First-years, don’t be fooled. You might think you still have an entire year to pick a major, but the harsh reality is you don’t. Switching majors is painful at best and impossible at worst, so choose carefully and immediately.
And if you’re still an undeclared second-year, well, it might already be too late to do what you really want.
Take it from someone who learned the hard way. I’m now a second-year English student, but until last quarter, I was taking mostly science classes to fulfill the requirements for medical school and for a life science major. I never thought about what might happen if I suddenly decided medical school wasn’t right for me or if I wanted to change my major to something on North Campus.
I naively thought I had the cushion of my second year to make up my mind.
I paid a hefty price for waiting. Because of the 216-unit cap (which is usually only applied after your fourth year) in the College of Letters and Science, I can no longer double major unless I want to take summer school and about 19 units every quarter.
Plus, I have to deal with completing lower-division classes for English as soon as possible and possibly forgo music and language classes I wanted to take for fun.
Some students have it worse. The psychology major requires that you finish taking prerequisite classes by the end of your second year. That means if you don’t start majoring in psychology during your first year, you’ll have to scramble to fit in your prerequisite classes as a second-year student.
If you’ve decided to make a switch and have to complete three ““ or for some majors, such as global studies and international development studies, six ““ levels of a foreign language, you can forget about taking those classes you wanted to take for kicks or doing a minor.
Even if your major change doesn’t involve switching from one side of the campus to the other, you’ll still find yourself in quite a bind.
That’s because there is little overlap in the prerequisites of many areas. Oddly, lower-division chemistry and math classes for life-science majors have been deemed so different from physical-science ones that they are not interchangeable. Shouldn’t these basic foundation classes be the same?
This frustrating discrepancy is what forced second-year psychobiology student Janet Lee to stay within the life sciences after she tried to change her major to statistics last quarter.
“All math classes are in a series pretty much, so it’s not like I can take four classes at once, and I can’t stay five years because that way I will be over my unit cap,” she said.
However, her decision to attend graduate school for statistics makes her remaining years at UCLA quite a struggle.
“I’m planning on taking four classes each summer to take the extra classes I need to supplement the stats minor,” she said. “I was so set on going to Germany, but it’s no longer feasible now that I have to take all these classes.”
Students such as Lee don’t deserve to be punished for doing what they love.
Ultimately, it comes down to preparation. Orientation was fun but not exceptionally helpful. Interestingly, at orientation, students are divided by major before they’ve even taken a single class.
This categorization automatically limits the flow of information regarding majors by assuming first-years know exactly what they want to do instead of contributing to what should be a conversation about various fields of study.
Frankly, I learned more about majors from living in the dorms than at orientation.
Counselors should spend their time hammering home the idea that students will need to quickly decide what they want to pursue instead of flooding students with information about the technical details of URSA and enrollment times. This would probably involve extending orientation, but it would surely be worth it.
Until better methods of student preparation are implemented, students must maintain a fluid mentality and allow themselves to consider other career possibilities before committing themselves to one field. Protect yourself from sliding into a unit-sucking void and take the initiative to research potential majors by talking to upperclassmen, TAs and professors. Don’t wait ““ the time is now.
If you’re having major issues, then e-mail Nijhawan at anijhawan@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.