Is My Major Useful?

Written by: Kayla Adella Utama

Edited by: Thuth Htet San

The question of whether one’s major is worth the trouble of studying it can be observed by a rather absurd metaphorical situation: a fortune teller and an admissions officer walk into a hospital room. A person is born with two things that might dictate the rest of their life. The first is a spark, which usually manifests as an innate passion turned desire. The second is money—man’s common denominator. It’s the simplest unit of measurement, born from the elementary concept of giving and receiving. The fortune teller can only tell you as much as you can afford to pay the admissions officer.

There is a modern academic phenomenon in the wake of such a parable. A lover of the humanities, or a regular contributor to the arts—after realizing tension between two ruling metaphorical figureheads—gives in to the appeal of financial promise. This phenomenon has rippled into my own life, often reverberating in the form of the stories of my good friends; talented artists turned marketing directors for fear of growing pedestrian given today’s social stigmas surrounding careers which practically corner 17-year-olds into making the smarter choice—if 17-year-olds even have the capacity to know what that might be. 

17 is an odd age. It’s the age of face-saving and ego-building, where you are the point of fixation, and all else is peripheral. It’s also when you have to decide what lifestyle is worth pursuing, when you haven’t the grounding to figure out exactly what that means to you. Oftentimes at 17, the concern is reputation—with a place at a university being the rite of passage to a stable, lasting reputation. To nominate the ‘correct’ major, then, is to nominate a ‘stable’ one. This idea of stability as an indicator of guaranteed success especially harms the stature of creatives—like artists—whose lifestyles are often unpredictable, flexible and progressive.

There is an almost universally agreed idea that lifestyles, often referring to a work-life balance, are always personal preferences. This idea, however, ignores a common fault in modern society—money has become an inherited right for a select few, while others simply possess its consequences, one of its greatest being its role in disappointing an artistic dream. People who are born into money can skim over learning how to make it, and instead focus on how to manage it, and then how to spend it. Inversely, people who are not born into money are made to understand incentives first, and then how to maintain those earnings. Without assured security, the poor are unable to prefer a creative lifestyle in such a leisurely manner, but people who are born into money can still afford rent and live comfortably even if their creative pursuits fail, and they are the first to say that money isn’t everything, passion is.

Consequently, with the promise of upward mobility in mind, students without that birthright will spend 3-4 years learning how to enjoy something they don’t, under the guise of studying something ‘practical’. Instead, they will compensate for the missing link; finance students who enjoy music will become nighttime DJs for house parties, marketing students who enjoy the fine arts will become social media directors, and economics students who enjoy literature will become analysts. Of course, separating personal endeavors from work is not impossible— but it is awfully dreadful to maintain a life where your spark can be switched off for necessity. Passion should always be necessary and allowed, not only for a select few.

But it might not be fair to assume that money runs the world in such a monolithic manner, and it could be argued that people’s upbringings might just as well factor into what someone considers a worthwhile pursuit. In many cases this is true. Caring about reputation goes hand in hand with allowing other people’s perspectives to tax your own, especially when their point of view aligns with the ‘majority mind’ (i.e. business is a profitable major). But in recent years, the majority of the world has wanted at least one of two things: fame, or money—and to quote a brilliant professor of mine, Professor Joseph Progler: ‘ideally one off the other’. I figure that humanities and the arts have such a bad rep for not consistently adhering to these two materialistic professions—when it comes to these fields, the general belief is you either get both, or none.

Humanities and the arts require us to understand and study people and cultures— not algorithms. But at the rate at which multifaceted and nuanced people and cultures are coined into singular ‘aesthetics’ (i.e. clean girl aesthetic, y2k aesthetic) and become actors in an algorithm; their value is lost on many people, especially to those most exposed to it: young people. Young people today are much more sensitive to what it might sound like to announce anything— having the ability to curate a perfect version of themselves online—this perfectionism translates to real life, wherein nothing should shake it.  A similar sensitivity is present in announcing your major, fearing judgement where there is none. For a particularly open-minded generation, this point of view is very black and white— because it groups us into ‘worth something’, or ‘worth nothing’.

Whether your major is worth something is up to two things: you, and the social conditions that confine you. It’s a complex push and pull between having yourself be defined by others and being privileged enough to make your own definitions. It’s the curiosity of instant surrender in turning over personal zeal for survival. When people say, ‘Life isn’t fair’, this is what remains forefront in my mind. A most striking display of social disparity, revealing in the most transparent manner the influences that dictate the course of our lives— the ones that make us think: “People like me can’t do that”.