My Biggest Regret by Dina Nayeri (Guest post and co-author of Another Faust)

My Biggest Regret
by Dina

I suspect there are a lot of high school and college students reading this post, so I'll talk about one of the things I wish I had known when I was starting college. It doesn't matter one bit to your future career what major you choose in college. You can study whatever you like, anything that sparks your passion, and still take a job in business or fashion or writing or...Well, pretty much anything.

I know this sounds like a big lie, but I spend a lot of time doing admissions advising and career advising and I can tell you without a shred of doubt that, if you are attending a liberal arts college, you can choose to study any subject and you can still go into any unrelated field.

Of course, there are a few caveats:

1) Pre-med, Pre-law, and pre-anything do not count as "majors." These are supplementary credits that you have to achieve if you want to go into those fields. But it's very possible to be pre-med and an Art History major at the same time.

2) You'll have to do some extra work (write a better resume, do more internships, conduct more research) if you want to study, say, Sanskrit and then go into, say, business.

3) You might have to go to graduate school. If you follow your passion of studying Russian Literature and then decide to be a vet, yeah, you'll need more school, and you'll need to convince that school that you're serious. But that's not a hard thing to do. And hey, you will be a much more interesting person than a vet who doesn't know anything about Russian literature!

3) Your dad will tell you that everything I'm saying is crap. That's because he is risk averse and he doesn't want to pay for your grad school.

My biggest college regret (besides that time I wore white underwear under a black dress and took like a thousand photos) is that I didn't major in English. At the time I wanted to go into the business world and I thought the only way to get there was to major in Economics. So I did. Granted, I took a ton of English classes at the same time. But I wish I had taken more!
I wish I had written my thesis in English and joined like a dozen reading groups! Now, looking back, I realize that the company I wanted to work for hired students from all types of majors. Preparing for the interview wouldn't have been much harder and I could have still gone to business school. Sure, I still became a writer. But that's not the point. What about those four glorious years that could have been spent reading Rushdie and Chabon and writing poems instead of calculating internal rates of return?