I am a college freshman and am trying to decide what courses to take/what to major in. I do not want to transfer into the business school because I believe in receiving a liberal arts degree and I prefer to learn life-long skills such as critical thinking that can be applied to any job rather than specialize in business. What courses or majors would you recommend that would benefit me in a multitude of fields? What kind of classes do business hirers want from an employer?
Higher Education (University +) - 3 Answers
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1
The most useful general courses are English composition, accounting, and American history, which usually teaches critical thinking skills. You need to select a career specialty such as a science, for example. Or you need to major in business and take enough liberal arts classes as electives so that you can receive a liberal arts education as well. It is very possible to do both simultaneously. You were very intelligent to ask this question. Unfortunately, graduating with a liberal arts degree is a likely path to the unemployment line unless you plan to go on to law school or another professional school, including those for the health care professions. Law and medical schools accept students with any academic major. Medical schools post on their websites lists of pre-med classes which must be completed. Law schools have no specific course requirements for admission.
2
My sister took many finance and marketing courses on her way to a business degree at a liberal arts college where every student was required to fulfill a basic liberal arts curriculum. She did not care for the liberal arts at all, but she mastered the subject matter well enough. She really didn't utilize her critical thinking skills until she moved to NYC and began working for IBM. Living on your own in New York with actual job responsibilities and a boss who could fire you for not meeting your sales targets and/or who could hold you back from better opportunities in the company for failing to contribute new ideas for business development, tends to bring out the best in a person including his or her critical thinking skills. I now think that the two high school courses I took in Art History with a fussbudget Harvard-educated Brahmin who had a pronounced cultural superiority complex was the best thing that ever happened to me in terms of critical thinking skills. I didn't realize it for the longest time, but that's where I was first compelled to offer critical judgments and articulate them and defend them or get flunked. That's a universally valuable experience in my opinion. Take care.
3
I do agree with your desire to get a liberal arts degree. However, what that means is that you're seeking a degree that is based on developing your critical thinking and problem solving skills rather than your practical skills. So it isn't really appropriate to ask what courses or majors would help you in business. There is no real answer. Any business who understand the value of liberal arts simply wants you to be well-rounded, and want you to be able to evaluate choices intelligently and develop solutions, thinking independently. The original ideal of liberal arts colleges was to teach those skills that are uniformly necessary for living in a free society. Hopefully, every major in the liberal arts would teach that. Unfortunately, in today's world, that's not entirely true. Many liberal arts curriculums have become nothing but teaching of random facts or sometimes worse, just teaching students to mimic the professors' opinions. I'll suggest some majors that typically do offer you good thinking skill development. You can decide for yourself if any of these majors are for you: philosophy, economics, chemistry, physics, and music theory. You might also do well in a foreign language, or in linguistics generally, if you have skill in that area. Beyond that most important skill set that is hard for employers to evaluate effectively, they also want a few other things that you can take through a series of individual elective courses. First, they want quantitative skills: math, accounting, finance, statistics. Second they want communication skills: Public speaking, drama, composition, creative writing, journalism, languages. Third, they want an understanding of how they operate and the world they operate in: economics, marketing, psychology, management, sociology, political science, law. If you can put all that together, you'll be widely desired in the business world, and there's absolutely no reason why you would need to major in business (though taking one or two business classes at some point would probably be helpful). In fact, I think many businesses would prefer this well-rounded approach if you do it right.
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