Coming to Terms with My Major

This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at SJSU chapter and does not reflect the views of Her Campus.

When I first applied for college, I had no idea what linguistics was. Even now, it still feels like a total waste of time having to explain what my major is or what I study. 

The funny part is that a lot of times, I have been mixed up with different majors from English to the study of foreign languages. I actually know for a fact, no, us linguistics students aren’t the next Duolingo. 

For me, a lot of the misconceptions around that came from the fact that I was studying a social science instead of something like math or engineering, so it was easy to be caught in countless long-winded explanations.

If you’re a non-STEM major and often caught up in this same cycle, it’s not anything out of the ordinary. 

In a generally modern world where our most visibly acknowledged and high paying careers come from the STEM world, it’s easy for other majors or career paths like the arts and humanities to often go under the radar since they are often broader and can be applied in a variety of career paths and roadmaps. 

Areas like the Bay Area are considered a business cluster, where technological and entrepreneurial innovations are a major factor in the advancement of STEM career pathways. 

Linguistics is no different as it also can be a broader, abstract field that delves into everything speech and communication like speech production, sounds, sentence structure, and even social and cultural aspects of language like semantics. 

Sounds insignificant to a future career, doesn’t it?

That’s actually false. In fact, it develops soft skills like communication, cultural literacy, teamwork, and active listening.

For example, in elementary school, we grow up learning to read from letters to words and eventually sentences over time as part of our language acquisition. 

When studying foreign languages in our high school classes or even for travel preparations, we are learning to produce different speech sounds and syntactic structures that develop a sense of cross-cultural awareness. 

Or even within the technical field, programmers teach our mobile devices and computers to be able to process and interact with our human languages (hello, chatbots and Google) through computational linguistics. 

The list goes on, but these are just some benefits to taking a non-STEM major you can potentially discover.

Non-STEM majors may seem insignificant, but as I’ve listed above, some areas of study can come with more merits than it may look.

What are some major misconceptions you’ve had? Let us know @HerCampusatSJSU!