Eitan Arom: Embarking on multiple majors may defeat its own purpose

Come June, I will have a piece of paper that declares me to be a Bachelor of Science. That same piece of paper will also announce that I am
a Bachelor of Arts.

I’d like to pat myself on the back for my double bachelorhood and brag about my mastery of both brain hemispheres.

And maybe I deserve a little bit of self-congratulation. I would be selling myself short if I said a double major in mathematics/economics and communication studies is an easy feat.

But as I come perilously near to graduation and the job market, I am increasingly unable to fend off a creeping point of consternation.

Challenging oneself is generally a good thing. But by loading up on majors and minors, college students may be making things difficult just for the sake of making things difficult.

Those who embark on multiple majors to look more attractive to employers may be defeating their own purpose by forgoing other educational opportunities, both inside and outside the classroom.

Choosing two majors or multiple minors certainly has advantages – for instance, students with more than one degree in diverse fields have a foot in the door of multiple career paths. Besides, earning a diploma that needs multiple conjunctions just to fit your field of study is satisfying in itself.

Yet there are costs that students may fail to consider. Our eyes, so to speak, are bigger than our stomachs when it comes to choosing majors.

Vijay Ingam, the founder of SOS Career Service, a Westwood career coaching center, said students with double majors can hurt their chances for employment by spreading themselves thin and letting their grades suffer.

But beyond the hit double majors could take to their GPA, there are some deeper disadvantages to wantonly tagging majors and minors onto one’s diploma. Extra majors and minors eat up time and course units, and preclude a number of other possibilities for personal and career development.

Many majors outside the physical sciences require few enough classes that students in those majors have the time and available units to customize their education. By sticking to one major, students have the chance to take courses that actually interest them, alien as that idea may sound to overly ambitious UCLA students slogging their way through multiple major requirements.

Of course, one might offer that some students are pursuing double majors because they are truly interested in both. That argument holds only so much water: a student may be interested in physics, for example, but it would be foolish to assume that every class in the physics major is more interesting to that student then all the myriad classes outside that major.

Once you’ve picked one degree field, pursuing the course of study that is the most “interesting” probably involves mixing and matching classes from a wide range of topics. That’s the whole idea behind general education – but striking out on your own has the advantage of being less restricting than GEs while allowing for multiple sequential classes in the same subject.

And while some classes are cordoned off by major restrictions and prerequisites, plenty of lower division courses are open to the entire campus.

This type of a la carte education has more tangible benefits as well. Taking classes off the beaten path of one particular degree can generate career skills and resume items that are more useful to employers than a second major in political science.

Ingam said hiring managers often look for courses in marketing and accounting, as nearly every business and nonprofit organization requires both of those functions.

Other skills, like programming and or foreign languages, are immensely valuable in a modern, globalized economy.

Admittedly, skills like programming can be learned outside of school. But our tuition buys access to three classes a quarter; our charge is to figure out how best to eke a marketable education out of those courses. Otherwise, graduating early can be a more cost-effective option.

Maybe this is just a bitter diatribe born out of my existential fright of the post-graduate world. But our educational choices are our own to make, and they are definitely worth a little fretting over.

There are plenty of good reasons to double major or pick up a minor. But simply adding words to a diploma is not among those reasons, particularly when that time could be spent adding words to a resume.

Send general comments to opinion@media.ucla.edu or tweet us @DBOpinion. Tweet Arom @Eitan_Arom.