Sarah Auerbach ’96 (in the pink sweater) and Jonathan Scheff ’75
(center) lead a discussion session with students during the Interterm seminar
on choosing a major. |
What’s your major?
“When I came to Amherst,” Rebecca Epstein ’99 recently recalled, “I
thought I wanted to major in ‘liberal arts.’” That idea seems
to be all too common, so this year during Interterm, the college sponsored a
two-day seminar
designed to help students think about choosing a major. Aimed particularly at
first-year students and sophomores, the seminar also included nearly a dozen
alumni, who offered their perspectives on major choice. Participants ate, drank
and talked—and spent a good part of each day in the Cole Assembly Room
discussing
the “Versatility of the Liberal Arts Experience,” as the program
was called. As one sage graduate said, “Very seldom does it make sense
to choose a major with some long-term career goal in mind.”
The Office of Alumni and Parent
Programs, the Career Center and the Dean of Students Office, with the financial
support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, sponsored the program. According
to the college’s proposal to the Mellon Foundation, the primary concern
was for students in their second year at Amherst, who “often feel like
the neglected stepchildren of the undergraduate academic world. The novelty of
freshman year has worn off, and they have yet to declare a major and to develop
an affiliation with their major departments. Hence the familiar phrase ‘sophomore
slump’—not to mention the equally familiar and even more invidious
phenomenon of ‘sophomoric behavior.’”
Rather than discussing the nuts and bolts of particular majors—what courses
to take when and so on—these sessions had more general import. Alumni of
various ages and professions talked about how they chose their own majors and
what effects their choices had (or didn’t have) on their eventual choice
of graduate study and career.
Lively discussion followed among the panelists and the assembled students. One
goal of the program was to introduce Amherst sophomores to the full range of
major choices while suggesting that there is no straight and narrow path to any
one profession or to a happy and fulfilling
career. The students, at this early moment in their academic careers, were able
to talk with several generations of alumni with interests like theirs, but with
diverse career paths. The discussion raised many questions. How about a double
major? Should I study abroad? Can I double major, study abroad and write an honors
thesis? The alumni panelists, faculty and staff couldn’t answer every question
for every student, but they presented living proof that
an Amherst graduate can thrive in the
so-called real world, even if she chose a double major years ago to please her
parents (“One for me, one for Mom and Dad,” as Sara Wilensky ’93
said); or even if he can’t remember now why a philosophy major seemed like
a good idea at the time.
The alumni recalled a remarkable variety of Amherst people who could help a struggling
sophomore pick a major: advisers, other professors and older students. “You’re
not here to make yourself a psych case,” said Karen Parsons ’85. “There
are people here who can help you become the person you really want to be.” At
the end of the two-day seminar, the choice of a major seemed to come down to
a choice about oneself. “I really didn’t play a lot,
academically, at Amherst,” lamented one alumnus, wishing he had. “Do
whatever you want to do,” Wilensky finally said. “It really doesn’t
matter.”
—Paul Statt ’78
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