As if picking a major wasn’t pressure enough, a good chunk of students will be faced with a second hurdle of choosing a minor. Despite the name, it can be a major addition to an undergraduate college education, but it could also be an inconsequential blip on a transcript.

The most distinguishing feature between a major and a minor is the number of credit hours necessary to complete them. 

At the University, minors are at least 16 credit hours but no more than 21, which translates to roughly 5-7 semester-long courses. Majors, on the other hand, range anywhere from 30 major-specific courses up to as many as 100 hours of foundational, core and major-related elective courses.

Graduating without a minor is entirely possible, but acquiring one doesn’t cost extra money. Many majors in LAS require supporting coursework, which generally require the student to select courses that are not in the selected major course of study but somehow contribute a focused and related selection of classes.

Some academic advising departments will suggest supporting coursework that will compliment the student’s major, whether that’s an anthropology minor for a history major or a chemistry minor for an integrative biology major. However, a minor can serve as a counterpart to a major to diversify a student’s academic record. A chemical engineering student with a food science minor now seems all the more attractive to a food production company looking to create the next Easy Mac or Uncle Ben’s microwaveable rice.

By many, minors are viewed as a desired and often necessary component of a successful undergraduate education. The minor offers a student flexibility in preparation for a workplace that demands more and more of its new hires.

Even in graduate school admissions, a minor can demonstrate a greater commitment to a program by showcasing a student’s capability to learn subjects with focus and depth. Students across the country can only show so much of who they are and what they did during their time as an undergraduate, and a minor can be just the ticket to earning an admissions letter.

But that’s not to say a minor is all that good. The programs generally require half (and sometimes far less than that) of the courses that are necessary for the completion of an undergraduate major. When only half of the courses are needed, only half as much material is learned in say a political science minor versus major.

It’s important to note that a minor does not necessarily represent a mastery of a given subject. For example, completing a Spanish minor does not guarantee a fluency or even a proficiency, for that matter, in the language. Employers are seeing a new hire’s command of the language, not a A-minus average in Spanish courses, where the student has little to no ability to speak the language.

Minors can be extremely limiting to a student’s selection of classes. If both a major and a minor are pursued in tandem with completing basic general education classes, the time that a student has to branch out and explore other subjects and courses becomes severely limited. Quality and depth in an education can be just as important as breadth, which exposes a student to ideas and modes of thinking that would not be found in other areas. It’s no secret that a gender and women’s studies class will be conducted in a frame of thinking far different from an electrical engineering course, but that difference can be the key to unlocking a student’s creative potential.

Creativity, whether it regards artistry or ingenuity, is a key component to a student’s academics and future success in a career. On a graduate school or job application, it might be somewhat challenging to represent the kind of creativity garnered from a diverse course load, but it is something that will be front and center when it comes to promotions or recommendation letters from advisers and professors.

A study recently released by the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, commissioned in 2010 as a bipartisan look into the United States’ state of education, argues that the humanities and social sciences are critical for the advancement and economic well-being of the country. In the wake of several years of policymakers and school administrators fearing that the U.S. is losing ground to countries like China and India in science, technology, engineering and math fields, the study of humanities and social sciences has started to fall.

But without the complement of STEM fields with humanities and social sciences, students can lack the modes of expression and creativity needed to fully exploit the knowledge gained in a STEM-focused education. As such a minor can provide the humanities or social science student with some statistical savvy, and an engineering student can counterbalance his mathematical prowess with an economics minor.

Certainly, a minor is not the only way to gain expertise in a field outside of a major. Other options include double majors or developing individual tracks of study, both which can be pursued at the University.

By seeking help from an adviser or simply following intuition, a student at the University can develop a track of study that is both beneficial to the student and appealing to an employer or graduate school.

Ryan is a senior in LAS. He had be reached at [email protected].