Choosing a major is one of the hardest things a high school student will have to decide when looking into colleges. In high school, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I was stressed all the time trying to pick a major until one day I decided I was just going to go in undeclared; I was just going to go to whatever college I chose undeclared and to try and figure it out from there. Since I had no ideas on what I wanted to major in, it felt like my college options were endless.

 

How could I decide on a college when I had no idea what I wanted to do?

 

Today I’m going to tell you all the reasons I chose Naz as well as how I ended up choosing marketing as my major.

Having what felt like endless options for a college, I wanted to make sure the college I chose had a lot of majors to choose from that way when I did finally decide, I wouldn’t have to transfer to a new school, I would instead just transfer into the program.

 

It also was important to find a school that didn’t specialize in just one thing; I wanted to make sure the education I was getting would be great no matter my final choice for my major.

 

Having all that in mind, Naz stood out to me from the start. I was really impressed by the opportunities for undeclared students and support in figuring out their major and career goals, something no other college I was looking at had. At Naz we have the Guided Exploration of Majors (GEM) progrm, where students and an advisor meet at least once a month to discuss ways to figure out a major. In GEM, we would do things such as meet with professors from different fields, learn about careers that come from various majors, talk with Career Services, and just discuss what we were interested in. There is also a one credit class offered called CDL 101: Exploring Self, Majors and Careers. In this weekly class we focused on things like how our personality traits, our future career interests, and majors at Naz all add up to an idea of what we want in the future. These two opportunities were really great for me. They helped me focus on what I did want in my major and career, as well as what I didn’t want. Knowing what you aren’t interested in is just as important as knowing what you are interested in.

 

After a lot of thought and time and effort, including spending hours looking up majors and course descriptions, I finally found marketing to be my fit.

 

I found the classes interesting, the program beneficial, and can see myself doing it for a long time. I hadn’t ever really thought about joining the School of Management before coming to college, but now that I’m here it seemed obvious the whole time.

In the end, I chose Naz because of the wide variety of majors, the fact that they have strong programs in many different fields, as well as the many opportunities they give to undeclared students to help them discover their life’s work.

For more on being undeclared at Nazareth College read a blog by Kelsey Sweet here.