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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Hi! I know I could get this advice from just the internet but I wanted to see if any of you had any advice suggestions on it. My daughter is interested in possibly marketing and journalism. She thinks marketing is a safer way to go but thinks journalism would be much cooler. What even are jobs in journalism that you can do that allow you to travel and learn and make a difference? Or in marketing? She is looking into what she might want to do in her future and just looking for suggestion. She is outgoing, kind, friendly.[/quote]

At most schools, marketing is going to be in the college of business and journalism will be in the communications school.  Journalism is a pretty narrow focus, and most communications programs are expanding into digital media, public relations, broadcasting, sports management, etc.  The focus is really going to depend on the programs offered at each school.  I think a double major or hybrid program across the business school and comm school sounds like a great opportunity.  [b]Throw a minor in computer science in there and you'll have a winner[/b]![/quote]

DP, not the one you're responding to. The bold above, and another PP's earlier comment about "I advise students to get a STEM minor" are simplistic.

I suspect a lot of parents on this board, yes, including parents who will insist, "But I hire people and know what I'm talking about," have no real idea of what it takes to get a formal minor in certain subjects at many colleges and universities today. It's not as simple as, "I'll just tack a computer science minor onto my marketing major" or "I'll do some kind of STEM minor with my communications major."

Those are fields where colleges often have very specific [i]sequences[/i] of courses for majors AND for minors, and getting minors in STEM or comp sci or many other fields can be challenging--or even impossible, if the student ends up shut out of some courses due to majors getting priority. And if the student doesn't have any real interest in a STEM or comp sci field, the student is burning a lot of classes and credits doing a minor in something he or she may never want to use professionally anyway.

Just going around here telling parents that their kid should simply add a minor, as if that's a simple thing to do, shows a lack of understanding of college right now. My own DC is doing a major plus two minors but that is only becuause DC's college's open curriculum means there are almost no required general education classes, so students can specialize in subjects much earlier. In most universities, that's not necessarily the case. DC has friends at several large universities who have found they can't just "add a STEM minor" because they didn't start the sequence of classes soon enough, or they can't get a seat in the one or two higher-level courses they need, due to demand from majors who need the class. [/quote]

Well at both colleges my kids attended/are attending, getting a minor in another subject was not hard and getting into the courses was not either.  However, my kids are at schools with less than 8K students and places where you can easily change majors, as long as you have certain prerequisites---like you need first calc class to get into business if you were not admitted directly, but it's easy to register take the course and then officially switch.  My other kid is at an open curriculum school where many double major (in LA) and most everyone does 1-2 minors due to the open curriculum.

Getting a formal minor requires planning to get on the right path.  But it can be done.  Even without a minor, having 2-3 courses in the minor you are interested in goes a long way to a career path, even if you don't get the minor (ie having 2-3 comp sci courses or data analytics or Econ and finance help market you).

But if you are at a large state university where even kids who are majoring in CS or Business struggle to find the courses they want, your kid might struggle to get into a minor as well. That is just one of the reasons my kids focused on smaller schools in their applicantions.  However, that is not the case at many many smaller schools, especially ones where kids can essentially major in anything they want.  [/quote]

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