4 Important Factors: When You Choose Your Major and Future Career

Please don't get me wrong. I loved my college life; straight As for three years, that freedom from my parents, great friends, and memories. University life was one of the best times of my life. My GPA of 3.7 out of 4.0 proves that. I even loved studying for tests! But IF I can go back in time and change just one thing; my major, I know my life would have more options and confidence.

If you are a student, please read this post and think about your situation while you still have a chance to change yours. And if you are already too late like me, you'll be able to sympathize with me and start bouncing back. Nothing is too late!

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When I was choosing my major, I didn't put much thought into it. Because I thought I knew what I wanted: business and marketing. Promoting something via advertisement was very interesting to me, and I wanted to be a creative marketer in the future. Even when I read an article saying: "Only 27 percent of college grads have a job related to their major", I thought, "That's a stupid way to waste 4 years of your life," and now I genuinely want to be that stupid person.

My closest stupid person that I jealous of is my friend, who studies business and marketing with me for four years. We took the same class, the same tests, and everything. Then, after graduation, he suddenly went to a coding academy to learn programming language. After 6 months of studying, he got a job as a developer at a trading company. Back then, I honestly did not understand why he would waste his time and money when he can get a job and earn money, but now I am the loser who wants to do the same thing he did three years ago. I worked hard as well and got myself a great job at a company that I loved, but currently, I am very unstable and can guarantee that his path is much more stable than my way.

Photo by Saulo Mohana on Unsplash

After five years of graduation, I learned how to choose my major:

1. Research and make a PROFESSIONAL careers list

2. Rank the careers with professionality, DEMAND, and SALARY

3. THEN, find the one that you want to study

People say, "Study whatever you want." but NO. If you want your life to be stable, consider the professionality, demand, and salary before you wonder what you want to study. Keeping the balance between four factors: professionality, demand, salary, and your interest can be crucial when you decide your major and future career. It is so obvious but a lot of people miss those three important factors before graduation. It is too late for me to change my major now, but why not use it to bounce back after making a mistake?

Professionalism

According to this Nonprofessional vs. Professional Jobs article, professional jobs usually require a college degree and typically paid an annual salary rather than an hourly wage. But what I mean by a professional career is having a job that requires special knowledge to do the tasks so it is hard to find other people to replace you. To give you some examples of the special knowledge and professional job; programming language and developer, law degree and lawyer, medical license and doctors.

Demand 

As technology is changing rapidly, high-demand jobs also change. Robots and AIs are taking over humans jobs, we do not want to compete with them. So either become a person who uses that advanced technology or finds the jobs that are hard for robots to replace. According to the Top 10 Most In-Demand USA Jobs, home health aide, physical therapist, registered nurse, software engineer, information security analyst, occupational therapist, web developer, data scientist, operations manager, and diagnostic medical sonographer. Even some of these jobs can be replaced by technology in the future, but at least for decades, the demand for these jobs is likely to increase.

Salary

No additional sentence needed to emphasize how important the money is. If you can find jobs that interest you in The Highest Paying Jobs in 2019. Lucky you, if you can't find something, don't worry and do more research. You can find it!

And finally, your interest. Remember. You don't have to love it like a hobby. It just has to be interesting enough to actually learn it for years. 

73% of us, we are likely to have a job unrelated to our majors. I worked as a marketer for over three years, and there are tons of professional marketers in the market. However, finding more options to be more stable, never hurts.

To be honest, I already have three options in my mind. However, to avoid making the same mistake, this time, I will make that list before I settle.

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[Jade Choi]

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