Scholars in the hands of an angry market

Alina Alam
Columnist

As a student with an undecided major at VCU, various people have given me advice about how to go about choosing my major. While some people have the audacity to tell me outright what I should do, others simply offer their opinion about my strengths and where they see me.

It doesn’t matter how the advice is worded or who is giving it, essentially everyone says the same thing: Major in something you love to do.

The trouble that many people have is they don’t know what they love or like to do, and they don’t know where they see themselves in the future. For me, I’m well aware of my passion, which is writing, but the question is whether I can make a career out of it.

It’s easy for people to offer their opinion, but ultimately the decision is yours. After all, it’s your life, and it’s the choices you make that will dictate where your path will lead you. The many contradictory messages about choosing majors and careers don’t exactly help in the decision making process.

Recently, an article by the Washington Post caught my attention. The article focuses on a report done by Georgetown University concerning college degrees and the job opportunities that come with each. The information in the article isn’t exactly jaw dropping: It states that majors in non-technical areas have a higher rate of unemployment.

Surprising? Not really.

The world today has a high demand for students with education backgrounds in science and math fields. Still, the future isn’t completely hopeless for those of us who lean more towards the arts; it just may contain more of a struggle.

Ideally, we would all be living our lives doing what we love and still prospering. In this world and with the current state of the economy, however, a reality of that sort isn’t the easiest to achieve.

Taking a more optimistic stance, for those who are highly driven and smart about their decisions, there is still hope career-wise. That’s the essential idea of the Georgetown study – to bring awareness to college students about the current and future job market, in correlation with what they may be hoping to do in terms of their career.

Don’t assume that college is simply the time to receive an education. These degree-seeking years are the prime time to get a jump-start on your career by exposing yourself to the working world via internships and other work opportunities.

While it may be tough to make a decision, your choice may not necessarily be set in stone. Years from now, you may be in a job field completely unrelated to the major in which you earned a degree.

As the future drifts dangerously closer, we should focus on building ourselves and our abilities for the competitive job market that awaits us all after college.