Choosing a Minor

Why choosing a minor as important as choosing a major

Going into undergrad, they don’t put as much emphasis on choosing your minor as the do choosing your major.

If you don’t know any better, it seems as though it just isn’t that important. As a pre-med student, I found it easiest to choose chemistry as my minor. I was already getting credit for those classes due to pre-med requirements so I might as well kill two birds with one stone right. This is the story of how choosing my minor brought me joy, and introduced me to the field that I would eventually call my major.

Starting out as a biology major with a minor in chemistry, I never really felt like I was doing what I was supposed to do. I knew that I should major in a science because I was pre-med, but it just felt like I was following the crowd. I thought long, and hard about what I should do, and I landed on changing my major to biochemistry. This didn’t feel right either. I was quite depressed, and not enjoying school as much as I usually did. I looked at what was different about my life since I started college, and the biggest difference was that I stoped dancing.

I was on the dance team at my high school, and it was the most fun experience of my life. I looked into joining a dance team at IU, but I didn’t really want to do anything that would pull me away from school more so than I was already pulling myself. I knew that there were dance classes at IU that counted towards your GPA, so I looked into that. I quickly found out that I could add that as a minor. As soon as I did, things started looking up. I then decided that choosing a minor was just as important as choosing a major. Choosing dance quickly pulled me out of my depression, and my grades in my other classes began to improve. Even though I knew I was on the right track, something still felt off about what I had chosen for my degree.

I took Psych 101 as a pre-med requirement, and I fell in love with the field. I found myself wanting to take more psych classes, so I added it as my third minor. The more psychology classes I took, the more I fell in love with it. I eventually swapped the biochemistry major for the psych major and graduated with two minors (dance and chemistry).

My journey will not be the same as yours, but if you take anything away from my story it should be that college isn’t cookie cutter. You might go in with an idea of what you want to do, and once you get there one thing can change the course of your experience. Listen to your heart, and choose your major(s) and minor(s) wisely.