After four years at St. Olaf, there’s only really one thing I feel truly passionate about in regards to St. Olaf students — they have too many majors.
We Oles are so dedicated, engaged, and hardworking, but we may have overdone it. In the pursuit of the well-rounded, opportunity-filled liberal arts education, we got too caught up with tacking on major after major, concentration after concentration.
Inarguably, there is value in pursuing a variety of disciplines. Surely that is why many of us chose the liberal arts — the ability to be both a biology and music major, splitting your time between Regents and CHM — what a grueling walk, by the way.
On the first day of class during introductions, if you have to take multiple breaths to recite your two majors and three different concentrations, perhaps some reassessing should be done.
To reiterate, I am in complete support of being an academic of many studies. But the concern lies in the fact that, by declaring too many majors, you lose time to wholeheartedly pursue those interests because you get caught up in having to fulfill endless requirements on top of your Ole Core classes.
Speaking for myself, I tossed around everything from SOAN to theater before landing on English. I certainly would have chosen all three, plus a film and media studies concentration. Part of the way through my sophomore year, I spontaneously decided I was interested in picking up Spanish again. Having one major, I had the capacity in my schedule to start taking Spanish classes and even go abroad for a semester within the Spanish department. And, I continued to take classes in film and theater. I couldn’t have had the enriching experience I had at Olaf with a bazillion different majors, because I simply would not have had the time or space to.
Of course, your major isn’t just a major — eventually, it turns into a degree, and that carries a lot of weight for your job search and post-graduation pursuits. So it pays to think about what degree you want to represent you. And, if it is truly two degrees plus a concentration, that’s great.
But, performative majoring is something we have to take a good, hard look at to assess if it really is serving us, or just our egos.
It is entirely valid and even essential to be interested in many different things, but I caution against getting too trigger-happy on the SIS major declaration page. Bring back having a multitude of interests without necessarily having a major to show for it.
If this feels like a call out, maybe it is. Direct your hate comments to my email.
