A Major Change
When you’re a college student, there are a lot of decisions to make. From choosing whether you want to live on or off campus, to figuring out which meal plan would best fit you, college is riddled with decisions both big and small.
Deciding on a major is a big decision. What you pick will be the basis of what your college experience will be like academically. Different majors have different course loads, difficulties, and expectations. Your major may even dictate where you attend classes. For example, Murphy Hall is the Media and Communication building. Take Stiteler as another example. It’s the fine arts building on campus, and the majority of the art-related courses offered at Arcadia are taken here. Depending on where you live and where your classes are, you might find yourself getting many more steps in than are needed to close the rings on your Apple Watch.
I changed my major in the middle of my freshman year, and it was an easy, yet tedious, process to get all my ducks in a row. Arcadia makes it as easy as possible for students to access the resources they need to make major changes. Though the university doesn’t let you just switch your major blindly, there are a few steps to take to make sure you make an informed decision.
The first step is meeting with your academic advisor. They’re there to help you, and I highly recommend discussing your options with them.
For me, I was an English major who wanted to focus more on journalistic writing. So alongside being an English major, I decided to go with a magazine writing concentration. You’d think I’d be set, right? Wrong.
Despite having a concentration in magazine writing, concentration classes usually don’t start until your second or third year. This meant my freshman year would’ve been riddled with creative writing and fiction courses, which was in a totally different direction than I wanted to go. After discussing my needs with my advisor, he recommended that I discuss options with the Media and Communication department. I was a little skeptical since communications sounded like TV production or film-related majors, which wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do either.
Skeptical or not, I went and talked to the head of the Media and Communication department and, to my surprise, I could major in that with a multimedia publishing concentration, allowing me to take courses in journalism, speech communications, and multimedia publishing and production. This was exactly what I was looking for.
Now that I’m in my second year, I’ve fallen in love with journalism, media production, and communications as a whole. Arcadia took the interest I already had and gave me the tools I needed to expand my knowledge.
My advice to anyone looking to change their major is to talk to your academic advisor. Scouring the Arcadia website for their massive list of majors can only take you so far, and college applications only give you the option of baseline majors like Computer Science, Communications, Biology, or English. Information on things like concentrations, minors, or double-majoring can be found on the Arcadia website, but I cannot stress to you enough that working with an academic advisor can really expand the information you find on the website.
In the end, only you can decide what makes you happy. So it’s up to you to figure that out. Though at Arcadia, you’re never alone.
