old I am finally figuring out exactly what I don’t want to do, and that narrows down for me what I do want to do. Every time I have found a job it has been further and further away from where I started and where I thought I’d end up. I’m really glad that I didn’t go into a career search with blinders on pigeonholing myself into only seeking out professions in my degree field. I would have been miserable I suspect. It is amazing to look back at where I started and where I am now and figure out how the hell I went from there to here.
My major has actually gotten in my way when trying to find a job recently and I have been advised to leave it completely off my resume and only discuss it once I’m at an interview and I can explain. If your major is too narrow, or you want to go into a completely different field, like me, you could end up shooting yourself in the foot. I don’t regret majoring in Criminal Justice, it is still the most fascinating major to me, I just realized a lot about myself over the years and I know that working in the CJ system is not and never has been where I wanted to be.
But at least I learned something fun in college. I think people tend to be so career focused, even when they start college that they forget to take courses that they will enjoy. Take a pottery class, take art classes, take writing classes even if you don’t need them for your major requirements. Take something different like Japanese culture. You might be surprised by what you learn about yourself and where it might take you. And if you are already out of school and still floundering, go back and take some of these more fun courses it might give you a different perspective.
Hey Jen!
I agree with you about taking classes that are fun in college! I have two younger sisters and I have told them both to make sure they major in something they love and that the money will come later. It’s so much easier to retain and grow the depth of your knowledge and connect with people when you actually like what you’re doing!
I’m so glad I minored in Entrepreneurship because those classes gave me so much energy, excitement and curiousity to keep reading and keep learning. I still keep in touch with my professors and my entrepreneurship classes are what really got me hooked on reading business and career books. I imagine those classes somehow inspired me to start this very blog.
Everything in your career happens for a reason. We women like to over plan sometimes but I always say planning too much early on is the worst thing you can do for your career.
Thanks for your comment!
Nicole
Good post. People have asked me what I could possibly do with a degree in economics. My answer is usually, “whatever I want to do.”
Rob,
I love that answer because it’s so true yet no one is saying it. That is a silly question because it suggests that pretending you have a perfect plan makes you more of a person, which is far from the truth.
Nicole
Coming from a liberal arts school, there is a lot of chatter about what people are going to do with their “useless” majors. It’s actually quite sad to see someone, defeated, after spending the past four years majoring in philosophy, believe that their only option is graduate school/law school/med school.
It seems like most undergrad majors could be argued as “useless” by someone, except for a few specific ones, like nursing or engineering or computer science. I’ve ever heard people obnoxiously asking what people plan to do with undergrad business degrees.
Rob,
If you want to live in North Carolina, the company I work for does research and we have tons of economists here and are always always looking for more… and the pay is stellar. Just sayin’ in case you’re interested.
Also, all of the people that I know who majored in philosophy ended up starting their own businesses and are actually quite successful. Strange huh?? I would never have thought philosophy would lead in that direction, but it makes sense now that I see it in action.
I second that, cost of living is low, Charlotte and Raleigh are building out transit and there are walkable places in both. Jen, not sure where you are located, I’m going to go out on a limb and say RTP. (Currently in Triad, but went to school down there)
Hi, Nicole! I just found your blog a few months ago, and I LOVE it. Thanks so much for writing about this. I felt like you were writing my life! All my life, my parents and grandparents told me to pick a major that would get me a good job, because “passion doesn’t get you a job.” So, I majored in economics, loved the first couple classes, and hated the rest. Like you, I didn’t make straight “A”s like I had during high school, and I came out of college with a GPA I’m not exactly pasting all over my resume. But I realized in my senior year that I really needed a career with a creative outlet, and my dad is a civil engineer. I started looking into what he does, and soon enough, I was working in the City of Raleigh transportation office despite the fact that I went to UNC, which has zero point zero zero engineering classes. I LOVE IT! Eventually, I want to be a transportation planner with some studio design experience, so I’m in grad school also, but I really hope my generation will be the one to stop forcing eighteen-year-olds to make decisions for their thirty-year-old future selves.
So glad you are getting something out of the blog! Most of the things I write about are because I was totally confused on the topic while I was in college. My Dad told me the same kind of thing- that when you graduate you need to come out with a trade rather than a passion (i.e. graduate as an accountant, a lawyer, an engineer, etc.). I wanted to major in marketing but that seemed way too vague to be turned into a trade.
Your type of story is a big part of the book I’m working on. Many people are SO focused on using their major that they miss out on great opportunities or fail to see unexpected events that change the course of their career. It sounds like if you would’ve ignored working at a place that seemed totally unrelated to what you studied, you wouldn’t be this happy.
Lauren- Let’s connect. I’m very interested in transportation and I live in Greensboro, will be attending UNCG in the fall for an MPA concentrating in community development (with lots of urban planning classes). I was a State grad with a degree in communication, but have always loved transit and travel. I’ve linked to my website and my email is there, hope to hear from you.
So, you majored in finance? And you currently work in finance?
Am I missing something?
That is correct. I really like working in finance and have no intention of ever leaving the field. I’ve also discovered since graduating that there are so many areas of banking that I didn’t know about which are pretty awesome and fit my personality and career goals very well.
Many people know me only as a career blogger and as someone who is writing career books. My major had nothing to do with starting Ms. Career Girl and everything I’ve learned about this topic I’ve learned on my own. I’ve connected experiences from my corporate life to my passion project here.
The point is, my major does not define me or my career. It’s all what you make it!
Nicole.
I love this post and I really hope that you reach a good amount of college students with this one. I’ve been down the path of the delusional “major matters” school. My little sister is in medical school and tells me that if I had gone ot the USC school of Music and been premed I would have more or less been guaranteed admission into med school, since it would have been so out of the ordinary. When you hear something like that it really makes you realize that your major and career are not often related.
To dig a bit deeper, one of the BIGGEST MISTAKES, I think college students make is choosing a major because of the fact that they think it will get them a job. I look at how much I missed out on in terms of amazing classes at a University full of Nobel prize winning professors because of this mind set. I was an environmental economics major and the truth is I have no interest in it really and can’t think of one job I had that resulted from my major.
For college students out there, a University is a wonderful place with so many opportunities and interesting classes. I would seriously consider the idea of chosing a course just because it sounds interesting at least once every quarter/semester. Those are the courses that have profound life changing impacts on you, not the required ones for your major. If you’re a premed, take a course in music or something like that. If you’re in finance, take a theater class and get involved in drama,. Who knows you might end up in Hollywood instead of an i-bank. When you chose a major based on your career interest, it’s like fitting a square peg into a round hole (with exceptions like Nicol mentioned, computer science, nursing, etc). As Nicole said, sometimes a job that has nothing do with your major could be your calling card and the best thing that has happened to you. Dont’ come to the end of your college career and realize that your major was nothing more than a means to an end and you really didn’t have an interest in it.
Well you hit the nail on the head and got me to speak up yet again! Your post is directly related to my new favorite book YOU MAJORED IN WHAT? By Katherine Brooks. I am going to a conference of hers on Career Coaching. She coined the terms career coaching! In her book she talks about career planning no longer being linear. i.e. You are good at art, so major in art, and become an artist. It’s this idea based on chaos theory -behaves sensitively to stimulus altering the original path/intent, but has a purpose, goal, and end point. If I haven’t told you already, I am a Career Counselor at a private college and I speak to this book and your post all of the time! Great job as usual!
Hey Cassie!
How funny you should mention “You Majored in What”…I am reading it right now too! I LOVE THIS BOOK. And although we haven’t met yet, I’m pretty sure I love Katherine Brooks too!
I didn’t know you were a career counselor at a private college- I’m going to send you an email today about some stuff I’d love to chat with you about.
I’d love more info about this conference she is hosting too- I’d love to attend.
Thanks for commenting again.
Nicole
I majored in English Literature, and I was constantly asked what the heck I was planning on doing with my degree. As far as I know, there isn’t a job out there specifically looking for “English Literaturists”
but that’s what I loved about it. I learned more about “life” at university than I ever did about literature. It was the experience of going out on my own, learning about things I loved, becoming disciplined and developing creative and deductive skills that I never even knew I had before!
Unfortunately, I know a lot of people who are relying on their degrees to get them jobs, but forgetting about the many other skills they learned and developed at college or university. Great article!
I also want to add that I was in this trap too, I thought I’d be a failure if I didn’t get another PR, nonprofit or event planning job. Due to the economy and my own learning curve, I began temping as an administrative assistant last year and I’ve evolved into a technology support coach, where I use the skills from my communication(PR) degree to ensure that me and my co-workers provide great customer service to our many customers that call. In addition, that job allowed me to take on volunteer PR and writing work, which allowed me to network in the community and continue my passion for working with nonprofits.
In undergrad, I did a lot of volunteer work and I did an honors thesis on nonprofits, along with leadership courses, music classes and student mentoring. The interest in nonprofits and an opportunity through my internship coordinator led to me to a program director position for an entrepreneurship nonprofit. However, I was so trapped into the fact that I was not doing direct PR, I shipwrecked myself. Two years later, I’ve re-emerged, preparing to begin an MPA program and flexing my entrepreneurial energy to start a local chapter of a professional organization. My message, don’t get trapped! Work hard, network and let your skills shine through whatever job you have.
Hi Nicole,
Great post! I majored in English Literature and Geography. Where I come from (Sri Lanka), most people think of what career they want in high school and then pick their high school classes to get into the right major/degree to get into that career after graduating from university. That’s 8 years during which you can’t change your mind or at least you think you can’t.
I used to pull my hair out in frustration because I never knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. I just knew what I liked doing and what I could do. I went to the US and spent two years dabbling in a Liberal Arts degree where I took classes in Biology, Classics, Anthropology, Geography, Geology, Computer Science, Dance, and Theatre before realising that the USA at the time was personally not where I wanted to be and my experience there did not feel very welcoming. I felt like I had to fit into a box and I didn’t have a clue what box it was.
So I left and I moved to Australia. I decided to study something I liked. I had to pick something rather quickly so I went with something I enjoyed. I ended up studying English Literature and Geography but I took electives in other things I was interested in such as Archaeology and Journalism. I even did an extra year of university where I had what was a History/Archaeology/Commerce/ Geography mix of an Honours project (we called it Historical Geography because we didn’t have a clue where it fitted in).
The day after I graduated I started my own business as a freelance editor and journalist. Why? Because I have always loved writing, I have always been good at it and my first book was published at 17. And because I edited other people’s work for them. Throughout my life up to that point, I had always been writing, be it a book or a column in a newspaper and I had always been helping others with their writing. I’m into my second year as a freelancer and it’s hard and it can get depressing at times but I like it a lot. I have made a ton of friends I would have never met otherwise and I have learnt so much about business and other issues. And as a freelancer, I can gain experience working for several different clients in one year whereas if I worked in-house at a company, I would only gain the experience working with that one company. I see it as a win-win situation for me at the moment.
So I went with what I knew I could do and not with my major. Problem is now there are tons of other skills I have gained and there is a temptation to open a slew of businesses for each skill set.