Choosing a Minor
Before I dive into my advice on how to choose a minor, I want to note that a minor is not necessary for a fulfilling college experience. There are infinitely many ways to spend your time academically at UMich; pursuing a minor is just one such way.
There are a couple ways to approach a minor: your minor could be in a field that supplements your major nicely (eg. Computer Science major, Math minor), or it could just be in a field that interests you. That choice is up to you entirely; what you minor in isn’t as important as what you major in, and ultimately the point of a minor is to gain knowledge rather than a certificate of completion. Essentially, do a minor because the material interests you or will be useful to you in the future, not because you feel that employers are choosing whether or not to hire people based on their minor(s). I took the latter approach and am currently pursuing minors in French and Linguistics.
If you go with the first approach, then chances are you already have a specific field in mind that compliments the field that you’re majoring in. In that case, nice!
If you’ve decided to go with the second approach, I’ve found that it’s tough to determine whether it makes more sense to pursue a minor in one specific field or instead to take a bunch of classes in different fields and learn about a plethora of subjects in doing so. What helped me make this choice was to scour the LSA Course Guide. I spent a good chunk of time just exploring and reading about hundreds of courses on the Course Guide and Atlas. Through this, I found that for the most part, the classes that interested me most were the French and Linguistics classes. After discovering this, I read about the minor requirements, and saw that I could fulfill the requirements by just taking the classes that sounded cool to me (as opposed to wasting my time in classes that weren’t interesting to me just for the sake of the minor). Seeing that my interests lined up well with the minor requirements for French and Linguistics, I decided to pursue both minors.
After you’ve declared your minor, if you decide that maybe this path isn’t the right one for you, all it takes (generally) is an email to your advisor and they can take care of it for you or point you in the right direction to get everything sorted out. There is no pressure to pursue a minor; be sure to avoid the sunk cost fallacy!
Essentially, a minor is a chance to explore something outside of your major. Whether that means a field that supplements your major or one that you just find fascinating is up to you. There is a lot of freedom with minors, and they’re more for exploration than anything else. All in all, your college experience is what you make of it, and your path is up to you!
Meera Kumar