Choosing a Major at the University of Charleston
This article was written based on the information and opinions presented by Beth Wolfe, an Admissions Officer at the University of Charleston, in a CollegeVine livestream. You can watch the full livestream for more info.
What’s Covered:
Some people come to college knowing exactly what they’ll major in, as they’ve wanted to be a veterinarian, a musician, an engineer, or something else since they were really young. Not everybody has that mindset, though. At the University of Charleston, if you’re not sure what you want to study, you have plenty of options. This article takes you through a few of the majors offered by the school that you might not have heard of and shows you that if you’re still deciding between several disciplines, there’s a way to do all of them here!
Uncommon Majors
The University of Charleston has majors that everyone’s heard of, like accounting, computer science, and chemistry. It also has disciplines that aren’t quite as common and might actually be the right choice for you.
Business analytics might interest you if you’re the type of person who loves math and data. You might feel pressure to become an engineer of some kind, but this field could suit you more. Business analytics majors take a large amount of data and multitudes of numbers, and they look for trends. These trends could become opportunities for businesses to save money and utilize their funds more efficiently. If you’re interested in this kind of math, the university’s business analytics major or data analytics major might appeal to you.
Digital marketing or digital media design are ideal options if you’re interested in marketing but want to study how the discipline functions today. It’s a field that’s changed greatly in the past few decades! Digital tools, like web design, graphic design, and social media, have become increasingly important. If you’re artistic and enjoy designing graphics, this major will teach you how to use those skills.
The University of Charleston is the only school in West Virginia that provides a financial planning degree. Financial planners look after retirement portfolios and 401Ks. They understand the stock market and investment opportunities and help individuals manage their wealth. Students interested in math could look into this field too. It involves modeling and projections so people can see how much money they’ll have at a certain age or when it would be possible for them to retire.
If you’re interested in healthcare but don’t think that becoming a nurse or a doctor is right for you, look into the school’s healthcare administration and management major. You’ll manage and analyze facilities that help people get well again.
A professional selling degree will help you if you want to go into sales. It hones the skills that make for a great salesperson, no matter the industry. You could cover real estate, pharmaceutical sales, or another field. Regardless, you’ll leave college ready to hit the ground running.
Working Across Disciplines
Even with all the unique majors offered by the University of Charleston, you still may find yourself stumped about what to focus on. What if you’re interested in many different things? Fortunately, this university doesn’t limit you to pursuing a single discipline. For the multidisciplinary studies degree, you just need to complete the minor requirements for different majors.
Many fields today rely on connections between different industries and skills. Perhaps you want to build a business that would involve computer programming. You could study entrepreneurship, applied computer science, and communications, as all of these would help you accomplish your dreams.
If you want to be a writer, it might seem like English or communications would be the best choice. But there are many different routes that a potential writer can take: you could become a science writer, a tech writer, or a political writer, for example. Doing multidisciplinary studies could allow you to study English and hone your writing skills, and it would also let you master the particular field that you want to cover.
This major enables you to indulge different passions and still be prepared for a professional career. By not limiting yourself to a single subject, you can see how different fields work together, and you’ll also be able to explore everything that interests you.
