Taking a major chance

What are you going to major in?" is a question I hear more and more frequently these days. Good question. What am I going to major in? It's a question I've been dodging for years now. When I was applying to college I took the strategy of random guessing. Environmental science? I like the outdoors. So that was my proposed major for Dartmouth. Sociology? I had no idea what that was, but it sounded kind of exciting, so as far as Yale was concerned, I wanted to be a sociologist. My number-one major choice ranged from anthropology to gender studies to comparative literature on the applications for the eight or nine schools I applied to. When I was matched with an advisor freshman year, it was an exciting surprise to learn that at Princeton, I was interested in majoring in French or Italian.

As sophomore spring approaches, I've had to find a new strategy to fend off this question. My roommates were no help. Despite the fact that they occasionally flirt with other majors, they've both pretty much known what they wanted to do since they got here. Lacking that sort of certainty, I made things up. For the first month or so, I told everyone I wanted to be a comparative literature or a Spanish major. Then, as I got more and more into my anthropology class, I started thinking that maybe that was the department for me. For a week or so I pondered a politics major, and then, one night in my Human Adaptation lab we watched a segment of David Attenborough's "Life of Mammals." The next morning, I emailed the ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB) department to find out what it would take to major in that.

"Well what are you going to do with that when you graduate?" asked my dad when I told him. I shrugged. As far as I can tell, what I major in and what I do in real life don't have much to do with each other. This, in fact, is largely my dad's fault. He majored in French, and then went on to be a columnist, write soap operas, and is, in his latest incarnation, an art student. My mom, similarly, majored in Russian. She then went on to run American Express' travel agency, be a partner at McKinsey, work as a venture capitalist and a variety of other things. Not surprisingly, therefore, I'm of the opinion that I could probably major in obscure Norwegian literature and still be able to go be a lawyer, or a journalist, or even sell my soul and work on Wall Street.

EEB is something of a radical departure from my heretofore very humanities-oriented life. Everyone I told who knew me was rather shocked. Secretly, I think that's part of the appeal. Majoring in EEB is like an adventure. I'm breaking out of the box that everybody, including myself, has put me in for the past few years. And that my escape could likely lead to an actual adventure in Panama or Kenya doesn't hurt either.

Too many people decide who they're going to be too early on. My best friend, for instance, has known that she was going to be an art history major since about the fifth grade. I'm not saying that knowing what you want to do with your life is a bad thing. I'm actually rather jealous. But sometimes people peg themselves too early and then they miss out on something that they probably would have loved. For instance, I spent my freshman spring trying to circumvent this whole ST thing by taking Bridges, and now look at me. College is for trying new things; whether that's playing soccer or robo or learning Japanese. But if you never try, you'll never know, and you might miss a chance to figure out who you are and what you love. Alexis Levinson is a sophomore from Los Angeles, Calif. She can be reached at arlevins@princeton.edu.