How can I decide on a college major when I have NO interest?
It really doesn’t matter too much what major you choose. Sorry to say, unless you’re going straight into a technical line of work, no one cares where you went to school or what your major was. Most disciplines could care less for anything other a Master’s – and even then, they don’t care too much. Relax, take something you like…maybe English, or Lit, or History – get out and get on with your real life.
A liberal arts degree is not vocational training. What you major is is not what you will be when you grow up. Therefore, pick something you enjoy so that you can spend the remainder of your undergrad years doing what you’re supposed to be doing: learning about a wide range of things and emerging into the world a broadly educated human being with a wide if not particularly deep skill set.
It’s been my experience that it doesn’t really matter what field of study your degree is in, as long as you have a degree. I was an art major, and ended up with a great job (via temping) that has about 1% to do with anything I learned as part of my major. My co-workers also have varied academic backgrounds, ranging from journalism to sociology to history. Unless you want to go into a profession that requires specialized or technical skills or qualificaitons (e.g. teacher, doctor, etc.) – and it sounds like you don’t, since you aren’t really sure what you’re going to be when you grow up – just having a Bachelor’s degree is the most important thing, education-wise. Besides that, actual industry experience is valuable. So if, like me, you happen to land an entry-level job in an industry you enjoy, you can soak up all that experience and transition it into a higher-level job or use those skills to get into a related industry.
And don’t choose your major b/c someone says it’s so awesome and they had so much fun and love their job now, blah blah. Having plenty of older relatives I heard it all, everyone thinks they know what you’d have a lot of fun with or that you’d make a great dentist. Don’t listen to any of them, including us hear at askMe.
If I were you I’d use college soak up useful general knowledge. That would be two years of mathematics (the calculus sequence, basic statistics), a smattering of physics, linguistics and/or computer science. Plus two years of a major foreign language (French, Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, German — take your pick). Computer science is great for learning general problem-solving skills (decision matrices, truth tables, algorithmic complexity, etc). You get out of college what you put into it.
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