Distinctive

By Nora Lessersohn, A.M.

Unlike most high school students, I knew exactly what I wanted to study in college: Religion. I indicated this on all my college applications, and when I got to campus I never changed my mind. I even wrote my personal statement about a conversation I had with a Henry David Thoreau impersonator in Concord, Massachusetts — the Mecca of Transcendentalism. Most students are not as focused as I was. 

While no one is asking you right now to know for certain what you want to do with the rest of your life, the intended major and minor you indicate on your college applications can make a difference in how an admissions officer reads your file. You can think of it as one way of “branding” yourself to help communicate your strengths as clearly as possible to an admissions committee. 

We like to say that it’s the argument of your application. 

Like a good thesis statement, your intended major explains, in a concise manner, what the rest of your application is expressing at greater length: what you want to study, what unites your most meaningful extracurricular experiences, and what will make you an active member of campus — and, eventually, the larger world. 

Now, an intended major or minor is not just a thing you indicate once on a Common App drop-down menu and forget about in the rest of your application. Many of your schools will ask supplementary essay questions about why you want to study at their school, why you want to pursue the course of study you indicate, and what intellectually excites you. These are all places where you will talk about what you want to study (i.e. your intended major and minor) and why their school is the best place to do so. 

In other words, the major and minor you choose to write about is how you will tell your intellectual story to colleges. Considering you’re applying to be a student, this is a pretty big opportunity to curate as compelling a narrative as possible. Just do yourself a favor and don’t put Undecided: this is like turning down an offer to use a flashing neon sign when you’re trying to give someone directions from 200 feet away.

An intended major can also be a way to distinguish yourself from others. Since many students apply to study Business or Pre-Medicine, for example, one way to stand out from the crowd is to talk about a major or minor that fewer people are likely to pursue, especially in the humanities, which are significantly under-applied to. At one meet-and-greet with Ivy Admissions deans, they told us that they could almost go all day without seeing a single application from a Humanities applicant. Even after getting to campus, students are now less likely to pursue subjects like History, English, Art, and Philosophy: observers have seen a significant drop in Humanities majors over the past ten years. 

We’re not asking you to make something up — you have to be able to back up your choice with experiences you already have. But we’re asking you to think about how to communicate those awesome experiences through your choice of major or minor. You may even be able to help yourself avoid being stereotyped as “another” white male athlete who wants to study Business, “another” academically-gifted Asian male who wants to study engineering or computer science, or “another” Indian-American student who wants to be pre-med. You know that you’re not, as DJ Khaled would say, just “another one” — so do what you can to show colleges that’s the case!

Let’s look at two examples. 

(1)

Jason is a rising senior from Washington, DC who runs the school newspaper, cares deeply about racial and economic inequality, and is a social butterfly. He’s considering studying Business so he can create a journalism start-up for underrepresented voices in media, but he knows this is a very popular major that won’t help him stand out in the application process. For colleges that don’t require applying directly into a business school, he checks out the lists of Majors (or “Fields of Study,” or “Concentrations,” depending on the school) for each of the schools on his college list. He learns about the study of Sociology, which he had never heard about before. He reads the descriptions of Sociology courses like “Poverty in America” and “Work, Identity, and Inequality,” and he realizes that they cover a lot of the issues he cares most about. They also seem to approach these topics in a way that makes sense to him. He decides to put Sociology as his intended major, and to talk about how his investigative journalism on income inequality in his home city inspired his intended course of study and his desire to do social justice work on campus next year.

(2)

Lila is a rising senior from Bethesda, Maryland who dreams of becoming a doctor. She plans to be a pre-med student at college, but wants to show off other dimensions of her personality on her college applications. A student of Indian descent, she has worked hard to bring awareness of South Asian culture to her school, and decides to see if she can do the same kind of activities in college. She sees that at many of the schools she is applying to, she can minor in South Asian Studies. She decides to apply as a South Asian Studies minor to highlight her work with the South Asian community and her intention to continue that effort on the college campus. This choice is sincere, but won’t get her lost in the other 10,000 applications from students who claim that they’re pre-med. 

Ultimately, as I always tell my students, you can apply to college as a Chemistry student and major in Art History once you get to campus. In the vast majority of cases, your intended major is not binding (you’ll know if it is, in which case you’ll want to strategize about the pros and cons of applying to such a program). But it’s still good to remember that looking for an intended field of study may not only give you an edge in the admissions process: it might just help you figure out the best way to spend the next four years of your life.