Should I major in pure math if I want to have an easy time in college?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP, take a gap year. you are NOT ready for college regardless what you major in

I was going to write the same thing. OP, don't pick a major out of a hat. If you can't clarify why you want to go to school, you won't be motivated to finish. What are your interests? Travel, volunteer, or get a job and get to know yourself better.

[Anonymous]

I think the OP may be one of those kids who hate doing "word problems" in math, and associates applied math with doing word problems.

Well, yes, doing applied math entails being able to do word problems, but you do not escape doing word problems by doing pure math.

More to the point: if you're majoring in math, and all the more so if you're doing pure math, you'll spend a good chunk of your time writing proofs. These are not the highly structured proofs from your high school geometry days, where each step is written out, numbered, and justified with a postulate or previously proved theorem, but the kind of several-paragraph proofs you see in your calculus text. See http://math.caltech.edu/~nets/lecture9.pdf for some examples.

If you don't love doing that, you're not going to enjoy being a math major.

[Anonymous]

OP, my DH was a pure math major and then became a math professor. He expected the majors to study at least 2-3 hours per week per credit hour they were taking. Lots of problem sets to do as graded homework.

If you don't want much out of class studying, go to the university and see what all the other students consider the "easy" majors and go from there. Where dh taught it was psychology, but it varies widely. The psych profs weren't paid much so made it for it with private practice, so they kept the outside course work down so there wasn't as much to grade and they could see more clients.

The "easy" or "less work" majors tend to be institution specific, and are less work for a wide variety of reasons. Just pick a major you like, if it is required, and talk to your fellow students once you arrive to figure out what is less work outside of class, if that is you goal.