Majors are the steppingstones to the future. For Prep students, the choices may seem daunting and limitless. While most gravitate towards mainstream majors, like engineering, business, and medicine, some Prep students decided to follow paths that are less travelled.
Jack Kurtz, a future Informatics major at the University of Washington, tells us about his experience in choosing his unique major. While he was initially drawn to computer science, the large competition dissuaded him from following it. Rather, he chose to pursue informatics, the study dealing with the creation of technology that stores and processes information. Kurtz described it as “similar to computer science, in the sense of working with computers and writing code, but it’s more human oriented, it deals with how humans make information and how we store that information to make it accessible to others.”
Kurtz explained that “with a lot of the new tech that’s come onto the scene, like AI, it’s been too easy for us to forget about the people that are making all this information. It’s important to have people who know what’s important in that field and can make tools and solutions to problems that involve people and computers.”
Alex Brown, a senior planning to major in Film and Television production at Chapman University said “filmmaking has always been my main passion in life, and it felt like I would regret not following it. So, the decision to pursue my dream of being a filmmaker wasn’t hard just because I always knew I would do it.”
He said, “working with other really creative and talented people is something I’ve been dreaming about for a really long time,” and having access to Chapman’s extensive resources and connections will enable him to work on more ambitious projects than he can do currently.
Similar to Brown, Anne Herb, a senior who will study at the University of St. Andrews, has always felt drawn to a particular major. Anne said, “since I was 12 years old, I knew astrophysics was what I wanted to do. When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut, so I’ve always loved space. But I found out more about Astrophysics a lot through watching videos on YouTube and social media and learning more on my own time, cause that wasn’t really a topic that was explored in school at that point.”
Astrophysics is a complex topic, but Herb helped put it simply, “we’re studying the universe galaxies, star clusters, like how everything functions. We’re also thinking about forces and gravitational pulls and all the physics terms that you would use; it’s all just in space.”
Herb plans to become a researcher after college, but her major also allows her to follow several different careers like financing and computer science. Herb described the diverse options as “one of the big advantages of studying physics, yes, it’s a lot of time in school, but after I can go wherever I want to go and pursue whatever I want to do.”
While deciding majors can be difficult, Herb advised Prep students to “pursue your passions” when making a decision.
