What shall we choose as our majors, minors, and electives in university? |
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Copyright © 2007 Soy-n-Joy® What shall we choose as our majors, minors, and electives in university? The straight-forward answer is choose "what you will do best in." You will do best in something because you have an interest in it, or you have developed an interest in it because you have been doing it so well. You are proud about what you have done on the subject or general area, and you have learned how to do it better than others or better than your other pursuits. The challenge is to do it even better by going a step further, whether in depth or breadth, than what you have already done. If you can figure out a meaningful direction or how to take it to another level, and have a passion for it, by all means follow the call of your heart and mind. The reward of satisfaction from your successful chosen pursuit will make all the hard work worth while. The odds of success are also on your side. Because you focus on what you do well, you will be more effective and efficient. But how do we know what we will be good at? With all the choices that university curricula have to offer, it is hard to figure it all out at the start. But the nice thing about modern university curricula is that they give you choices to explore. And you can add or drop courses as you see fit, or after you have exposure to direct or indirect experiences. You are allowed to do "trial and error" in a college environment. A bad choice or mistake you make in college is not going to impact your whole life, and it is not your career life in reality. So college is for you to explore with freedom, a luxury that you should cherish. Look at it as an opportunity to learn from mistakes that you don't have to pay for dearly. If you are torn choosing between universities, choose the one that gives you the flexibility to explore. A rigid curriculum that limits choice may be building you a wall of misery. How do we tell that we are better at A than at B? Just look at what you have done well without external motivation. That is probably an area you are self-motivated to do well. You are a self-starter in that area without people pushing you. Feel whether you enjoy the learning process. See if you are happy with the results. But most important of all, after spending a while in the university, say after 2 initial years of exploration, see if you have a vision of a future that you would like to achieve, and then make your choices so that they will fit into a grander scheme of things: your personal strategic plan. Once you have that vision clearly in your mind, then everything you do must be coherent with that vision and contribute to its eventual realization. This is about effectiveness and efficiency. That is, whatever you do is effective toward making your vision a reality. And because you are dedicated to doing effective things only, that absence of distraction improves efficiency. If you have surplus resources on path to your envisioned future, do build in flexibility for a plan B, just in case your plan A has failed to materialize. For example, if your general interest is in the health science area, and you somehow have found out that a physician's job is not what you want, then you may still be able to switch to a related area of interest like molecular biology, pharmacology, nutrition, microbiology or medical technology. Or if you are interested in business administration but have found that marketing is not your cup of tea, think about going into supply chain and logistics management, accounting and finance, human resources management, or public administration. Today's world offers enough opportunities for different talents to work together as a team. And the odds are that teamwork will beat individual efforts when the stakes are high. The team leader, in particular, is a high-visibility individual shouldering the hopes and expectations of many. Shall we go for the popular subjects? Certain subjects are popular at a certain time for certain reasons. Mostly the phenomenon is driven by supply-and-demand in the specific job market at a specific time. Some areas become "hot", but unfortunately that popularity may be transient only. We must look at the trends of development in perspective, and project what the likely scenarios will be 5 or 10 years down the road. When everyone wants to become a lawyer, we shall witness a glut of lawyers in a few years' time. The early birds get their worms, late birds get the leftovers, if they are lucky. In fact, society always needs a variety of talents to keep it functioning and prosperous. Our born talents will be put to profitable use, as the Chinese saying goes. We shall drive our personal strategic plan not based on what is popular at the time, but based on what we are good at. But shall we worry about the job market? Yes, you should, unless you don't depend on the job market for a living. In order to be employable, like marketing any other goods or services, you need to be differentiated and relevant. Being differentiated means that you must be good at something, and preferably with a combination of skills and character traits that help you stand out from the competition. And being relevant means that your training, education, and experience must catch your prospective employer's eyes in terms of providing expected contribution and preferably beyond. So what you are good at must be relevant to the employer's needs. That still leaves you with a lot of freedom of choice to stay within your area of interest. Besides, an undergraduate degree may mean only that you have been screened twice by the university (upon entry and graduation), and that you have the capacity to learn. In that sense, coming from a name school helps. But whatever you have mastered upon graduation may be obsolete very soon. The fortunate thing is that most organizations today will provide on-the-job training to improve your odds of contribution, and they depend on cross-functional teamwork for effective output. So unless you choose to become a start-up entrepreneur (even entrepreneurs need to find partners with complementary skills), you do not need to be good at everything. But you need to be good at something so that you can make up for others' weaknesses and they can make up for yours. In this context, an MBA training is desirable, not so much that you can make a career in business, but for better abilities in decision making, negotiation, communication, leadership, and networking: general skills that can apply to business and non-business situations alike. We must be broadly knowledgeable about how the market economy works, why people make certain decisions, and why people behave in certain ways. By properly equipping yourself, you will be able to communicate confidence, and to build relationships effectively. It will be ideal if the modern-day scientist, engineer, teacher, economist, lawyer, or doctor can model after Renaissance personalities, but you do not need to be good at everything like Galileo Galilei or Leonardo da Vinci to make things work. You can choose to improve on your areas of weakness, but it is always more effective if you can have people strong in your weak areas to complement you in a team. And if you can empathize and communicate with them seamlessly to help your team work well, you will build trust and make yourself a very effective team player or leader. And shall we be concerned about parents' wishes? We do not want to upset our parents because there is a lot of emotions involved. They have certain expectations and they must have verbalized them in the process of your upbringing. But any open-minded parent will respect your choices. After all, they cannot see you through your life; you are the one who must live your life, and enjoy or bear whatever consequences of your decisions along the way. If they dictate what your choices will be, and if things do not turn out rosy and you are suffering, they run the risk of bearing the blame (even though in fact they can only give you advice, because you are the ultimate decider and implementer). And if you make the decisions and you suffer from the consequences, you only have yourself to blame. So think through your goals and options, gather information where you can and trust your guts where you cannot, and make your decisions carefully. Once you have made up your mind, don't just drop a bomb on your parents. Prepare the groundwork well ahead of time, and ease them in. Patiently convince them of the rationale of your choices. They may or may not agree, but they will learn to understand and respect your decision. What could you do if you were the parents? The question should be reframed as "What could you have done?" because the whole process involves preparation, decision, and implementation. If you want your wish come true as your child matures, you should have laid solid groundwork to nurture expectations. Lead by example, for instance. If you do not love reading, do not expect your child to love reading. A reading environment must be part of your coherent strategy to encourage your child to love reading. Do lots of fire-side chats, dinner-table chats, story-telling, and experience-sharing with your children. Old Joseph Kennedy mandated his children to do their famous dinner-table reports, and successfully nurtured the trio of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Edward Kennedy. And you do not need to go it alone. You may leverage help from knowledgeable friends to deliver diversity of exposure too. And when the values, beliefs, assumptions, and habits take shape as the child grows up, you can expect him or her to make decisions and to follow through based on pre-formed preferences. No wonder many doctors beget doctors, lawyers beget lawyers, and politicians beget politicians. Now almost every education or career program initially follows the general pattern of going from broad to deep, and from general to specific. Then when you are advanced enough on your path of development, you may feel the need to go from being deep to broad, and from being a specialist to a generalist again. Just recall what you have gone through from kindergarten to grade school, and then onto high school and college. That ordinarily is accompanied by gradual narrowing of focus. The science genius may have evolved into a software engineer or a molecular biologist, and the humanities enthusiasist may have become an economist or a historian. And then you can look at people who have graduated, and who are now moving up their careers. As they move up the ladder, the credentials of being a focused expert no longer suffice for the new roles. That is the basis of the famous Peter's Principle, which says everyone will eventually be promoted to a position of incompetence. They may be the best technical expert on a given subject, but then they find out that in their new roles they need to acquire management skills, whether about resources or people. They may need to find out about how value chains or supply chains work, how to figure out the meanings of financial reports, how to communicate with cross-functional coworkers, or understand what brand management is all about. In other words, how the companies and institutions in which they are investing their lives in actually function, at the micro-level of the firm. And they also need to make sense of the society in which they live, at a macro-level. That naturally requires broadening up from their narrow focus. That is exactly why organizational leaders who are farsighted enough to have accumulated broad knowledge of business management, psychology, history, cultures, and philosophy along the way will find that repertoire of skills very handy. You may also prepare yourself ahead of time by choosing your minor (or double-major) and electives strategically. Without distracting your primary focus on your principal area of interest, the studies you choose on the side will not only enrich your knowledge base, but will give you exposure to the commonality of reasoning in various fields, and the chance to understand and work with people with different interests and backgrounds. Your enhanced knowledge base will ignite your creativity, and your varied exposure will prepare you to work effectively in future teams. You have increased both your relevance and differentiation, or your marketability in the job market after graduation. And always remember to verify your assumptions. You may feel that you have a passion for something, but that feeling may deceive you. For example, you may aspire to become a doctor, but you may regret when you actually become one after years of hard work and you do not enjoy the work. One way to verify is to embed yourself in the environment as an observer before you actually commit yourself irreversibly, like working as a summer student trainee or lab technician in a hospital. That way you will get to see how people actually work, how they feel about their jobs, and have a taste of things to come in that environment before splashing in. You will not be making decisions in the blind if you are informed about your options. This is the basis for making an effective, informed decision. Good luck on your choices in a university that you enjoy. If you have any comments or questions, please e-mail us at contactus@soynjoy.net. |