Season 3: Episode 12 Transcript
Major Minor
Lee Coffin:
From Hanover, New Hampshire, I'm Lee Coffin, Dartmouth's Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, and this is the Admissions Beat.
I think one of the most annoying questions a student gets asked during a college search is, "So, what's your major?" The answer should be, "I don't know, I'm not in college yet." But it is a question that bounces around a search from the beginning all the way through the end, and ultimately, at the beginning of the school year when you finally arrive on campus and people start saying, "What's your major?"
You don't have a major until the spring of your sophomore year on most campuses, like the one where I work. But that question is actually still an important one. You don't need to know what your major will be, but you do need to be thinking about program. And I talk a lot about the three P's: program, place, people. Program is the mother question. It is the essence of where you go to college.
What will I study? How will I study it? Do I have the flexibility to move between departments, majors, minors, as I discover things that interest me? I remember going to college way back when, thinking I was an English major, and I took a history class, which is not a big leap from English, but a very different course of study.
And that first semester class, it was a survey of American History from the colonial era to the Civil War, had the most dynamic professor, or teacher, that I had encountered. I was hooked. So, in high school I wasn't thinking, "Lee would be a history major." That's what I chose, and have never regretted that course of study because ultimately, it's what made me happy and what got me out of bed in the morning to go to class and to do my research and to write my papers.
So, to help you think about this, whether you are a senior in the last days of decision-making leading up to your big enrollment decision on May 1, or you're a junior and you're just starting to explore and to think about, what might I like to be? Am I a word person, am I more of a numbers person, am I logical, am I creative, am I a bit of all those things?
And where do these majors and programs that I've never heard of [fit in]? My high school didn't teach me linguistics or anthropology or geography, or maybe they did teach geography but not in the way we do at Dartmouth. And you have this curriculum in front of you as something to explore, scratch your curiosity, try something unexpected. Sometimes the best courses you will take as a college student are your electives, or a course someone says, "Just try this." It's way outside of your comfort zone, but that's what makes it exciting.
So, to help you think about that, whether you are seniors or juniors or parents, this week, in an encore episode from my original podcast, The Search, I invite three members of Dartmouth faculty—one from engineering, one from philosophy, and one from government—to join me to think about what they teach, what you might study, and to share some thoughts about how one of them studied physics and ended up a professor of philosophy. How do you go from here to there as you follow your curiosity and your intellectual engagement?
It's not just the GPA. It's what you study, what makes you ask thoughtful questions, what makes you raise your hand and say, "I have an idea..."
We'll be right back.
(music)
Let's say hello to Alexis Abramson, who is a professor of engineering and Dean of our Thayer of Engineering. Hi, Alexis.
Alexis Abramson:
Hi.
Lee Coffin:
Nice to see you.
Alexis Abramson:
Nice to be here.
Lee Coffin:
Lisa Baldez is Professor of Government and Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies. Hi, Lisa.
Lisa Baldez:
Hey, Lee. It's nice to be here.
Lee Coffin:
And Sam Levy is a professor of philosophy, and he is also the Associate Dean of the Arts and Humanities at Dartmouth. So, hi, Sam.
Sam Levy:
Hi, Lee. Thanks for having me.
Lee Coffin:
You're welcome. Let's get in the time machine and go backwards to start. So, I'm going to bring us all back to your senior year of high school, wherever that was. As members of the faculty, as college professors, I think it'd be interesting to see where you each started. So, when you were in high school applying to college, Alexis, did you know you were on your way to being an engineer?
Lisa, were you always wired to go into government? Are you a politician, by the way, because you have a degree in government? Sam, when did philosophy come on your radar? So, I won't call on you, but who wants to jump in first and talk about the young version of your intellectual self?
Alexis Abramson:
I'm happy to jump in here, Lee.
Lee Coffin:
Thanks, Alexis.
Alexis Abramson:
Okay. So, I was good at math and science. As you hear sometimes when somebody says, "Ooh, I want to be an engineer," and that is a path one could go toward, but I also really enjoyed my other classes. So, when I was looking for a college, I wanted to make sure I didn't go to an engineering school that was more solely focused on engineering. I wanted to go to a broad school where I could take the philosophy classes and the history classes and really try and bring those classes together for a fuller experience while at the same time preparing me to be that engineer.
So, I went to Tufts University as an undergrad because I was looking for that mix. But I think, even today, when we think about, "Do I want to be an engineer or not," the students don't necessarily have to be great at math and science, and they don't necessarily have to know they want to be an engineer. And really, it's okay to think about it and decide, once you get there, which path makes sense for you.
Lee Coffin:
That's really helpful. But as the kernel of your college search, once upon a time, was this interest in math and science. So, even then, that part of your high school curriculum was tickling you in a way that made you say, "Hey, this could be what I study."
Alexis Abramson:
Exactly. And I was very focused on getting a job and doing something very applied. So, it was part of who I was and who I wanted to be, and so engineering seemed to fit that personality that I had.
Lee Coffin:
Okay, that's helpful. And where did you go to high school?
Alexis Abramson:
So, I went to a public high school in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, a large public high school, a very diverse public high school in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. So, grew up through that school system, and had a really great math and science experience there too, which is always helpful if want to feel good about who you are.
Lee Coffin:
Okay, that's terrific.
Alexis Abramson:
Yeah, and go that direction.
Lee Coffin:
Thanks, Alexis. Lisa, what's junior Lisa thinking?
Lisa Baldez:
So, I grew up in the Washington DC area, and politics is always part of my family, part of what it was like to grow up there, and so I think I never really questioned that politics was something I was interested in. That said, as a college senior, I applied to college early. I got in early, and I thought, "I'm done." And I completely stopped thinking about intellectual endeavors, and I didn't give any thought to what I was going to be studying in college whatsoever.
Lee Coffin:
Wow. So, I hear you say that, and I'm smiling at the idea that an Ivy League professor just shared that insight about, you took your foot off the gas pedal a bit at the end of high school and you still got on track. So, went into college where you had a political focus as part of your, sounds like part of your DNA, but did you go in thinking, "I'm Pre-Law," or, "I'm gonna study Poli-Sci," or were you just saying, "Let's see what happens"?
Lisa Baldez:
So, I did take a political science class in my first term in college. It was a notoriously difficult class. Then, I also took a class on East Asian politics and East Asian history, and I absolutely fell in love with it. And my freshman year I was absolutely determined that I was going to study Japanese and I was going to be a scholar of Japanese politics. And that lasted until the end of my freshman year.
Then, I decided I was going to major in politics. At the same time, when I was at college, I did a lot of modern dance. That was my, I would say it's my extracurricular activity, but that was also for course credit, and it was something that was very important to me. It was something I had never done before. I happened randomly on a modern dance class, and it was just like, "Oh, this is where I'm meant to be." And it was a really important part of my experience there.
When I look back, I regret that I did not really commit to that to the same level that I committed to my major in politics, because I just didn't really think that that was possible to do or that it was okay to do. Now, I know, yeah, it's absolutely okay to do both of those things or one or the other, and I would have learned just as much from whatever choice that I would've made at that time.
Lee Coffin:
Great, thank you. Sam?
Sam Levy:
So, I grew up in a small town in Winthrop, Maine, and went to a small public high school there. And I was, through my senior year and I think through many years of college, just dreaming my way through. I had lots of interests. No particular focus on what I thought I would study, but there were topics, subjects that I was quite interested in just to find out about.
And in my senior year, about the same time that I was having to decide where to apply, and then as the acceptances were coming through where to go, I was involved in a science project where I was in the basement of my house putting lasers together to make holograms, which was something, a path of discovery that's completely out of nowhere.
And I remember the day, downstairs where it worked, and we produced the film, and then a hologram was there, it was visible, you could see the thing, and thinking maybe this work on optics and lasers, combined with interest that I had in physics, would lead me into study of physics.
The other thing I really liked in high school at that time, I had a class with a charismatic teacher in a psychology course. So, I went off to college thinking I would probably try to double major in physics and in psychology, but not with a particularly strong view about what the degree would mean or what it would do. I just thought, "Those are two things that I like, and colleges have them."
So, I ended up going to the University of Colorado at Boulder, which was, in every way, exciting and thrilling and big compared to the tiny town I'd been in. But it was quite some time before my academic pursuits actually straightened up and took me to where I ended up, which was a major in philosophy, which is what I've continued to study since then.
And even that, I would say was only partly academic intellectual path. It was my first term in college, and I had the standard intro science-ish sampling, widely, curriculum where 8:00 a.m. was calculus, 9:00 a.m. was physics, 11:00 a.m. was psychology, 1:00 a.m. was philosophy, and maybe French later in the afternoon.
And those eight and 9:00 a.m. courses didn't agree with me as much. I loved the content and did fine, but it was hard to be sharp in the morning. And that 1:00 p.m. time slot was pretty agreeable. And I had a very charismatic professor. I didn't know what philosophy was, I'd never heard of it, really. And I had a very charismatic professor, Wesley Morrison, who would hang around after class and shoot the breeze with three or four or five students. And of course, it was a very discussion-intensive course as philosophy classes tend to be.
And I thought this looks like a pretty good thing, this faculty gig. We get to have this exciting discussion in class and then hang around and it just keeps going. Felt a little boundaryless and felt like open discovery and inquiry. And I just kept taking philosophy classes while I was checking out other stuff.
So, for each step in this for me, it's been chance encounters with individuals who were doing stuff that I found interesting, and just pulled me along. I was not somebody who left high school or arrived in college with a plan. I had ideas, but that was about it.
Lee Coffin:
Well, what's interesting too, just if you go to the very high level, like Alexis, engineering, Sam, philosophy, we'll get to Lisa in a sec, you've got these specialties hiding below that "major" word. But what's interesting about Sam's story, as someone who started out thinking physics and psych and making lasers dance around his basement, is now a philosopher and the Dean of the Humanities, but there's mathematics hiding in your discipline that may not be just the word "philosophy".
To a lot of people, you might not think like others. There's a math basis here. You're talking about logic and mathematics. And that charismatic faculty member, Sam, was my experience as well. It was my first semester and I was taking a survey, U.S. History Through the Civil War, of course a big lecture, and Jack Chatfield was the professor. And he was the most charismatic, dynamic lecturer. 300 people in this auditorium, but he was on fire three times a week.
And I caught myself saying, "This is so different than any U.S. History course I have ever taken." And it was a survey course, so it wasn't even a specific topic. But I ended up taking him three times over my undergraduate experience, and became a history major, in the same way all of you have said something presented itself, and my interests shifted once I got to college. I was thinking English. That wasn't a huge leap from where I was to where I ended up.
But I think that moment, particularly during the first year, is this really important moment when you take this toolkit from high school, which is, you're a good student, you know how to study, you know how to be attentive and write papers, and then your brain starts to open. Then, you get to wander and wonder as you meet the curriculum.
So, what advice would you give admitted students right now? So, they're at the penultimate moment of their college search, they may have already enrolled, they're about to enroll, they're going to start picking classes soon. As faculty members, what would you hope they're thinking about as they wrestle with this question of, what will I major in? Is it too soon for them to be asking that question?
Lisa Baldez:
I actually think that, as you mentioned the beginning of this podcast, Lee, we ask students, "What is your intended major?" And we prime them to think that way. So, by the time many of them come to university, they have a plan. And when I advise first-year students, my tactic is always to try to get them to think outside of the plan, and to put the plan aside and to take something that is just speaking to them in some way to try to move them toward that serendipitous class that might change their life.
So, I think one piece of advice would be, I think it's great to acknowledge here's what you're interested in and here's what you're thinking, but be willing to set that aside and not worry so much about thinking from your freshman year to your first job, which I think a lot of our students are thinking, and I think many of their parents are thinking, that college courses are incredibly precious commodities.
And here you get 35 of them, and each one is something you don't want to take because it's part of this, I'm going to say, march toward a particular end. But I like the idea of a path and a way to get lost in intellectual endeavor. That's a really exciting thing, and it's really exciting to be with students on that path.
Lee Coffin:
I like that idea of each course is a precious resource, because it's easy to lose track of the idea of college and the macro that there are these little units, 35 of them in the Dartmouth example, which are course by course, and they add up to a degree and they add up to a major, very pragmatically, but each one is this little discovery. Let me ask just a existential question. So, high school students have teachers, and then they come to college and they have professors. What's the difference?
Alexis Abramson:
I'll jump in, from the engineering perspective at least. So, the professors that are typically in front of our students have spent years and years studying a relevant field, a field relevant to engineering in our particular case, and obviously, relevant to the fields of study that students are enrolling in classes in those departments. They've spent years and years of their lives studying these very specific fields.
So, they're bringing, to the experience of the course, this knowledge that, really, nobody else on earth will bring. And there's a real specialness to that. So, in engineering, my background is energy efficiency and buildings and how to mitigate climate change, and so I come with my own unique perspective built on years of doing work in the laboratory, experimental work on materials to save the world's climate change problem, and looking at using data analytics to solve problems to help us change what we're doing in our buildings, to use less energy, things like that.
So, when I teach a course, even on thermodynamics, which is a fundamental engineering course, I can bring these real world examples in that are relevant to today, that are relevant to cutting-edge technologies and understanding of the world around us. So, it adds this layer of depth and breadth to what might be thought of as like, "Oh, a thermodynamics course. You just crack a textbook open."
It's not the case. At the university level, you're bringing this additional experience to the classroom that those students on the other side hopefully are experiencing in that way and can appreciate the depth and the richness of the topic much more than what you would typically get from a textbook and you would likely get in comparison to a high school class on a similar topic.
Lee Coffin:
In this professor construct, you are teachers and you are scholars, you are researchers, you are pursuing new knowledge. Can you give me an example of how one informs the other, how your scholarship has translated into a course you're offering?
Lisa Baldez:
So, my last book was on the UN treaty on women's rights and why the United States has not ratified that treaty and our history of U.S. engagement on that issue. And it was a new topic for me. I had never done research on the United States. This was a new realm of the United Nations and international organizations and human rights issues. And I started the research by teaching a seminar on it.
And that was a little risky, but I was at a point where I was willing to do that and ready to do that. So, the students and I learned together, what are the questions, what does the research say, what does that knowledge that Sam had talked about earlier? Then, I was able to get some feedback from them, and they could also see the process of what it is to start research when I didn't really have a clear sense of where that was going to take me or even if this was a viable topic.
Then, I was able to, as the project progressed, teach that seminar every year. And that ongoing conversation with my students and the process of, "Here's the research as far as I know it, here's a chapter that I wrote, what do you think," I remember one student saying to me, she had read one of my draft chapters and she said, "Professor Valdez, I don't really hear your voice in this."
And it was such an awesome moment. She was absolutely right. So, that process of working with my students more as colleagues, it made the research sharper because I had to articulate what I was doing to an audience, and also, I was able to learn from them, from their feedback, from the brilliant questions that they asked that I would not have considered, what was worth pursuing. So, it was a really mutual process. There was no boundary between teaching and research on that project, and it was incredibly valuable.
Alexis Abramson:
Well, Lee, I think I can answer that question in a few different ways. I've taught a seminar-style class on climate change, and I think to have a scientist and a practical-focused engineer engaged in a seminar-style class is a really great opportunity. It's not something that your typical engineering school necessarily engages in, but to have that opportunity at Dartmouth and some other institutions to do that, it's a good experience I think for the faculty member and the students.
So, I can bring, to that seminar-style class, that more practical side of things. So, it's not just about the impact of climate change on our world and the different populations in our world that are being affected by it more and more today and will be more in the future, but it's about, what can we really do about it, what are the technologies and the solutions that we can bring to the table?
So, being able to go into that seminar-style class and explain what nuclear energy is, for example, and to give the students this toolbox of beyond the social science understanding that climate change is going to have, give them an understanding of, really how does a solar cell work and how does nuclear power work and why aren't we saving more energy and buildings. And that practical piece is really important.
Lisa Baldez:
Professor Levy?
Sam Levy:
Yeah, I have similar experiences, and it's often the case that trying to figure out how to deliver material, the ideas in the classroom, requires me to go back to the historical texts and read them very carefully. I realized fairly early on that trying to figure out the best way to pitch this to student broke open the conversation. I didn't understand what I was seeing in the texts until I needed to explain it in a classroom.
And the students, just like Lisa was saying, ask these terrific questions. I think, "Oh, right. Now, I understand. I'm seeing connections I hadn't seen before." So, there's some nice road testing that happens in talking to students.
Alexis Abramson:
And I think I'll build on that, if I can, a little. So, when students say, "I wanna go somewhere to do research," or, "I might want to go somewhere and do research," there are other ways to get exposure to these topics. So, one thing that I always see students maybe not taking advantage of enough is some of these more extracurricular, co-curricular-type opportunities, speakers on campus.
Take advantage of those things, as Lisa was saying, to expand your horizons and try some things out. Then, if you really do get interested in a particular topic, there are, at many institutions, opportunities to then go that next mile and link up with a professor, or there might be a program at a university, specifically for undergraduates, to do research.
Seek out that program, apply to that program. Sometimes there's funds to pay you for research, sometimes you can get course credit for it. So, try and reach out, navigate that process, and then, ultimately, if it's something that you really seem to connect with, a topic you really seem to connect with, then you'll hopefully have that opportunity to go deeper.
Lee Coffin:
Well, across all three of your scholarly areas, you are practitioners in some way. You're taking these ideas from your fields and you're applying them, whether it's directly in policy, but you're doing research. For students in high school thinking about a program, where do I go to college, who's going to teach me? A lot of students I meet talk about this interest in doing research on their own or with you.
So, as you each think about that, what advice do you have for high school students around thinking about research in an undergraduate space? So, some places will be more open to it than others, but how can they know that this is a place where that's possible?
Lisa Baldez:
So, I think, one thing we tell students is do study what you're passionate about, study what you're really passionate about. But a lot of students don't really know what they're passionate about. "I'm passionate about fantasy football. I'm passionate about hanging out with my friends." That was certainly my case in high school.
But I think another way to ask that question is, what are you curious about? What stokes your interest? You read something in the paper, you hear about something in the news, you read a novel, what do you want to know more about? And that is a way of thinking about how you might go from where you are now to thinking about engaging in academic research.
Another little dirty secret about research: often research is really boring. So, it might be copying and pasting numbers from one document into a spreadsheet, it might mean sifting through long documents, looking for particular mentions of topics, and it's hundreds and hundreds and thousands of pages that you do that, or writing programs to figure out certain problems.
And I think that's part of the process of doing research. It sounds—and maybe I'm overstepping here— but maybe it sounds glamorous to people, and it is, and it's exciting, but there are also parts of it that require a bit more discipline and focus. And I think I'm happy to introduce that to students and share all parts of that process with them.
Lee Coffin:
So, you come to a college website, and it is an avalanche of information. So, I'm a student who's thinking, "Yeah, I'm broadly interested in the Humanities." I'm trying to figure out what that means, and I land on the Dartmouth website. And maybe this is a mom or dad-also-helping guide a college search. What resources do faculty have on your departmental pages or your personal pages that you see as useful?
Sam Levy:
I think in my own experience, it was the courses that took me in to find the faculty and got me embedded in different ways in mentoring relationships. So, I don't know that seeing so much what a faculty member's working on for their research would be the first point of entry, because oftentimes there's a pretty big distance between what you're prepared to talk about and what the faculty member's writing about. But what the faculty member's teaching, that's pretty close contact.
Finding your way into a space like that, I think there are lots of different paths, but for me, talking to the faculty and just following my curiosity got me into a conversation where then someone can take you to that next step, and then things become very clear rapidly, like, "Oh, this is what we're up to, this is what we're trying to do."
Lee Coffin:
So, let's imagine someone's listening to this conversation and this feels intimidating, for those of us who might be a little less confident out of the gate as we meet the curriculum, and then we meet you. Does that make sense? Have you seen students hesitate on the inbound moment and lack the confidence to seize the moment?
Alexis Abramson:
Yeah, I think, certainly, you hope, as a professor, that your students feel comfortable enough maybe because they've taken a class with you or they've talked to some of their peers that they feel comfortable enough reaching out, sending that email, or coming to office hours. And I think, really, just knowing that we as professors expect that of our students. We love when our students come to office hours. So, don't be afraid. Please do.
Take advantage of that opportunity to go and have that one-on-one conversation, be it about questions you have in the class or questions you just want to ask them about the research that they're doing or the sabbatical they took last year that you read an article about. So, we're, as professors, really welcoming of students coming and talking to us.
Lee Coffin:
So, they got in, they've chosen a college, they're now first-years and they're picking courses, and there's this thing called office hours. And for a lot of students, particularly in the selective realm of college admission where the admit rate was tight and they got in, and they might be wondering, "How the hell did I get in?" And they're used to getting As, because that was the motivating force through high school to get them into the college of their dreams, and now maybe they get a B.
I'll go back to Jack Chatfield, my history professor, I got a C on my first test in his course, and I never got anything less than an A in high school. And I remember being crushed by the C on that exam. And I did go to office hours to see him with my blue book, for those parents who remember the blue books. And I said, "What did I do wrong?" And he flipped through it and he said, "You did nothing wrong." He said, "You answered all the questions correctly. You just didn't expand on them to the degree you needed to."
And coming out of my public high school, no one ever taught me expository writing. So, it was this really interesting recalibration of thought. He said, "You're smart. You just have to go a little more deeply on the answers to these questions," and then off I went. But I think a lot of us have that moment when we get to college where the As are a little harder to earn or there's this pressure to still earn an A.
So, what advice do you give to high school seniors around that transition from being a high-achieving high school student to being one of many high achieving students, and then entering class? What do you see in your classrooms, in your advising work?
Lisa Baldez:
So, my first grade in college was a D.
Lee Coffin:
Oh.
Lisa Baldez:
Equally shocking. So, I know what that's like. And I have lots of experiences that I am pretty open with with my students to say, "Look, here's my experience." And we know that failure is essential to learning. You have to fail in order to really learn something. Some colleges and some professors are trying to incorporate that into pedagogy, and to build in low stakes quizzes and low stakes tests so that you can fail and learn from that and still do well in the class.
But it is a very real thing. And I think that that fear of failure, for a lot of students, can be crippling. But that said, exactly what you did, Lee, is just to ask, "Tell me what happened. Tell me what you saw that led you to this grade or these set of comments."
It's a high threshold in terms of confidence to be able to do that, but that's where you're going to learn and go somewhere different from where you were before. Otherwise, walking away from that or not inquiring is failing to avail yourself of a really amazing opportunity.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, I think the sting of that first college grade is, you feel it. I remember going back to my room and feeling like, "Oh, God, I really..." My poignant story that I will often tell, I was in a freshman seminar, it was on politics, it was in oral communications. And people were talking about Plato, and I had not read Plato's Republic in high school. And listened to the conversation, I thought, "Why are they talking about Play-Doh?" I thought the toy that kids had, and I didn't realize it was something that my high school just didn't include on its curriculum.
And I had this moment of feeling like, "God, how did I get in," and, "Why don't I know what they all know?" And that was a cold shower for me as a kid coming out of my not-so-fancy public high school where I was big man on campus and president of the National Honor Society, and all of a sudden I was like, "Okay."
But the moral of this story I'm sharing is, I had the skills. The college admission officer who took me said the ingredients were there, I just needed to teach myself a different way to learn. What got me through high school was still germane, but in this new environment, I had to rearrange how I understood being a good student.
Office hours were part of that, or jumping way ahead of my syllabus, or going to the library every night and reading, and buying a highlighter and highlighting things in books. But these were study skills that my public high school didn't teach me, and you have to learn how to swim in a different stream.
Alexis Abramson:
Yeah. I think, when I talk to some high school students, they simplify it a bit by saying, "Oh, college is just another four years, that it's just like high school, but it's harder." And that's not it at all. It's this opportunity to really expand your horizons and go into depth and breadth that you wouldn't normally go into, and Lee, your example of taking that extra step to really investigate that topic from a unique perspective you had never thought about before.
I think about when I was an undergrad and I was a mechanical engineering major, but as I said earlier, I wanted to take these other courses. And I had a couple of good friends who were not engineering majors, and we took this History of Women class together, which I was interested in. And we had to write an essay on the history of women.
And I decided, "Well, I'm gonna take an engineer's approach to this." And I talked about how the history of women is like an oscillator. So, I wrote my whole paper on that, and I spent hours and hours and hours, versus my two friends who were, one was a history major in fact, and they did it the night before, of course. And they got As and I got a B+ plus. And it was devastating to me, but I also, at the same time, really understood that, "Look, this isn't my strength."
And really, I learned so much by taking this unique dive into things that maybe was untraditional, unconventional, in a sense, and broaden my horizons in a certain way. And I got a good grade, don't get me wrong, although I was a little bitter that they didn't spend much time and got a better grade.
So, it's really about the experience in college. And I know it's easier said than done. Grades don't matter as much. They do, I get it. But at the same time, when you look back years from now, it's those experiences where you really went outside your comfort zone which might have meant you got a lower grade, but it's those experiences that really help you become the person that you will become and are so meaningful in the end.
Lee Coffin:
Post-enrollment, pre-matriculation, it's time to start picking courses. Would you advise students to stretch outside their comfort zone for at least one of those three, four, five slots, instead of saying, "I'm Pre-Med," and loading up all on that? What's the virtue of popping outside of what you think you want to study, and landing in, of course, the History of Women as a mechanical engineer, and saying, "Oh, this has pushed me into a very different intellectual space than the one that feels organic"?
Lisa Baldez:
I'm going to answer that by sharing something I hear from seniors a lot. By the time many of our students are seniors, they have completed their major requirements, they have completed their distribution requirements, they have completed their pre-health requirements, if they're doing that or they're close. So, they're like, "Okay. Now, I can take the courses I really want to take," which I think is not how I would recommend doing it, but they often find themselves there.
Then, they take a class because they have been really curious about this class, and they're like, "Oh, I wish I'd taken this class earlier." And it's okay. They took the class. It doesn't matter that they're not going to major in that thing, but it's still valuable to them. But I hear that so often. And I wish for those students that they had taken that class their freshman year, and maybe it wouldn't have put them on a different path, maybe they wouldn't have appreciated it at that time, they wouldn't have gained as much. They needed to do all they did.
And I'm going to suggest what you suggested, Lee, to students, I'm going to keep doing that. I've been doing it my whole academic career. I'd say, probably, I'm guessing, maybe 5% of students actually take me up on it. And the ones who do, usually report back. But ultimately, every class you take, every path you're on, you're going to learn something.
Even if you think, "Oh, that class was terrible," if you reflect on it, well, what was so terrible about it? And you can learn from that experience too. So, I don't think there's any wrong way to do it, but I do want to have students avoid that feeling of regret for having waited on something that they loved.
Lee Coffin:
A lot of students think a major is a through-line to a career.
Sam Levy:
Yeah.
Lee Coffin:
Is that true or false?
Sam Levy:
Oh, yeah, I'd say half the students I see coming in first year, they think you major in X because you want to become or do X later. I think it's just, for me, apart from trying to get into a PhD program, just the opposite. It's, let your profession drill that knowledge into you. Do something to construct yourself, whatever it is, between now and then.
Alexis Abramson:
I think engineering is a bit of the exception. You can major in engineering and follow whatever career you'd like to follow. I believe in that. But it is hard to not, if you don't major in engineering, then to become an engineer, right?
Sam Levy:
Right.
Alexis Abramson:
So, there is that complexity there that, yes, maybe it takes a bit of forethought ahead of time, but about 50% of our graduating students in engineering did not necessarily know they wanted to major in engineering when they got to Dartmouth. So, it's really worth exploring that further to decide what excites you and let that be the driver, for sure, of where you take your major and minor.
Lisa Baldez:
Data on this has shown there is very little statistical correlation in terms of your major and the career that you end up doing. People for whom their major in college does link to what they're doing professionally tends to be academics. So, the very people advising undergraduates are the exception to the rule in a lot of cases.
(music)
Lee Coffin:
I hope this conversation with our three professors has your wheels turning as you continue to ponder and wonder what you might study. So, next week, as April continues its merry march towards the national candidates' reply date, we will bring three first-year students to the mic to help you think about what you discover during your first year of college. What are the aha's that animate your freshman year that may not be on your mind as you wrap up your senior year of high school?
Till then, this is Lee Coffin from Dartmouth College. Thanks for listening.