Falling Out of Love With Your Major

The saying goes, “Do what you love and you won’t work a day in your life.” While that is true for those lucky few, how often does one actually end up sticking with treating a hobby as work? Apparently 80% of students change majors throughout their tertiary education, and while there are other factors such as being forced to study their former major, the problem of falling out of love with your major is still a big one.

Statistics from withfrank.org.

There are four common types of motivation that lead people to choose what they study. There’s helping motivation, loafing motivation, and career motivation. However, the most relevant one to this topic is interest or intrinsic motivation, which is basically motivation based on the expectation of enjoyment. While it has been observed other forms of motivation are equally common, those that do get to study something they love usually do so as they believe it will be less burdensome.

What happens, though, when your major becomes less attractive than you thought?

It has been common advice for students to choose a major that they have at least some interest in for fear of suffering burnout too early. However, choosing to study something that you hold too dear to heart has a severe consequence, and that’s the sudden switch of something you love becoming something used to pit yourself against others and a source of stress.

Personal story incoming: When I began my Foundation in Design programme, I imagined that I would love every second of it. I had been one of the better art students in high school, and foolishly expected that that would carry into college, university and eventually a career. Imagine my surprise when I found out that I was simply a medium fish in a very small pond. Soon, drawing and fine art in general became a source of stress for me as I started my degree in art and design, and I was constantly surrounded by a bubble of rapidly decreasing self-esteem, unable to stop comparing myself against my peers. It’s said that competition in any environment is healthy, but this extent was beginning to take a toll on me. Put simply, I was unhappy that I now had to be forced to do what I loved and was once a source of relaxation for me.

I was among those lucky few who were able to change my major. That said, is it a generally good idea to change your major once you feel the initial spark of excitement fading? Some people might take a positive spin on it. Realistically though, and from personal experience, forcing yourself to do something you once loved increases burnout and will definitely make studying feel like a burden.

Still, I recognize that I was lucky enough to realize it early enough that I could change majors without any big repercussions. For those who are unable to change due to time, convenience or financial reasons, some good advice is to find out if it’s the major making you burnt out or the difficulty of the subject in question. Maybe you’re just thrown by the sudden feeling of having to learn something at a professional level. It could also be from being surrounded by people who seem to be doing better than you, which leads to the next point, which is to open up and accept that everyone has their own pace.

Whatever it is, studying is never an easy task and it’s completely valid to feel burnt out, uninspired or tired of what you fell in love with in the first place. No matter what your solution is, here’s to finding a path that will lead us to the right place.