Avoiding Mismatched Majors
Avoiding Mismatched Majors
Wise Counsel from 'The Lady of the Library'
In Don't Know What to Study at College? Cinzia Dubois describes a technique that she built to help would-be undergraduates select subjects to study. (As she hails from the United Kingdom, Miss Dubois presumes that each student will choose a single course of study before he matriculates. However, the procedure she lays out strikes me as equally useful to students at American-style universities who find themselves in the market for a major.)
Dubois begins the video by making a number of points that will prove familiar to regular readers of Extra Muros. These include:
‘I only know six people who work in the field they studied at university, three of whom are university lecturers.’
‘Do not pick a subject for the sake of going to university. You don’t need to go to university.’
‘If you are not ready [to pick a subject], it’s probably better to take a gap year and think about it first.’
Asking a teenager to set the course for (what he is told) is the rest of his life places an enormous burden upon him
Having done this, Dubois moves on to her technique, which might be described as a kind of brain-storming. That is, she recommends that people searching for an academic discipline make, and make sense of, lists of the things that they love, the things that they do well, and the things that they want out of life.
The goal of this exercise, Dubois concludes, is to help a prospective undergraduate select a subject that will serve them well at university, increasing their enjoyment of the experience and, at the same time, minimizing their misery. I think, however, that the same method might be of value to self-directed learners in search of fields, whether of work or of study, to explore. Indeed, as autodidacts can change their itineraries much more easily than institutionalized learners, I can imagine them using this technique many times in the course of their lives.
Cinzia Dubois has published many other videos of value to folks of the extra mural persuasion, programs in which she models many of the skills and attitudes that I associate with successful school-free study. Indeed, I suspect that she may soon find herself entirely in our camp. After all, she calls her YouTube channel ‘The Lady of the Library’, and not ‘The Lady of the University.’