How I Ended Up in Marketing: Choosing My Major
Go exploratory & choose electives that interest you
Hey again! It’s Suzanna but this time I’ll be talking about how I stumbled upon marketing as my major.
Let’s go alllll the way back to junior year of high school where I was juggling AP classes, looking at colleges, managing extracurriculars, regular homework, and finally “what am I going to do for college.”
I always had plans to go to college. That was a no brainer. But I wanted to have an idea of what I liked to do before choosing a career path for the rest of my life (okay not actually, but the pressure to decide this at 16 was bonkers to me).
I knew it was common for people to change their major but I wanted to be pretty set in stone (the stat is people change their major 3x during undergrad!).
My Journey: Enter College Board
I didn’t have any desire for a specific college nor did I have much of a push into any specific field (yes, my family would have liked for me to have gone into the medical field but I didn’t let that force me onto that path).
I didn’t know where to start but my brain immediately went to the College Board. I did go to a college prep high school so I was familiar with some of their resources as well as having counselors who were well versed in these realms.
I did some poking around on their website and stumbled upon their selection for college majors.
I literally went through every single option listed and opened a tab for each one that sparked some interest. The website has changed since I last was on it but it was a GREAT help to giving insight to what each major might entail.
From there I did some research into the various majors that felt good for me. I ended up finding the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and US News Career that provide more in-depth future insights. Here is the marketing manager page that I actually used way back when I was looking around!
Considerations
Between the two websites — the main things I was looking at were entry level education, job outlook, salary, and number of jobs.
These were big deciding factors when I was choosing what my major would be.
My first word of advice if you don’t know where to start would be to not stress out!! It’s totally okay to have no clue what you want to study at 16 or 17 years olds.
I looked through a variety of disciplines before deciding on business and becoming a marketing major.
My advice? Go exploratory your first year to test the waters out with all sorts of classes to see what interests you.
Which leads me to my next tip, take elective courses that you may be interested in! It can help give you an idea if a path or study is worth pursuing more.
Lastly, don’t feel bad or guilty for switching between majors!
Like I said, the average student changes majors three times.
Now from freshman year me to you — good luck on your college journey. Remember to take your time, and don’t stress yourself out too much.
Good Luck!
XOXO,
Suzanna
