This week, I’m updating on where I am academically as a Wellesley sophomore. Declaring your major is the major part (see what I did there) of sophomore year at Wellesley! At Wellesley, you can major, double major, or major and minor. If you plan to study abroad in your junior year, then as a sophomore you’d have to declare your major by December, and all sophomores have to declare their major by the following March.
I will major in economics and minor in statistics; I am going to declare those in the next few weeks since I’m seriously considering studying abroad in England next year. To declare a major, you need a faculty member in that department to serve as your major advisor. I believe it changes over time and depends on the department, but my econ major advisor was randomly assigned to me. For some majors, students have to ask a faculty member themselves to be their advisor. I took a summer course with the professor who’s in charge of studying statistics here, so that professor automatically became my stats minor advisor. After meeting with your advisor(s), you declare your major online and name your advisor and what classes you plan to take for your major. Then it’ll get approved and voilà, major declared!
To any prospective students reading this who have no idea what they want to study or major in: trust me, it will all click once you attend college and take classes. When I came to Wellesley, I wanted to study economics but I wasn’t totally sure about it. Around this time last year, I also thought about majoring in neuroscience. I realized in my first semester that personally neuroscience wasn’t for me, and that’s okay! Once I took a variety of classes in my first semesters, I had a clearer idea, and I first thought about majoring in data science. After researching more about Wellesley majors and their requirements, I then decided on econ and stats. With the variety of classes you take in different fields, exploration is welcome and encouraged at Wellesley. Here’s a link to the Wellesley course distribution requirements.
As for how my classes are going this semester, they’re definitely challenging, but I like them all. As a refresher, I’m taking advanced Chinese, intermediate microeconomics, multivariable calculus, and Islamic art history. I’m taking intermediate microeconomics as a required core class for my major, calculus as a prerequisite for a stats course, Chinese because I’ve been learning it since elementary school and to fulfill Wellesley’s foreign language requirement, and Islamic art history because I enjoy art history and to fulfill Wellesley’s art requirement. I already had a test for Chinese and calculus, and I have an econ midterm coming up soon. My homework so far has mostly been weekly problem sets for econ and calculus, readings for art history, and textbook problems for Chinese. What I’ve observed in college is that homework is assigned less often or on a weekly basis, but it is lengthier or more challenging.
This is a lot of information at once, but I promise that there are many resources like class deans, professors, and your peers to reach out to for help. Thank you for reading, and I’ll include photos from the past weeks!
Wellesley’s academic quad, with buildings where most classes are held
Lake Waban (1 of 30,000 lake photos in my camera roll)
Claflin Hall living room
Foggy evening
This view of Galen Stone Tower from a lake walk!