Choosing a major is something that all students face during their college careers. Some people come in with a strong idea of what they want to study and stick with that, and others change their minds a few times! Lewis & Clark makes it easy to explore your interests, major (or double major or minor) in your favorite areas, and change directions if you decide to. Here’s a little bit about how I arrived at my decision to major in Psychology!
I came into college with an interest in English, especially creative writing. I was also interested in studying biology. I chose my first semester schedule so that I could explore these areas; I took an English class and Bio lab in addition to my core class and a theater class (just something that sounded interesting!). I was also assigned a faculty advisor in the English department.
Early on, I found that I was overwhelmed by the amount of reading assigned in my classes. My English class and core class had a lot of readings, and my theater class was very literature-heavy. Because of this, I ended up dropping English early in the semester. I really enjoyed the Bio class I took, which focused on ecology. I got to work on a research project about invertebrates and invasive ivy! It was really hands-on (our group spent a lot of time looking for slugs in the forest) and I loved it.
But talking with the college advising center, I realized that the Biology major includes a lot of math and chemistry classes, which some of my bio major friends had already taken in high school. This meant that it was difficult to get into upper-level bio classes that I was really interested in, like plant bio.
Second semester, I enrolled in an intro Psychology class with Amelia Wilcox. She’s a really fantastic professor, and inspired me to continue with the psych major. Even though PSY100 is mostly sampling little bits of different disciplines of psychology, it got me excited to learn more. Psychology seemed to combine areas I was interested in, like research methods (similar to those I had used in bio), developing interventions to help people, and sharing information in a creative and engaging way through writing.
It also appealed to me that the Psychology major is structured in a simple way; all psych majors take PSY100 (Intro Psych), PSY200 (Statistics), and PSY300 (Research Methods). After taking this sequence, all upper-level classes open up, so you can choose what areas interest you (like developmental psych, clinical, environmental psych, psychology of gender, etc)! When I decided to declare my major in Psychology, I asked Amelia to be my faculty advisor. She has been a huge inspiration to me as I figure out which classes to take and what I might do in the future with my major!
I took a couple of additional English classes after dropping that first class, since I still wanted to experience college English, and was considering double-majoring. I found that I didn’t love college English classes as much as I did in high school. This doesn’t say much about the English department, except that class experiences can be very different in high school and in college. Subjects you love may become side-interests, and you might fall in love with subjects you weren’t excited about before! I still love writing, and am enjoying learning about the ways that creative writing and Psychology are interconnected.
That’s just a bit about my experience with deciding on my major, though everyone’s is different! Feel free to reach out with questions, calebweinhardt@lclark.edu