You Have to Choose a Major Sooner Than You Think
Most colleges ask students to specify their intended major on the application. Before stressing too much about what to choose, they should know this does not mean they’re sealing their fate forever. But there is a bit of a strategy to choosing:
There are two places students are asked about majors on the Common Application:
In the Future Plans section. Students should not choose Undecided here if they have any defined interests. This is a place to give admissions one more piece of information about themselves and their passions.
In the Questions sections for each of the colleges. Most colleges include a question on the intended major or college. Students are given the specific choices (usually in scroll down options) offered and are required to choose.
Is the intended major highly competitive?
The increasing competitiveness and popularity of a few majors have made choosing a major increasingly important to admission outcomes. For this reason, if possible, students should indicate a second major choice as well as a primary choice. Highly selective majors like Engineering, Computer Science, Business and Nursing, can only admit a certain number of students, for reasons unique to each of those. If a student has not indicated a second-choice major, they might be shut out of that college altogether. Selecting a second choice sends the message that a student would like to be considered for admission to the college, even if not accepted into their first-choice major.
As a student considers different majors, first they can think about their interests, passions, the high school courses in which they excel, any outside programs they’ve explored and how those might fit into potential majors.
Colleges present and run their majors differently. For many universities, students apply for undergraduate admission, and that's it. Even if the university is divided into several smaller colleges of study, students won't have to choose a major until after they get to campus. For schools like these, the initial major choice doesn’t carry much weight; students may change their minds when they get to school. But at other schools (such as Northwestern University, Cornell University, and Boston College), students need to make a choice between undergraduate colleges and/or majors as they apply as high school seniors.
At Cornell, rather than apply to Cornell University as a whole, students must apply directly to one of seven colleges. Once in a college, it can be difficult to transfer internally to a different college due to the competitiveness of programs. If a student is sure that they want a specific major, the best idea is to go for it as a first-year applicant. Don’t assume a transfer into that major later will be possible. As a general rule, if a college has a specific field of study with extra requirements for undergraduate admission, internally transferring will be difficult. It is rare, but at a few colleges, students cannot switch majors once they start. At the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, students apply to one of 12 undergraduate colleges within the university. Even though students have until junior year to declare their major, for example for an Engineering major, options will be limited to engineering, and selecting a major in a different college would require a transfer application process. If it's hard to make an internal transfer, students need to think carefully about their choice of college/major and whether they’ll be happy with the major and courses offered within it.
The University of Maryland takes a different approach to their more popular majors by designating the selective programs as LEPs (Limited Enrollment Programs). First, Maryland considers all applicants for acceptance into the university, then they consider the student for their desired majors. Students who are admitted to Maryland but not into their preferred LEP major are automatically placed in Letters & Sciences, where they will work with an advisor to meet the requirements for their preferred major the following year.
Decipher how restrictive a major choice is by searching for advice on picking an undergraduate school, division, or major in Application Requirements. If it’s not on the admissions website, search ‘[School Name] internal transfers.’ If the information is not online anywhere, students can contact their designated admission counselor at that school. Feel comfortable asking questions of the admissions officers; they tend to be friendly and helpful.
If a major choice is binding, have college options that are less strict. Students want as many options as possible in April of senior year. One way to do this is to apply to some liberal arts schools. If a student is really not sure which college to apply to and the choice isn't binding, they should pick the most general. Most universities have a College of Arts and Sciences or a Humanities and Sciences school with a wide variety of majors.
Choice of major and that major’s selectivity affects other aspects of choosing and matriculating to a college: compiling balanced college lists may be difficult ‒ what seems like a Safety school could become a Reach school when major is taken into consideration; different majors/schools within a university may have different testing requirements (probably not this year, due to COVID); the pace at which a student has to start taking courses for their major is impacted ‒ in Engineering and the sciences, students won’t have much time to explore many other areas of interest.