As a history buff from a young age, Dani Levinson planned to become a history teacher after she graduated from college.
But after taking a film class her senior year of college and harboring a love for films her entire life, the recent graduate said she decided to deviate from the typical path suited for her history major.
Like Levinson, a number of students are choosing to follow career paths not normally associated with their majors.
Instead of pursuing law school or teaching like many of her fellow history students, Levinson plans to undertake an internship at an independent film company and plans to eventually enter film school.
Levinson said she particularly wants to become a film critic as opposed to a history professor because it will give her the freedom to work from home, which is important because she wants to have a family.
Bijan Kimiagar, a fourth-year psychology student, is also exploring options other than those normally suited to his major.
Kimiagar is forgoing a psychology research position to teach English to students in Japan as part of the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program offered through the UCLA Career Center after he graduates.
Many students from the UCLA College are more likely to choose majors that are not directly related to their career paths, as opposed to technical majors such as engineering students, said Kathy Sims, director of the career center.
One major from the UCLA College with a variety of career options that students can choose from is English, said Janel Munguia, academic counselor for the English department.
For example, Munguia said one of her English students interned for an interior design company that designs high-end furniture. At the end of the internship, the student was asked to take over and run the business, an option she is still considering.
Sims said there is a new and growing trend of students looking for temporary jobs after graduation, such as working abroad or with nonprofit organizations.
She said students do not feel they have to commit to a single career by graduation. She added that these short-term career paths are becoming increasingly popular among students because they want to explore options before settling down.
“We now embrace the reality that students might want to go do something after they graduate that’s temporary,” she said.
Employers are also embracing the short-term employment that students are choosing, she added.
“They see it as a growth experience, where as before, it was seen as you weren’t mature enough to make a commitment,” Sims said.
Eleanor Lurye, a fourth-year psychobiology student, chose her major with the intent of going to pharmacy school but said she could not keep a sufficiently competitive grade point average for admission.
Lurye is now considering an array of options, including the Los Angeles Police Department, pharmaceutical sales or pursuing a master’s degree in physician assistant studies.
Some departments, such as ecology and evolutionary biology, survey their seniors annually to determine, among other things, what fields students are looking into.
Mark Gray, the undergraduate counselor for the biology department, said survey results from last year showed that seniors graduating from his department are entering a wide range of fields that are not necessarily connected to science.
He said such jobs included working for Google and Teach for America, a nonprofit organization that places college graduates in schools with low-income students.
Julie Plotkin, the undergraduate advisor for the economics department, said she has seen economics students pursue a variety of jobs other than accounting or finance.
She said she has talked to economics students who have gone into acting, movie producing and volunteering for nonprofit organizations.
“Students think what they’re majoring in will determine their career, and that’s not necessarily the case,” Plotkin said.
When looking for students to hire for his consulting firm, Todd Sargent, an alumni representative to the Undergraduate Students Association Council, said he hires a majority of technical majors, including engineering and computer science students.
However, Sargent, a strategy manager at Hitachi Consulting, said he is impressed with students who major in both North and South Campus fields because they are well-rounded.
“I’ll hire (double majors) right off the phone,” Sargent said jokingly.
Though the majority of applicants Sargent’s consulting company receives are business economics students, usually only one third of the pool of applicants hired is made up of students graduating with that major, he said.