Choosing a major might be the most difficult decision you can make as a college student, seeing that some students do not come to their choice until their junior or senior year. Also, there are some students who change their major any number of times throughout their college career. Both extended time to choose and changing your major are totally okay as well. You want to be sure you’re making the best decision for yourself, because, after all, your major almost always correlates to what job field you will be in for a long time, if not your entire working career. However, for me at least, choosing my major wasn’t the most difficult decision in my time in college. But rather, choosing the second major I will pursue alongside my first major. In fact, the choice of my first major was one of the easiest decisions I’ve made.
Even before college I knew that learning Chinese, Mandarin specifically, was something I wanted to continue to learn, even after taking it throughout high school. But, even before that, learning Chinese had been something I wanted to do for a long time. While growing up in Ann Arbor, my neighborhood was filled with other families from places all around the world. My street alone had more than 60% of its residents having an Asian or Middle Eastern background. This allowed me to experience many social and cultural differences from a very young age. The most obvious difference being language. One of my best friends from my street is Chinese and I would often visit his house. While at his home I would hear him speak with his family in Chinese and hearing the language was very interesting and intriguing to me. The thought that you could speak to someone in such a different way than English was fascinating. From then on, the urge to learn Chinese grew in me and is what led me to take on Chinese as my major. However, I also knew that Chinese wasn’t the only thing I wanted to study.
Originally, I thought an area of study to pair with Chinese would be business. Although it’s a great combination, for me it just wasn’t going to work out with having to dual enroll in both the College of Arts and Letters and the Broad Business College. Because of this, throughout my freshman year at MSU I opted to only have Chinese as my major and to explore other options to study alongside it. It was not nearly as easy to choose an additional major. But, by being in CAL for my freshman year, I realized something very important to my choice of an additional major. CAL was the best fit for me, in terms of colleges that MSU has to offer. So, I knew that my additional major also had to be offered through CAL. With that in mind and with the help of the amazing academic advisors of CAL, we were able to identify some of the interests I had and came up with a couple possible options for me. But only one of the options stuck out clearly for me.
The most obvious choice for me to pair with Chinese had to be global studies. Mainly because I had already considered it earlier in the year. But that was the global studies major that a different college was offering. I hadn’t realized that CAL also offered a global studies major. Although I’m only just beginning my learning of global studies, I have high hopes for the major and how it will mesh together with Chinese and where it will take me in the future.