Right now I am on an Economics/Legal Studies track. Originally I was doing Finance, thinking that I was going to be a Wall Street hot shot some day. Then I interned out in NY... Immediately dropped the Finance major and switched paths.

You can learn a lot at the University level, but you really need to want to. Don't waste your time taking shitty Rocks For Jocks classes.

Enroll in classes that benefit you. I.e. a public speaking course, an accounting course, etc. College is a time to find yourself and who you really are. It is a time to carve out your life's path. A time to learn how to think (logic) and how to work under pressure.

Good luck and most importantly follow your heart's desire.

I know what I want to do after I graduate. I'm moving out to San Francisco. Do you have similar plans? I'll be back on campus next Saturday if you'd like to meet up for lunch.

Love to. Always up to make new friends. I'm moving in on Friday. Gimme an email (in my profile).

I'm moving out to San Francisco. Do you have similar plans?

I'm not sure yet. I'm planning to finish the 5 year BS/MS program in CS in 4 years at the moment, but I'm also entertaining offers from a couple software companies, some in the Bay Area, some in Redmond. I was born in San Francisco and hold some startup interests, however, so SF has a certain appeal.

Just saying, this makes it seem like you were in a Finance major in a business school and switched to liberal arts to everyone not familiar with NU. Whereas you were always in the liberal arts curriculum.

>Do you go to NU?

Transferred to Urbana Champaign for CS.

English has never been my strong point.

The whole article is great.

"If a psychologist met a colleague from 100 years ago, they'd just get into an ideological argument. Yes, of course, you'll learn something by taking a psychology class. The point is, you'll learn more by taking a class in another department."

I think that's a great test, and I agree about the Entrepreneur program. If it wouldn't amaze and impress somebody from 100 years ago, it's probably not very valuable. You can learn enough about it on your own.

At the same time, I do have to agree. If you don't get math, it's not going to do much good.

Do something that will afford you plenty of lateral freedom (so you can take that calligraphy course a la http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc#t=4m28s) but that will give you some skill you can make money with on the other side.

If grad school is your goal (you didn't indicate so I'm only guessing) then a purely theoretical degree is fine; you'll satisfy your intellectual curiosity while demonstrating that you have the chops for higher level thinking. Otherwise, please please get a degree in something more specific.

The business of designing your own degree makes me nervous. On the one hand you can use it to show you had the industry to do something off the beaten path. On the other hand it's this thing no one can easily relate to. If I tell you I have a degree in Economics you understand what that means (that I'm no economist is besides the point!). But it comes with certain expectations about the materials I studied and the manner in which I was trained to think/solve problems. That signaling goes a long way with employers and/or clients and you might pay a price if you get too creative.

Also you never, ever know where life circumstances will take you. Best not to get a chip on your shoulder. Not saying that you have, just saying that I've seen it happen; we entrepreneurs get it in our heads that "none of this matters... I'm starting my own company when I graduate." You might be 100% right, but best to find out when you get there.

One final thing: Don't take anything I've said too literally. A year in the Business major doldrums got me overly concerned with doing something more pragmatic (again, I think this is only natural of we entrepreneurs) so I added Economics to my CV and rushed my schooling to finish a year early. Looking back that was so foolish... I should have lightened my course load and finished on time with my buddies. That would have given me plenty of opportunity to explore more interesting classes (like softer stuff in communications and theater) while using the extra time to get my business off the ground. You know what they say about hindsight.

Good luck either way. You sound like you have a good head on your shoulders so I'm confident things will work out for you.

On the other hand, with the ignorance of youth, I'm not really worried at all. I've never really had any problems getting jobs when I've applied for them. Businesses are usually impressed with my biz experience for a young person. I imagine I would be immediately ruled out of a lot of hiring processes though.

Also, it turns out English is a waste of a major--while there are English majors who are good writers, you'll run into just as many, if not more good writers in college who are not English majors--and plenty of English majors who are very poor writers indeed. If you want to work on your writing chops, find writing intensive courses in history and philosophy. (Studying literature doesn't teach you a think about how to write literature, it teaches you how to criticize literature.)

On the quantitative side, you want statistics more than you want to worry about other types of math. How much can we infer from how much data? How do you set up an experiment to collect valid data? Is a difference of x really a difference? You're completely at sea unless you can answer those questions. You can easily be a huge success in business and in life without understanding calculus. Being poor with statistics will make things much more difficult.

Finally, business classes vary by quality--classes like accounting which correspond with an actual set of skills are sometimes worthwhile, but some business subjects aren't worth taking classes in (MIS, management) and others (marketing) lie somewhere in between.

[1] It turns out that if you misunderstand Hegel, you still have a potentially interesting set of philosophical ideas to work with, even if they're different from the ideas Hegel was trying to convey. So it's no impact to a philosopher's stature to write unclearly, just an impediment to one's original intent being understood.

Get a real major. One endorsed by a department and whose name everyone understands. Do not invent the name of your major. A major is a brand. (Believe me: It need not have anything to do with your future career, let alone what you actually do in your own time.)

When I say that I have a degree in "Physics" people know for a fact that I have formal training in quantum mechanics and electrodynamics, that I have enough math background to navigate Maxwell's equations, and that I've probably seen an oscilloscope before. If my degree were in "Computational Physical Sciences" they would harbor doubts. They would be justifiably suspicious that I was bullshitting them, that I had dodged around grabbing easy electives and had never done any heavy lifting.

You only have to spend so much of your time taking courses in your major, so get one and finish it. Indulge your whims with electives -- go ahead and spread those around; it is good that you want to do that.

As for what to study, I'll adopt my usual advising tactic and tell you to study something hard. Your major is your brand; let your brand be "interesting, hardworking, and smart". Sciences and math are hard. Statistics, mathematics, accounting, economics. Biology, chemistry, physics. Electronics. Mechanical engineering. Linguistics. Dare I say it: Computer science. Philosophy is actually pretty good. Music can be pretty good -- both technical and artistic; takes a lot of hard work and determination; a good way to practice communication and get over your stage fright. Things that make you read and write a lot are very good -- I minored in history, it was great -- but do not major in "communication" (though if there's an elective lab course that lets you run pro-level audio and video equipment, that would be great fun) and do not waste time studying creative writing in college.

(You really can't learn to write like Roald Dahl by taking a course. Very few of the great writers ever formally studied writing, and Dahl appears to be no exception. Great creative writing is mostly about practice -- you must read a lot, and you must write a lot -- and you can get that without paying tuition, though it certainly does take time. Just go read Stephen King's On Writing, and/or the essays and forums on Wordplayer.com:

http://www.wordplayer.com/

and/or Learn Writing with Uncle Jim:

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6710

and save the tuition money for something else, something you can't get on your own.)

Lab courses, for god's sake: Take the opportunity to get your hands on every piece of expensive equipment that your school owns, be it a piano, an electronics lab, or a machine shop.

For someone like you, you will not learn anything in fluffy courses. Your goal in college should be to become "certified impressive" and the way you do that is by taking on a major well known to be hard. Generally that means hard science, physics is a good choice.

Once you are certified impressive in a difficult subject, you will have maximized the credentialing value of college, while dodging a lot of the fluffy bullshit other, less rigorous departments would put you through.

Riffing on the "brand" theme, I claim that Linguistics is a crap brand, and I agree with you that Communications is a crap brand (although some CMNS students I've seen have learned a LOT in a what-you-make-of-it way). Philosophy has highly variable brand value depending on who you're talking to.

If it is just for the contacts and a piece of paper just do a the shortest business or engineering course you can and do it online via something like Open University so that you can focus on building some business ideas or working for a startup. Try get an internship or voluntarily role at Google or Facebook, Twitter etc - what you will learn there and the contacts you will get will be invaluable, even if you work on the business rather than technical side.

3-5 years of college and grad school will be an absolute waste of time for you. You don't actually learn anything in college of use, you hopefully just learn how to learn but you can do this on your own time for cheaper. Also the contacts but there are better ways of getting a good network together. When I hire or interview someone I only look at their experience, especially any side and personal projects they have, I relay don't care what they studied or what college they went to. MBA's are even more of a waste of time and money

Just don't do a finance course and become a banker: http://rakkhi.blogspot.com/2010/07/turning-bankers-to-engine...

Lots of classes don't have enough general interest content to be worth spending 3 hours a term on, but are still worth attending a lecture or two. Easier if you're a college town bum than if you're an actual student though.

Good luck with this.

Toastmasters is awesome, I did it a few times last year than started working. Thanks for reminding me to get back to it. I'll also take that advice about professors to heart, it's brilliant. I guess the best way to do it is to google every prof?

I don't know how you would predetermine which professors are still working professionals. I mostly lucked into that situation, in part by taking classes in GIS, which was apparently still new enough to have lots of working professionals teaching it and not so many full-time professors teaching it.

Took 2 years of college starting at age 18 at the local hometown college. Had no major the first year. Chose a history major the second year so I wouldn't have to change advisors and could largely continue taking whatever interested me. Dropped out because I got married and began following my husband's military career from place to place.

Spent many years checking out every available educational option at every duty station while having babies and doing the military wife thing. Much to my frustration, they never met my needs (will skip the details to try to keep this short).

Showed up in California, where in-state tuition (that I qualified for) at a community college was about $13/credit hour (and later dropped to $11). Talked to a college counselor. Enrolled in two classes and tested out of three others and was given credit for my 2 years of college from when I was a teen to wrap up an Associate of Arts in Humanities in May 1999.

That fall, much to my astonishment, enrolled in a bachelor's degree (I was astonished because I was trying to lock in those old credits for "some day, when I might return to school", which I had not envisioned to mean "like maybe this fall!"). The program: Bachelor of Science in Environmental Resource Management. Environmental studies degrees are typically rooted in geology departments at colleges and tend to be very science-heavy. Since I had a humanities degree, I was missing some of the lower level sciences I needed. I don't recall if I CLEPed any of those. I do know I took at least one such class at a different California community college. This was amidst a huge health crisis, so some of the details of that time in my life are a bit fuzzy.

Later got my Certificate in GIS, the equivalent of master's level work. But I still have not finished my bachelor's, due in part to a divorce and said health issues. I also now have a certificate my employer paid for, which is industry-specific. Employement-wise, no one cares that I have done the equivalent of master's level work. I don't have my bachelor's degree, so it's a big "So what?" My plans: make it on my own, where actual ability to Bring It matters more than a sheepskin.

Hope that makes more sense.

I suppose CLEP does help in getting credit but one would still need to check with the respective colleges regarding their policies.

"He ... believed a competent person primarily has the ability to take things from one field of knowledge and apply them to others in creative ways." Well, he's right. But you have to have the information to work with.

By the way, lot of philosophy majors discover that they don't want to be in academia (or do, but can't get tenure) and that computing not only requires an ability for abstract thinking but rewards it well.

I'd also suggest a good creative writing course (I'd pick prose over poetry, but they're your classes now); the workshopping process did a lot for me as far as developing a critical eye toward language. One could only hope that it would do the same for you.

I'd definitely prefer prose to poetry, I've never seen poetry used in business.

In both, you learn how to put words in their best order. It is just that each genre has its own conventions (multiple sets of conventions, in fact) regarding what "best order" actually is.

Another piece of advice would be to not only choose subjects you're interested in but also the specific classes and professors in those subjects.

Also, can I read your paper, and/or have more resources on what you're talking about? It sounds fascinating.

e.x. in my introductory class to digital logic, we learned about the history of logic on the sidelines.

Now, if they have a History of Business, that is very clearly relevant to your interests- go ahead and take that.

I think the history is most interesting on a really localized rather than general level. That's when you can get into the nitty gritty of what influences people and how people rise in power.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1676242

Are quite helpful as well.

Good luck!

I'm on the marketing team for a fashion company, reco jeans. If you're a technical minded person, learning how to market something like fashion will blow your mind. I got hired because the owner was impressed with my past entrepreneurial stuff and they were looking for someone who knew SEO.

If you're looking for an unpaid, just for learning internship, and if you live in NYC, send me an email at kevin at recojeans. We're looking for an unpaid intern right now with some html or other web language skills.

Get a degree with something practical underlying. I wish I had done econ as a second major, or minor. But more for purely intellectual reasons (what financial motivations cause people to do things). Your major is really 60 ( i think, its been a while) of your 120 credits, in some cases its even less.

So use your 20-30 remaining courses wisely. This whole idea of telling people you majored in something imaginary will honestly make you look more like a smug a-hole for years to come than clever, and people won't take you as seriously as you are taking yourself. think about how this sounds "I majored in life studies".

However I highly recommend working on your communication skills, take lots of classes where you have to write analytical papers on a variety of subjects. The greatest businessmen are also great communicators. They know how to convey their pitch and turn it into sales.

take a media studies course or two, take an intro to marketing course, take commercial law (one of my fav courses), take an international business class, and before you realize it you've just knocked out a minor in business/commerce.

Math wise, talk to an advisor in that department, your goal seems to fall under 2 courses: statistics, and financial math. both very useful. Calculus and higher may not really solve your issue.

History wise, you're on track here to understand human nature, and likely sharpen your paper writing skills here.

don't forget to take a science course or two, even if they aren't complicated/hard science classes, you want to avoid a narrow-focus and expose yourself to great minds all over.

you might also think about taking an introductory Computer Science or engineering class. I wish I had taken more of these as well.

One of the key things you're going to need is a good advisor or multiple advisors. Most advisors in college don't care about your track, they are just forced to help you, and have a huge volume of students to deal with. Here is an insider tip (both my parents are college profs): look through the course lists, find ones that interest you, and look up the teacher's email. Shoot them an email, tell them you'd like to pick their brain, and want some advice on their field. See if they are free, and if you can come by their office hours. People LOVE to think others find them interesting. Before you know it you'll have a handful of advisors, many whom could help you in your business pursuits as well.

so in conclusion, get a real major as its going to help you be more marketable to others (think people investing in YOU, long term). Take a bunch of interesting classes, don't be afraid to take a class in another department (just ask, they'll let you in), and if you plan correctly, you can probably knock out a bunch of minors w/overlapping courses.

But here's my issue; anything that sounds sexy for business doesn't work for me

Marketing Management - A lot of this looks interesting, but here's my thing: It seems, from my experience, people with marketing degrees are no better at marketing than others.

Management - These classes look useless to me.

Economics - I'm not interested in the macro part of the economy as a career

Finance - I'm not interested in large scale money management and investing.

So my solution is an ad hoc major. I wouldn't have to call it "life studies" or another lame name. I could pretty much call it whatever I want, right?

All of these are good reasons to do post-secondary education. Lots of them are compatible with each other, too. But if you don't care about some of them, don't optimize for those things. With that in mind...

A lot of people are talking about the on-paper value of your degree, and you appear to be interested in that. I'm not sure that's actually right for you; it appears to me that you're on a career path where no one will ever care about your degree. Moreover, even in careers where the presence of a degree matters, the nature of that degree might not; some jobs just say "must have degree" on them, and that's that. Some jobs do care, but those are rare rare rare. So, I doubt that you actually need to focus much on the paper value of your degree.

That said, let's talk about the paper value of your degree. First, school choice. I'm a Canadian, I assume you're American, so this may be wrong, but I think that cheap US schools ("cheap city college"?) have very low brand value. (As I understand it, for a first-world country, the range of brand value in schools in the US is very high... some very very high-brand-value schools, and some very very low ones, and a whole range in between.)

And now, I'll get to the major. Normally you don't get to name your own major. There are exceptions to this, some of which are high-prestige. For example, Will Shortz does love to brag about his degree. But in general, if your major isn't a "real major", it's a joke. Also, many schools have a "not-really-any-major" option, which may be called General Studies, or something like that. Or, my school has an option to get a degree with no major, but two "extended minors". These nothing-major degrees are all very low-prestige.

But remember, maybe you don't care about the paper value of your degree.

Also the opportunity cost of getting a branded/respected degree is MUCH lower now than in say 20 years from now. You are buying a safety net.

also the fact that most "marketing" majors know squat about practical marketing is irrelevant, most students lack the ambition and foresight to break beyond their major of study. you're showing us now through this thread you're thinking ahead.

no one will be more impressed if you have a self-named degree over being a marketing major, but proving yourself an expert in web marketing analytics (which you become on your own, and build up your brand).

personally, i maintain that nearly anyone who is sufficiently motivated to learn math can do so. my wife is a perfect example, if you would have asked her last year which subject she hated the most, it would have been math. she was re-taking some lower level algebra course at a community college, which she'd previously gotten a D in, and she was committed to taking the minimum number of math courses required to transfer to a california state school. however, i told her she could get her university of california education paid for, and the particular school she wanted to go to required calculus for her major, so she reluctantly took the plunge.

a year later, math is her favorite subject. she's gotten A's in all of her math coursework for the past year, including her first calculus class over this last summer. she's currently taking calculus II, and doing well in it, now.

i can't tell you how many doors this has opened for her. she was initially a psychology major, but she's considering going to economics (which is very math heavy, requiring the typical 5-semester engineering math track: calc I-III, linear algebra, and differential equations) now instead. who knows where she'll end up, but the process has been extremely rewarding in that a) she was a total math phobic before and her confidence has undergone a complete transformation in the last year, b) math really teaches you to organize your thinking and think "clearly" in the same way you viewed philosophy as doing (math and philosophy are actually quite closely related), and c) as previously mentioned, she can do anything she wants to in school now.

and, actually, having taught math at a community college myself for a couple years i can say that i've seen this story repeated over and over again. nearly all my algebra students went on to calculus afterwards, and i'd see many of the students in my algebra classes do very well in my calculus classes later on. probably the most rewarding thing is when someone would come to me years later and thank me for helping them get good at math because it opened up __________ opportunity for them later. my default response was, "hey, you did all the work...!".

so, why all this talk about math? the reason is that most of the articles i've seen regarding job satisfaction by major have one thing in common: a lot of the "most" rewarding/fulfilling/lucrative/useful jobs are math-related.

is this to say that you'll be miserable if you just get the basic analytical requirements out of the way and never take another math class again past stats? no. but i've personally found that having been a math major (and now back in grad school for computer science) that it's always rewarding when something math-y comes up to be able to confidently tackle and competently solve problems. in other words, kick its butt.

most of the time it turns into a puzzle or a game of sorts, rather than a chore. personally, my flexibility and competency with math has led to many different and extremely interesting options for me. i've done work in anything from biophysics/chem to bioinformatics, to writing economic forecasting/analysis software, to what i'm currently doing, which is solving computer vision problems.

i hated math in high school. i only really got interested in it at a community college as a result of a couple of inspiring professors, and i ended up at one of the top math programs is the country. in high school, i'd never have guessed that would've happened.

bottom line is that i've never regretted learning to excel at math. if you have the time and inclination, it might be something to consider. then, after you get that and your GE's out of the way, you can revisit this question again.

good luck.