Maybe I've put too much weight on the idea of choosing a major. But unlike other people, I've spent the better part of two years trying on different majors, rejecting them as mismatched and ultimately finding myself submerged in a haze of choices, none of which I really have the prerequisites for.
I blame this on the German department. My roommate was scrupulously avoiding the German table at some majors fair, German being a language she neither spoke nor had any intention of learning in the near future, and attempting to not further confuse the ever-expanding panoply of major choices, when someone at that table flagged her down. She was informed that my total ignorance of German was irrelevant and that, in fact, she could start as late as sophomore spring and still major in German.
Then sophomore spring arrived, and with the words of the German department still ringing in my ears, I happily paraded through February and most of March paying very little mind to which major I would choose and assuming that it would work out in the end. I'd fallen in and out of love with so many majors that I had a plethora of choices. I came to college wanting to be a comparative literature major. Within three weeks, I had become totally disenchanted with the department despite not having taken a single class in it and set my heart on politics. By last April or so, I'd moved on to French and Italian, and ironically, while spending the summer in Italy, I was consumed by a love of Spanish. When I came back to school, I had a fling with ecology and evolutionary biology, which morphed into anthropology, which became English, and then, last week, I finally decided.
I'm not sure why I consider this declaration so momentous. My mother majored in Russian and ended up a partner at a consulting company, and my dad majored in French and is currently an art student, so there's no reason for me to think that my major will have any bearing on the rest of my life. But for some reason it feels like a serious commitment. On the one hand, it's not going to determine the rest of my life unless I want it to. On the other, though, I feel newly defined. One little submit button decided what classes I'll take for the next two years, who will be in them, where I'll go abroad, what I'll be doing in the depths of Firestone senior year, and who, if anyone, will even consider hiring me when I graduate. A choice from a drop-down menu seems to set off a cascade of decisions that are pushing me forward into the real world.
It doesn't help that this is how people portray it. When you tell practical adults like doctors and lawyers that you're majoring in English, their first question is "Well what are you going to do with that when you graduate?" If you tell writers and artists like my father that you're going to major in EEB, their first question is "Well what are you going to do with that when you graduate?" Well, I don't know. And at the moment, I don't want to know. I'm in no hurry to get into the real world. Somehow, the stress of being tied to one major is almost as bad as the stress of not having a major.
That we draw this parallel between what we major in and what we do with the rest of our lives is somewhat inexplicable. Medical schools apparently like students who didn't just major in biology or chemistry, and English majors end up on Wall Street. In the end, it just doesn't matter.
Still, when I finally declared today, it was not anticlimactic, as my roommate promised it would be, but really exciting, and felt just as momentous as I'd built it up to be. All of a sudden I feel like I have direction and purpose. Scared as I am of what's to come, I am, for now, quite happy to be defined as Alexis Levinson '10, comp. lit. major.
Alexis Levinson is a sophomore from Santa Monica, Calif. She can be reached at arlevins@princeton.edu.
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