Before entering college I did not truly grasp what majors were. When I was younger I had believed that a person’s major was just the occupation they were planning on going into. For example, I had thought that someone whose major was chemistry meant that they would go on to be a chemist and those who majored in psychology went on to be psychologists. I had believed that majors were straight paths and would lead you to one particular outcome. Entering college, I began to learn and see how majors were not in fact what I had thought they were but something else entirely.
Upon starting taking courses in college I learned more about the variety of majors and that people who were in the same major had different plans for the future. I learned more about how there can be focus within majors. As a freshman, I was an allied health Major with a focus on Athletic Training. There were other options for people whose majors were allied health which could help them get more education in their ideal career field in the future.
I was happy and believed that athletic training was what I wanted to pursue but upon taking my introductory allied health course I made my topic for a final project focused on painkillers in professional sports. I had thought that it would be a good thing to look into because athletic trainers tend to be the ones giving athletes painkillers during games and matches. That final project completely changed my mindset and made me come to the conclusion I wanted to advocate for athletes and inform them of the risks that come with painkillers. I then declared a minor in psychology thinking this would help me learn more on the subject of the effects of painkillers.
That was not enough for me though. After taking more classes and some psychology classes I realized I wanted to help athletes mentally more than physically. I began to look into career paths where I could do that and came across sports psychology. I decided that if I wanted to go that way I needed to change my academic plans to something that held all the disciplines I was looking to be educated in. I found interdisciplinary studies thanks to an advisor and learned that it was precisely what I was looking for.
College majors today are becoming more accepting of including more diverse topics and essentially embracing the idea of interdisciplinary. Having a wide range of fields to heighten a person’s learning and knowledge is extremely helpful. There are lots of college majors and programs you can find these days that combine various fields to do so. This allows students to ensure they have an educated perspective from a scientific and social humanities view. This can also benefit students greatly when getting their first jobs or entering the workforce to pursue their ideal occupations. There are lots of jobs now where an interdisciplinary structured background is preferred so that an employee can be trusted to handle certain tasks and projects.
Majoring in psychology for example primarily focuses on understanding the mind and how it works. A required course that Plymouth has psychology majors take is statistics which is beneficial for understanding and reading statistics in many psychology fields that students may encounter in their futures. Although this is more of a minor example, it shows how there are different levels of interdisciplinary themes in various majors. I think allied health is a good example of a generic major that holds interdisciplinarity within it. Many jobs fit under the topic of allied health and similar Plymouth State offers various concentration options for those majoring in allied health sciences. This may be more of an obvious example but since changing to become an interdisciplinary major, I have begun to notice things like that.
Now that I have spent a couple of semesters as an interdisciplinary studies major, my perspective on college majors has certainly changed. I’m more conscious of what a major entails and which disciplines a major can focus on. In my process of looking into graduate schools, I have noticed that the courses listed for each program are fairly diverse and that the description of the programs, in general, is broad in the sense that they make sure to address the fact the world is changing and with that calls for different skill sets. More things are becoming interconnected and college majors are now addressing that. More majors are combining multiple disciplines to provide college students with the flexibility to navigate the workforce and look at issues from different perspectives. If anything, including interdisciplinary themes in college majors, is becoming more encouraged to benefit college students.