Major mythology: How not to waste your parents' $125,000

We've all heard the mantra that a Princeton degree is valuable anywhere, and that it's important to take classes that interest you and expand your mind. No specific curriculum choices lead to wealth and success, so it's important to find your niche. My advice to the Class of 2004 and to prospective students is: Don't believe it. It's part of a propaganda campaign to keep the humanities departments afloat. If you do not follow the guidelines below, your time at Princeton will be wasted, and you will be doomed to a mediocre future with minimal wealth.

Myth 1: Choose a major based on your interests.

Every Princeton student should major in electrical engineering. Seniors majoring in the social sciences realize the utter ridiculousness of using their sophomore-year interests to guide their studies. Interests change, and someday you will be interested in making money. For that purpose, ELE is your best bet.

The main reason to major in ELE is to show employers that you can deal with math. A secondary-but-still-notable reason is that if all else fails after graduation, you can design things. This is the United States, where people are always designing things, especially things with electric circuits. The ability to make expensive electrical appliances gives you alternate options; employers know this, and will adjust their offers accordingly.

Myth 2: It's acceptable to take a quasi-math gut class to fulfill the quantitative analysis requirement and then bail on math.

OK, if you're not a "math person," math is hard. But it pays off: Corporations pay for math and computer skills because they're rarer than research skills. Anybody from Princeton can do great research; only graduates with math on their resumes can back up great research with great-looking graphs and charts in color.

Mathematically-oriented courses also allow you to throw around buzzwords like "regression" and "derivative" and "variance" during interviews. Business isn't about digging up centuries-old primary sources — it's about writing reports with graphs and buzzwords, which is much easier with a math background.

If you want, you can skirt around the rigorous classes and take classes with "math" in the title in more touchy-feely departments like sociology and politics. But skipping out on math is not an option if you're interested in competing for good jobs. If you really just can't deal with numbers, you might want to change your major to a less rigorous type of engineering, or to economics. These departments should be your only other options. (For a rough estimate, the more times the letter "e" appears in the department name, the more valuable the degree, comparative literature being the obvious exception.)

Myth 3: Save up some pass/D/fails for your senior year.

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Graduate schools and prospective employers do not see your senior-year grades. All classes are essentially pass/fail as a senior. Use the p/D/f option to take five classes for all your underclass semesters, preferably for the more irrelevant distribution requirements like "Epistemology and Cognition." If you have issues with math or economics classes, this is a good way to get them on the transcript without allowing them to drag down your GPA.

Myth 4: Use electives as a way to explore other interests.

If an elective doesn't fulfill a distribution requirement, it should be related to economics, computer science or mathematics. Statistics-oriented social science classes count, but only if they have "statistics" or "math" in the title.

Myth 5: Studying abroad expands your horizons.

You're at the greatest university in the greatest nation in history. Why leave? It's important to remember here that you're an engineer; cultural experiences are fun, but you can pay for them when you're investment banking or working for Microsoft or Intel. You aren't going to find a better engineering curriculum no matter where you go. Study abroad is for the liberal arts people who need to boast about their level of exposure to the "real world" at cocktail parties.

Myth 6: Money can't buy happiness.

If you aren't happy with money, you probably wouldn't have been happy without it. Money isn't everything in life, but it definitely helps smooth out the rough edges and eliminate some daily concerns. OK, this last one's true: Money can't actually buy happiness. But it can buy freedom, and freedom well spent will buy happiness every time. Joe Dague is a politics major from Carlisle, Pa. He can be reached at joedague@princeton.edu.