How To Design Your Own College Major! (& Why To Consider It)

Mar 30

why i chose to design my own college major

This is post is all about how to design your own college major.

How To Design Your Own College Major

Hi! My name is Nikki, and I’m a third year college student and individualized studies major.

If right now, you're asking “what is individualized studies,”don’t worry because this post is going to answer that question as well as the question “why I chose to design my own college major.”

I’ll also be talking about why you might want to explore an option like this if you’re struggling to find the right major!

Choosing Your College Major - It’s Hard

I want to start by just talking generally about choosing your college major, because it’s hard.

Maybe it’s not for some people. Maybe they’ve always known what they wanted to major in and it was actually an easy decision. All the power to them that’s the case!

But I think for most people, it can be a really overwhelming and confusing decision to make - especially if you’re like me, and you’re interested in so many different majors and career options that you just can’t choose one.

Like me, maybe you find yourself wishing there was a way to magically major in all of them without double or even triple majoring.

How I Ended Up Where I Am Now

Now, my story. I've always been creative. I love making things, whether it’s through graphic design, video production, writing, drawing, etc. So naturally, I thought a career in art and design was the path for me.

That’s why I came into college as a new media design major focusing on UX and UI design, app and web design, and programming.

A year and a half into my degree, I decided that New Media was too programming focused for me personally, and so I transferred into graphic design.

After a semester of that, I felt like that wasn’t really the right program for me either, which was especially confusing having grown up as an artist.

I thought, “I’ve always loved art, so you would think graphic design would be a perfect fit for me,” but I just wasn’t feeling it, and for awhile I couldn’t figure out why. I knew I wanted to change my major but I didn’t know what to.

My school has a ton of different majors to choose from, and I looked into a lot of different ones. Other design majors, business, marketing, communications, journalism, public relations, media - those were all things I was interested in as well.

But I would look at the curriculums for these programs and think, “well these classes align with one or two of my interests, but I have a lot of other interests that I want to explore in college as well.”

And I just couldn’t seem to find one program encompassing all of them, or at least multiple of them.

Finding Out Designing My Own College Major Is A Thing

So, I expressed these feelings to my academic advisor and she pointed me towards my school’s individualized program.

Before this, I had heard of the program, but I didn’t really know what it was. So, when I discovered that it was a program where students could design their own degrees, I immediately thought, “well this sounds exactly like what I’ve been looking for and I didn’t even know it!”

I couldn't seem to find the perfect major for me from ones that already existed, so I thought, why not create my own?

And that’s where I’m at today, almost two semesters into being an individualized student and with just over a year left of my degree.

By designing my own degree, I’ve been able to explore all of my interests - my creative ones and my entrepreneurial ones.

Why You Might Want To Consider Designing Your Own Major

All this to say, if you are someone who has multiple different academic/professional interests, and you don’t want to have to choose between them, this might be the answer for you like it was for me.

I wanted to study a mix of marketing, media, and visual design, but you can take any combination of interests you have and make designing your own degree work for you.

Whether it’s engineering and environmental science, business and music performance, computing security and international relations, the combinations are endless.

I also want to say that you can take the path that I did and transfer into an individualized study program several years into your college education.

That’s totally fine, and that’s a really common path for students who design their own degrees. But it’s not the only path.

You can design your degree right from the very beginning of your college education if you want.

So, if you’re in the midst of your college search or your application process right now, and this sounds like it could be a really good fit for you, keep it in mind.

There’s No One Right Way To Do College

I want to end by saying that there’s no one right way to do college. You can stick with one major, or you can change it several times. You can double or triple major (or minor).

You can do college part time or full time. You can finish in the standard four years.

You can also graduate early, or take time off if you need to. I actually took a year-long leave of absence from college before coming back as an individualized studies student.

My point is we all have a different path, we’re all unique, and that is okay. I feel like colleges that allow students to create their own programs recognize that.

For example, the advisors at my school work hard to help each student in the program craft a degree that works for them, no matter their interests, no matter where they are in their college journey, no matter where they want to end up after college.