Looking Back...
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With two and a half weeks left before school and the threat of becoming insanely busy looming ever nearer, I thought I would write a recap of the summer.
I spent the month of May reading Atlas Shrugged, figuring out my major, and searching for a job of some relevance to my future career. Happily, I succeeded in all three…I ( Read more... )
First, keep in mind that the classes you take and especially your major can serve three purposes:
1. Teaching you stuff that's directly useful in your future career. This is much rarer than you'd expect. Only a handful of majors, such as Computer Science and Nursing, do this.
2. Giving you a piece of paper that that you can use to prove you're smart and hard working to potential employers or grad schools. To a slight extent, any college degree serves this capacity. But some are a lot more effective than others. Things like Economics, Accounting, Math, Business, and hard sciences are a lot more likely to get you a job or into grad school, even though people with these degrees don't actually know anything useful for most jobs. (My Economics degree with a minor in Computer Science got me into the best film school in the country, where very few of my classmates had film-related undergrad degrees.) In this respect, Philosophy has a very bad reputation in the business world - Philosophy majors generally aren't taken very seriously. You can argue over whether this reputation is fair or deserved, but the fact is it exists and you should be aware of that.
3. Having fun. Anything people take because it's interesting falls into this category. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but you should make sure you understand the costs involved in going to college and have actively decided that it's worth it to spend that money on something fun/interesting but not very useful.
So my suggestion would be that you think a lot about whether to be a Philosophy major, even though you find Philosophy very interesting. Also, a lot of Objectivists would be very frustrated by a college Philosophy curriculum, which spends a lot of time engaged in intellectual wanking over fallacious arguments about ideas that are obviously wrong/dumb. They also tend to attract a lot of crazy obnoxious pompous hippie jerks. As someone who is intelligent, rational, and well-groomed, you might not enjoy spending a lot of time around such people.
Obviously you should live your own life and pursue a Philosophy degree if you think that's what's best, but I would urge you to be wary and keep the door open for switching to something else.
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Kira - do you have contacts in the corporate world (assuming you want to keep that door open)? If you have contacts that like you enough, your major doesn't seem to matter.
A minor in a subject, btw, is usually enough to get you into graduate school, so that you could hedge your bets by choosing a practical major. But connections matter a lot more than your major (which is why a lot of people fight over unpaid internships).
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