At its earliest stages, college was an opportunity for academics to educate themselves further and to challenge and better their minds. Today, college is a rite of passage, an almost essential step that young people take towards their impending adulthood. Choosing a major is as stressful as choosing the college itself. Deciding what to focus all of your time and energy on for the next four years and then your life’s work after is a big decision for people that had to ask to go to the bathroom only months prior.
As is with almost everything else, there is an assumed hierarchy of difficulty when it comes to different majors. More often than not, STEM classes are placed above STEAM (inclusive of the arts) because majors having to do with the liberal arts are looked at as nonessential or non-serious, which is not the case. In my experience, I find that people tend to only discuss the difficulty of their own major when trying to discredit someone else’s. As a communication major, a lot of the time I am either grouped in with English or told that my major is not a legitimate subject of study. Communication as a whole has a lot of overlap with a multitude of other subjects and at NSU; we are required to take mathematics, science and language courses alongside our core curriculum. The majority of STEM majors are restricted to classes within their field of study. An argument could certainly be made that they are taking what is pertinent to their major, who’s to say that the inclusion of outside-subject courses would not be beneficial, as is assumed to be the case with STEAM majors?
The truth is, all majors are difficult in their own way. There is really no way to definitively chart difficulty because it is relative to each individual. Biology and engineering majors most definitely have the reputation of being some of the most difficult courses of study, but what about art majors? Where biology students spend their time memorizing key terms and maps of the anatomy of various organisms, art majors must complete any multitude of projects of varying degree and difficulty at any given time for different courses. It is possible for a student to excel at his or her major and say it is difficult, but if he or she moved to a field they weren’t comfortable with, there’s a chance that would be even more difficult for them. If a math major was forced to transition into English when writing papers and essays was not their strong suit, they would find the major overwhelming. The same could be said vice versa.
Every major has its own difficulties and obstacles that a student must overcome. The entire purpose of obtaining a college degree is to become an expert in your chosen field of study; difficulty should be expected. I don’t think it can soundly be determined that one major is more difficult since it varies depending on the student. Bottom line; graduating from college is hard regardless of your area of study. If it was easy, everyone would do it.
