Education: Declaring a Major

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Recent discussions among some of my acquaintances about the hoops they had to go through to proceed with a course of study have reminded me of the amusing story of when I declared a major as an undergraduate. I had behaved for most of my early undergraduate career as a chemistry major. However, the reality of the need for a PhD in order to be taken seriously in the field, and the realization that a surprising number of my graduate student teaching assistants in chemistry courses were miserable--not a common thing at a sunny California university--caused me to reconsider. (One teaching assistant of a lab course even committed suicide while I was in his section, which made that course pretty hard to complete with any enthusiasm.)

Toward the end of my sophomore year, I finally decided to declare chemical engineering as a major, while taking only the introductory course to the field. At the time, the department's policy was that all students wishing to declare the major had to meet with the department chairman. That year, Dr. Gerald G. Fuller was serving as chairman, so I arranged a meeting with him. I was instructed to bring my transcript.

Upon being invited into his office, the man that I would eventually come to know as Gerry (it was a small department) requested my transcript and then asked some banal question about my experience at the university. As I tried to give a reasonable answer, he started to peruse my transcript. After about twenty seconds, he held it up in front of his face, seemingly to get a closer view. When I paused in my answer, he moved his head to the side and asked another banal question I do not remember, then returned his head to my transcript. When I finished answering his second question, he put the transcript down on his desk, looked me in the eye, and said:

"You're going to be successful in this major."

I never asked him what he was looking for on my transcript. At the time I was borderline offended that he reached that conclusion apparently based on what he saw on a piece of paper, rather than any real knowledge of my capabilities or enthusiasm for the material. Perhaps he was at least in part seeing how I would react to his attention being somewhere other than on what I was saying, even if it was focused in some sense on me.

In any event, for an instant at least, I had been given a vote of confidence in a field about which I still knew very little. That's something any declaring student could use, and made the "obstacle" of having to meet with the department head not much of an obstacle at all.