Sometimes, making a decision about what to major in at Wellesley is the art of the unexpected.

Take Erika Liu ’15, who double majored in peace and justice studies and French cultural studies. She says she fell into her majors by accident. “I just took intro to peace and justice studies because it fit my schedule,” she recalls. It was at the time of the Arab Spring anti-government protests in the Middle East and North Africa, and Liu found herself immersed in learning about the world beyond the College.

She had taken French in high school, so at Wellesley, she tried German instead. “I did so horribly in German that I ended up going back to French,” she says. Her junior year, she went to Senegal, drawn by her interest in studying political turnover, peaceful or otherwise, in Francophone Africa. “I took all of my classes in French and realized that I had basically completed almost all of my French requirements unwittingly,” she says.

Back on campus, Liu asked the French department if it was too late to declare a major. “It wasn’t, so I ended up double majoring kind of last minute. It’s something I bring up all the time. I’m currently in business school at Columbia, and I don’t have any business background. I love telling people, ‘You know, I majored in peace and justice studies and French,’” she says. “Having a nontraditional background adds a different dimension to management and business school discussions.”

On her way to both an M.B.A. and an M.P.H. and with a job in hand as a summer consultant at BCG, a strategic consulting company, Liu says that one of the best things about her Wellesley experience was that she could “just kind of fall my way into two amazing majors that really changed my life. I had great major advisors, and I found my undergrad experience very rewarding. Everything turns out OK in the end, even if you choose a not very conventional major. I got an intellectual experience out of it.”

After Wellesley, Liu worked in issues management for international nonprofits through APCO Worldwide. “I’m more focused on health care now. My last job pre-business school was at a pharmaceutical company working on policy issues.”

Liu’s path may not have been conventional, but it’s one that Jennifer Pollard, Lulu Chow Wang ’66 Executive Director and Associate Provost of Career Education, applauds.

“We really feel strongly about the value of a liberal arts education,” she says. “The more we see the economy shift and change at a rapid pace, the more those liberal arts skills are the ones employers turn to. They’re going to have to train their workforce constantly anyway, so they would rather pick the learners, the intellectuals, the collaborators, the good public speakers, who are going to be able to upskill and retrain constantly. Those ‘soft’ skills are almost impossible to train for. So let academia and an incredible faculty and all the support here bring up those types of employees.”

Career Education advisors interact with students from the beginning, Pollard says, kicking off with Embark, a first-year retreat, where students start their career exploration journey. “Now, you’re not picking your future today, right? You are picking courses and majors that you are curious about and you’re interested in,” she says. “And no matter where you get to with your career aspirations, junior and senior year, we will help you get the internships and the opportunities for research and hands-on learning that translate that major to whatever career you want.”

Advisors work with students throughout their four years at the College, encouraging, questioning, and learning. “We’re not trying to sit here and edit résumé bullets to death to try to fit them into a traditional career path,” says Pollard. “We’re trying to help them become the best version of themselves. The career parts will come by senior year, and our outcomes show that.” (See “Class of 2023 First Destination Survey.” The knowledge rate, or the percentage of graduates whose outcome data was verified, for this year’s survey was 90%—an all-time high.)

Pollard cites the class of 2023 as a good example of how a liberal arts background helps students once they are out in the world. “We had all these students who have been aspiring to enter the tech field, then suddenly we are seeing Amazon, Google, and other companies starting to freeze their hiring,” she says. “But we saw our students quickly pivot and realize, ‘Well, I could do this job in health care or life sciences. I might get into tech some place later in my career, or I might not.’ They found parallel paths—and that’s a liberal arts degree.”

Finding Balance

Provost and Lia Gelin Poorvu ’56 Dean of the College Andrew Shennan has watched students’ academic pursuits evolve since he joined the faculty in 1988 to teach history. As he prepares to step down from his role as provost, he has been reflecting on the rise in student interest in STEM majors.

“When I came to the College, it felt like science was a subculture. Most students did as little as they could get away with. Since 2008, there’s been a pronounced trend in the other direction,” Shennan says.

Recent data indicate that more than 50% of Wellesley students had at least one major in a STEM field, while the number with at least one humanities major was around 30%. But Shennan doesn’t think this means the sky is falling for the humanities. He says, “What we have done is achieve a kind of balance, a good balance, among the three discipline areas—humanities, social sciences, and STEM—that we hadn’t had before.” And partly because he’s a historian, he continues, he believes it’s important for the College to maintain its long-standing strength in humanities and not get too caught up in trends. “Student interests have always changed. That’s the way the world is. But if you overreact, it’s easy to lose your bearings as an institution.”

Shennan says the Career Education approach to working with students is helping the College maintain that balance. “They have done a wonderful job of not encouraging a very narrow mindset,” he says. “I think a major is just a label at the top of the transcript. In most cases, people want to look at what skills you have, what areas you’ve studied, and go into the detail, the content, of the transcript, not just that one line at the top.”

Shennan’s perspective on the value of a liberal arts approach to undergraduate education was influenced by his own education in Great Britain, where he was required to choose his career path at age 14. But U.S. colleges like Wellesley aim to broaden students’ horizons before they have to make choices. “It’s such a forgiving system, because it allows someone to think that they want to major in something and then discover something else. It’s taking a long view of education. It really is for a lifetime,” he says.

With more than 50 departmental and interdepartmental majors—and the opportunity to create one’s own—Wellesley offers a panoply of choices. Students get a lot of support along the way, says Maryellen Kiley, associate dean of students for academic integration and advising. From the moment first-years are welcomed at orientation, they are greeted by their first-year dean and connected with a faculty advisor: “We tell them, ‘You’re at a liberal arts institution, and we want to have you explore and really dig deep into what your interests are and what that content area might be.’ Some of those conversations are, ‘What do you love doing? What excites you about going to class?’”

Kiley remembers seeing three first-years sitting together after attending a panel on the meaning of the liberal arts. She stopped to ask if they were all right. “They said, ‘Yes, we’re, like, just overwhelmed. We selected our courses [after orientation] three weeks ago, and then we just experienced this presentation. And now we want to go back and change all of our classes.’ I said, ‘That’s the whole point of this presentation.’”

Planning and Pivoting

Alexandra Mouangue ’24 arrived at Wellesley with a plan. “I came onto campus wanting to be an international relations and economics major,” she says. She had attended a high school with a powerful econ department and says, “I had a really good foundation.”

Her pull toward international relations stemmed from her own life. “I’m an immigrant, so I’ve always had an interest in international affairs,” she says. Mouangue is from Cameroon and came to the United States with her family when she was 8. “But the biggest motivation was me wanting to have a major that would lead to a career that was financially secure. I have gone through a lot of instability in that aspect of my life, and I did not want to put myself in that position as an adult.”

But as she explored other classes at Wellesley, she started to alter her plan. She took PSYC 101: Introduction to Psychology with Kyra Kulik-Johnson, senior lecturer in psychology, and fell in love with the subject material. “I was like, ‘Yeah, I need to major in this. This is what I want to do,’” she says.

She applied to the Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program, which is for underrepresented students. Its scholars receive summer research funding, attend workshops on graduate admissions and funding, receive GRE training and personal and academic counseling, network with faculty mentors, and attend and present at national and regional conferences. “I wasn’t sure that I was going to go to graduate school, and the program helps you sort through those questions,” she says. Everything clicked, and in 2020, Mouangue was a named author on a paper, “Trait irritability and temporal discounting: Exploring potential sociocultural moderators,” in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, with Christen Deveney, James W. and Patricia T. Poitras DS ’91 Associate Professor in the Natural Sciences and associate professor of psychology, and others.

“I don’t think I would have gotten as far as I have if it wasn’t for McNair,” Mouangue says.

A psychology major and economics minor, Mouangue is writing a thesis on how social class and access or experience with resource unpredictability influence decision-making patterns about money. After graduation, she’ll be working at Drexel University, coordinating a research study on mindfulness and acceptance-based technological therapies for binge eating disorders.

Mouangue says she’s still making the case to her family that psychology will be a good choice for her future. “I could become a clinical psychologist, go into academia, or work in private practice as a therapist, or I could work in clinics and hospitals or residential facilities,” she says. “I’m not really sure where I’ll end up yet, but I know I do want to work with people while still maintaining the research aspect, because I love doing research.”

What would she tell her first-year self from the perspective of her senior year? “I would tell her to put down the plan and just take classes that are interesting, to follow her curiosity,” Mouangue says.

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Essential Skills

Yoon Sun Lee, Anne Pierce Rogers Professor in American Literature and professor of English, as well as chair of the Department of English and Creative Writing, has witnessed changes in trends relating to majors in her nearly three decades at the College. “We are a smaller department than we used to be,” she says, but they haven’t seen the precipitous decline in majors that some large universities have.

She sees several reasons for the department’s persistence. “Part is that Wellesley just has a tradition of having a strong English department with a lot of majors,” she says. English majors are still among the most numerous at Wellesley; in the class of 2023, English is the seventh most popular major.

When students approach her for advice about declaring an English major, she encourages them, if it speaks to them. “It’s about engagement and about wanting to think about literature in a rigorous and sustained way,” she says. She also talks about the practicality of the discipline. “You can do anything with an English major. It gives you excellent analytical skills and excellent communication skills, and these are increasingly important to employers, even more so now in the age of AI. People need to think in a way that is both creative and analytical, and that’s what we do.”

Lequinn Pettway ’25 matched with Wellesley through the QuestBridge program and as a sophomore committed to a double major in English and anthropology. English was an emotional as well as a practical choice, she says. “I started thinking, ‘What if I didn’t have an English class in my schedule?’ and I just couldn’t bear the thought of that. I was like, ‘I need to take English every single semester until I graduate,’” she says.

Pettway says anthropology appeals to her as a way to look at the world. “The disciplines work really well together in powerful ways,” she says.

One possibility for her future is journalism. “I have the writing skills in the house, I have the anthropological approach, I like interacting with people. I really, really want to learn other people’s stories,” she says, “the forgotten, erased, and untold stories.” For the moment, she’s busy as a member of the Shakespeare Society, where she is stage manager for this spring’s production of Julius Caesar.

“Since I declared my double major, I feel certain and so confident that this was the right choice. I’m so happy,” Pettway says.

Anthropology captured the imagination of Georgia Oppenheim ’20 as well. A double major in chemistry and anthropology, Oppenheim is a Ph.D. candidate in biological anthropology at the University of Michigan.

“When I got to Wellesley, I signed up for chemistry right away, because it was something I loved,” she says. “I knew I might do pre-med, and chemistry was going to be my major.” One semester, she was deciding between a calculus course and an intro to anthropology course. She says, “I was like, ‘Well, I took an archaeology class in high school, and I thought it was cool.’ So I tried it out, and it changed my life.” She laughs. “It’s so dramatic, right?”

Oppenheim studied in Kenya the summer after sophomore year. “I got to do the hands-on research I’d always wanted to do,” she says. The project involved excavating at a site that is 1.8 million years old. “It’s one of the earliest hominin fire sites in the archaeological record,” she says. Her research examined how phytoliths, microscopic plant particles in the sediment, changed due to fire conditions—and that involved chemistry.

“What also really tied me to anthropology was the idea that we can ask questions about material culture and our human past through chemistry—we can kind of provide a voice to objects that can’t speak,” she says.

At Wellesley, Oppenheim studied with Megan Núñez, Nan Walsh Schow ’54 and Howard B. Schow Professor in the Physical and Natural Sciences, professor of chemistry, and dean of faculty affairs, and they have kept in touch about what Núñez calls the “very cool things” Oppenheim is doing.

Graduate school has its challenges, Oppenheim says, but she adds, “The thing that really keeps me going is my Wellesley experience, the professors believing in me—Prof. Núñez being so excited and saying, ‘You can do the special thing. You can do it. Just keep exploring.’”