During a cold mid-winter lunch with friends sometime last year, I sat down at a table with President Maud S. Mandel and former Dean of the Faculty Safa Zaki. They were holding an open lunch to speak with students, and one of my friends suggested we join them. Somewhere during the conversation, I said I was planning to double-major in English and geosciences and received a strange response from both: “Consider not double-majoring.”
This advice came from two of the most respected academics in the country. With Zaki now president of Bowdoin College, both lead elite liberal arts colleges, and I had assumed that they would advocate for diving as deep as I could into whatever I happened to be interested in. If this meant pursuing a double major and staying up alone in the library, working to gain as much academic depth as I could to lay the foundation for the rest of my career, that would be all the more impressive. Instead, they laughed and recommended having interesting late-night conversations with friends, taking classes that seemed engaging and fun, and not double-majoring.
Knowing that I was going to write this piece, I recently sat down with Mandel to hear more of her thoughts. She presented another angle to that argument: The purpose of an undergraduate education is to give students a taste of both the breadth and depth of the world around us. In this sense, the purpose of education is not to make students an expert in their field(s) but to give them an idea of what being an expert could look like.
Imagine this completely fictional scenario: You’re a student, you’re two years into college, and you have to declare your major. You know you like math, and you are definitely going to major in that. But you also realize that, although you have never wanted to major in English, you took some classes on Joyce and Hemingway, two authors you love, and you’re only four classes away from completing the English major. So you slog through four more English classes you weren’t very interested in, and you meet the criticism and period requirements for the major. Congratulations! You’re an English and math double major, and in the process, you missed out on learning a new language and taking two geoscience classes you always thought would be interesting. But you can say you double-majored.
Imagine instead that you decided on single-majoring. You still took those classes about your favorite authors and the classes needed for your math major. However, with the single major you also had energy to engage with all those other interests you have. Maybe you took a couple of art history classes and began to question the colonial narratives in museum curation. Maybe you took some computer science classes and managed to get past the introductory ones to explore network programming.
While a double major constrained the amount of subjects with which you could engage, the single major allowed you to explore the subjects you were interested in beyond just the introductory level. Majoring in one discipline instead of two allowed for genuine engagement with three or more.
Not being able to explore the full range of one’s interests is, I believe, the most detrimental consequence of the belief that one has to major in something to specialize in it. Again, undergraduate education can only provide a very limited degree of depth in a subject. It offers a chance to sample the ludicrous amount of depth the world has to offer. Sampling a broad spectrum of ideas allows you to experiment and grow.
A liberal arts degree will not make you an expert in something. Compared to the length of a career, the difference between taking four comparative literature classes because you happen to like books and majoring in comparative literature is minuscule. However, taking nine to 10 classes in comparative literature differs greatly from taking four classes in comparative literature, three in computer science, one in geosciences, and two classes in Mandarin. I believe that at the undergraduate level, a broader education is more important than slightly more classes in one particular discipline.
I understand that for many people, double-majoring can be important. Maybe you experience familial pressure to earn a “useful” major such as computer science or economics, but you also want to major in history. Or maybe you are genuinely just interested in two things and would take all 18 classes required for a double major anyways. But for everyone else out there, for whom it feels like you are going out of your way to pursue a double major, it could be worth examining the reasoning behind it. If it is because you feel the need to choose between various interests, or you feel pressure to not fall behind your peers who are double-majoring, think again. Just be curious and explore.
I hope that this piece inspires students to put some thought into why they are double-majoring. Choosing majors can be a serious source of stress for some students. I know that from personal experience. However, in the grand scheme of things, your major doesn’t matter — most employers certainly don’t care. Goldman Sachs, for example, just looks for “critical thinkers” from a “variety of backgrounds and majors,” and the law school application has no major requirements. So if the double major you decided on doing is a source of stress or unhappiness, maybe you should question that decision.
The point of a liberal arts education is to generate a curiosity in learning that will last the rest of your life. You don’t normally build curiosity through narrow study. You build curiosity through experimentation. You build curiosity by taking an array of classes you never thought you would and learning to build connections between them. The value of an undergraduate liberal arts education does not come from one major. It comes from all those other classes that teach students how to think, how to be curious, and most importantly, what a tremendous task the lifelong pursuit of learning really is.
Felix Diaz ’26 is from Arlington, Mass.
