Students Creating Customized Majors

commentary by Shelby Till | February 16, 2012

With the job market as competitive as ever and the cost of college increasing every year, more students are faced with the challenge of earning a quality education in a major that will help market themselves in a competitive workforce. Most of the time, students can do this by earning a traditional degree from a university that needs their basic needs; however, what happens to those students whose needs don't fit any of those traditional degrees? Now, a number of schools are offering students the opportunity to create their own customized major.

Individualized majors are not a new concept. In fact, they have been around since the early 1960s and 1970s, but many of those fist diy degrees were pretty out of the ordinary. For instance, the famous Will Shortz earned his degree in enigmatology, otherwise known as the study of puzzles, from Indiana University in 1974. Another student studied the marketing, design and aerodynamics of "flying disks," or Frisbees at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Since then, the degrees have become more closely entwined with a number of studies and topics that interest the student. Alan Goodman, Hampshire's dean of faculty, says that in today's world, advisers require students to tie majors more closely to their planned fields of work or research. To help students have some type of structure for their educational plans, universities provide programs with faculty advisers and sometimes specialized courses, while still meeting school standards.

Also, this is not something that everyone can accomplish. Customized majors actually take a lot of effort, plus skills in selling yourself, along with your major. At most universities, students are required to find at least one professor to sponsor and advise them during their studies and a majority of them are required to create an extensive final project or paper. Some people have even written and published their own books for their final project.

Because such programs typically involve a rigorous application process, the students are required to demonstrate an unusual amount of determination, Margaret A. Lamb, who is director of the University of Connecticut's individualized-major program and senior associate director of honors and enrichment programs there, argues. "The admission process for the individualized major is not for the faint of heart. Students don't do an individualized major on a whim, unless they can sustain it with hard work."

However, with hard work come some pretty good rewards. Trudy G. Steinfeld, who is in charge of the New York University's Wasserman Center for Career Development, says undergraduates in NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study generally have more opportunities in the job market in comparison to students with traditional majors. An individualized major allows students to promote themselves as "entrepreneurs and self-starters," she says.

"If you have a company or nonprofit, you are looking for employees who have an interesting collection of skills and who can shift gears quickly between tasks, and individualized majors often fit the bill," Steinfeld says. "Particularly in a tough economy, employers are trying to make sure that they get a bang for their buck, and they want versatile employees."

Another benefit that these students have is the ability to dive into emerging and innovative fields. For example, Justin Carven, a Hampshire College mechanical-design major who studied biofuels, continued on to start a company in Holyoke, Mass., promoting vehicles powered on vegetable oil.

Dr. Alan Goodman, who is Hampshire's dean of faculty, says customized programs like these also allows student to try to predict job shifts.

"While schools are struggling to put together majors in sustainability or green building, here a student can go ahead and say, 'This is what I want to do and this is how I want to do it,"' he says.

So with the workforce being so competitive, we may begin to see more and more students take advantage of these individualized majors. And maybe it will be these students that create new, innovative fields that help restore our country once again.