5 BENEFITS OF DECLARING A COLLEGE MINOR

Declaring a College Minor Benefits

• Personal Interests
• Improve Your Future Outlook
• Broaden Your Skills
• Become More Diverse
• Double Major

Though students know that they need to declare a major, many do not realize the benefits of declaring college minors while in school. Declaring a minor is a great way to take classes from a different department that will complement the degree that you earn or to take classes that interest you. Many colleges give students the chance to minor in one or more areas.

Personal Interests

The biggest benefit of declaring a minor is that it gives you the chance to study things that interest you on a personal level, even though those things may not relate to your future career. You may have an interest in creative writing but major in business and plan on going to business school later. Choosing a minor in creative writing lets you take classes to improve your writing skills. Those classes also give you a creative outlet for the ideas bouncing around in your head.

Improve Your Future Outlook

Choosing the right minor can improve your future outlook too. According to the Huffington Post, some college minors can give you a leg up on the competition and make your resume look better. If you want to major in journalism and write for a leading magazine or newspaper one day, you need to pick a minor that shows you have experience in another area. As publications across the country shut down, the need for journalism major keeps dropping. Those finding success in this field are those who minor in another field or select a double major. With a computer science major, you can show employers that you have a strong understanding of technology and technical subjects.

Broaden Your Skills

The problem with picking a major and only taking classes within that major is that you learn how to do things in a specific way. You'll find that all the professors working in that department expect you to use the same methods for citing resources in papers and writing papers for your classes. When you get in the real world though, you may find that employers want you to do those same things in different ways. The classes you take in your minor field can help you broaden your skills and learn that there are different ways to accomplish the same things.

Related: 50 Best Online Colleges and Universities 2017

Become More Diverse

One benefit of picking a minor while in college is that it lets you become more diverse. You can learn the skills and develop the traits that employers actually look for in new workers. You might declare a minor in the same foreign language that you studied in high school. This gives you the chance to take classes that improve your reading comprehension of that language as well as your speaking skills, which may you more in demand.

Double Major

You should always look at the course requirements when enrolling in a college degree program to get an idea of how a minor compares to a double major. Many schools require that you take general education courses and/or liberal arts classes in addition to electives and courses from your major. Some schools only require that you take six to 12 credits in a field to declare a minor in that subject. Instead of picking multiple minors, you can often take just a few more classes to double major in two fields of study without spending any more time in school.

When you go to college, you can study almost any subject you find interesting. After picking a major, you should look at some of the benefits of college minors, like how declaring one can broaden your skills and help you become more diverse.