Choosing the right major before you enter grad school can be a tricky one. There are a plethora of different grad school majors, degrees, specialties, and fields in which you can devote the next 2 to 8 years to. This is almost a completely daunting task and may cause a bit of anxiety just thinking about it. Hopefully, this blog helps you ease those feelings and potentially figure out what grad school major/degree/specialty you want to focus on.

Let’s Talk About Your Interests

What you choose to go into needs to be something that you can feel passionate about. For me, I love math and science. So what grad school major did I choose? Well, I chose engineering which encompasses both of those concepts. Honestly, it probably wouldn’t make sense to get a degree in, like political science, when my passions lie elsewhere. The only time that you might really focus on a different grad school major is when it will help your job out.

Look at what really interest you and also look at what your undergrad major was. This often is the main driver for what you will be doing later on. Many science majors stick with science. Pre med student go into, you guessed it, medicine. And many different majors for into law. It is not uncommon to see people from many different backgrounds in undergrad going into law.

In all of these cases, the vast majority of people were going with what they were passionate about. You don’t just start a PhD or a Law degree without being somewhat interested in it. I don’t know a single person who went into law just because they were bored and didn’t know what to do in life. If you know someone that did, please let me know in the comments lol.

Take a Look at Your Future, from a child’s perspective

There is a practice that I started using where I pretend that I am meeting my younger self. I pretend that little 10 year old Ben is standing in front of me and we are having a conversation. He asks me how things are, what my interests are, and what I became/did with my life. In this exercise I “tell him” what I did with my time in college and told him I went on to do this and that. I then hope that he approves or shows excitement. I always hope that my younger self will be proud of all that I accomplished and have done.

I suggest trying this. Have a conversation with your younger self and see if they would be proud of the person that you have become and are becoming. See what they would have to say about it and if you are on the right path that you laid out when you were younger. Did you want to be a world class doctor yet chose to be an investment banker instead because it was easier? Would your younger self approve of this decision? It might seem like a silly thing to do but it really makes you think about whether you are doing something because of money or because you thoroughly enjoy doing it and you are passionate about it.

Shop Around

Start this journey by doing a bit of research. First off, decide whether you want to pursue a doctorate or master’s. This probably needs to be the first plan because applying to those are different processes all together. Next, write out your interests and see if there are degrees in which you can get a master’s or doctorate in that subject. Say, you are really passionate about reef fish (like me). You may want to type in “graduate school programs in reef fisheries” or something fairly similar to that. See what pops up. I typed that exact phrase into google and this popped up.

It looks like there are many places that specialize in this particular subject.

Now that you know there are places that that will take you on in that subject, you need to do some more research on that school entirely. I think I will write another article about choosing a graduate school in a future article. That subject is just a very long topic. but I will go into some detail now. By shopping around, you want to look at where the school is, what they provide, and if it’s going to cost you a billion dollars to go there. Remember, financial stress is real in grad school and you don’t want to spend your life paying off debt.

Look at all of the perks and maybe even do a pros and cons list. I love making these. Really make sure that you have a really good long list of pros and cons, then repeat this for each college that you want to go to. If you want to know how many colleges to apply to, go check out my blog about that (here). I think it will help in this cases.

Will it Pay the Bills?

Lastly, you have to consider the return on investment when choosing what grad school major to take. Trust me, you can get a degree in Hogwarts History or something weird like this, but will that pay the bills later on? I mean, it could potentially, but that would require a ton of luck (or magic) to do. You have to consider whether it will advance your career and actually be a good investment.

Many grad school majors will be worth it. Many of them won’t It really is something you need to put some time and effort into looking i to. Say, you love science and are really good at science and math. Getting a master’s in engineering will guarantee that it checks off all of the boxes. 1) you are passionate 2) your childhood self will approve 3)there are plenty of schools to go to and 4) it will pay the bills. Consider all of these things when going to grad school.

So, back to will it pay the bills? Look into how much your degree will cost and how much it may boost your pay. If a master’s degree will only get you like 1 to 2K dollars a year more in your career and the schooling sets you back 100k, then maybe you need to reconsider grad school in that field. Make sure that it is financially worth it before you may any decisions.

Final Thoughts

I hope that this article has helped a tiny bit with the steps to go through in order to really decide what grad school major you should do. If you can check off all of these then I think you have a pretty good opportunity and you should take it. Once in to grad school, you can check out my blog love-and-bean.com to learn more about grad school life, how to survive and thrive, and just overall help with grad school.

Choosing your major can be difficult but I know it can be done. Heck, I did it and so can you. If you have any trouble trying to decide what to pursue, send me an email and we can talk. My email is benswaringen@yahoo.com. I am fairly certain that I can help you along your grad school journey and beyond.