What's Your Major?
Written November 21, 2003

In an age of stupid conversation jump-starters, the question “What’s your major?” has to be amongst the stupidest. Sure, it’s a step up from unintelligibly stammering catch slogans from late-night infomercials or staring at someone’s chest and addressing it as “Mr. Rack”, but in general the academic conversation path is a cop-out, a futile attempt at personal connection used in a position of weakness. But it’s inevitable.

Like every other student, I’ve bandied the question of academic faculty with countless people I’ve met over the course of my two-point-five years at Wilfrid Laurier. It seems to be a natural fit, sliding into the repertoire directly after “What’s your name?” and right before “So how do you know [insert mutual acquaintance here]?” It slides off the tongue effortlessly after a few weeks at university, a cookie-cutter approach to categorizing the massive flux of humanity you regularly encounter at school.

Initially it even seems reasonable. After all, shouldn’t you be able to figure out what a person is like through their academic choices and strengths? Perhaps they’re in the same program as you and the discussion can then naturally progress to the oh-so-joyous task of assessing the qualities of various professors and classes. Unfortunately, conversations rarely build on this academic base and have a tendency to flutter off into inane triviality.

The end result of this casual brush with education is that people will often use their knowledge of a newly-met individual’s academic program to define them in the absence of any deeper context: “Oh, he’s a biz-kid, and probably studies like a Prozac-snorting madman,” or “Gee, she’s in English so I bet she can’t even add up the amount of change in her purse.” Okay, maybe not to those extremes, but a set of preconceptions still accompanies the students of each academic faculty.

I’m especially guilty of this stereotyping. Any of my friends will probably remember that I sneered jokingly at them the day I learnt they were in business or economics, probably mentioning something about “money-chasing Satanists” or “capitalist pig-dogs”. It’s all in good fun, but there’s always an element of belief in such generalizations unless you make the deeper effort to understand the individual.

On a similar note, it’s entirely possible to do the same thing with the extra-curricular involvement that people associate themselves with at WLU. It’s easy enough for me to sum up Fashion N Motion dancers as a glittery waste of a brain, but conversely it would be simple for them to assess me as a bitter, pessimistic Cord writer who hates Laurier and everything good it has to offer. Truth be told, some of the most creative, unique people I’ve ever met base their student experience from deep within FnM and the Student’s Union . I would rather throw myself in a trash compactor than join them, but at least I can respect their ambitions and talents as individuals.

One of the first questions posed to somebody you first meet will inevitably be “What’s your major?”, no matter how much you don’t want to ask. It’s a verbal necessity of being a post-secondary student, and I don’t quite understand it completely. Maybe they subconsciously teach it to us in O-Week. Regardless, the important thing is how you utilize this information. Will you walk the simple path of using it to categorize everyone by a few decisions they’ve made, or will you take the high road and dedicate some time to understand the motivation and character behind the choices?

Good column. This really is the most popular (and annoying) question that students ask when they first meet each other and I just thought it should be highlighted. Obviously nobody stopped doing it. At least I managed to twist the idea into a semblence of a point at the end.