Why Your Major Doesn't Tell the Whole Story

"What's your major?" is how we sort each other on campus. It's the first question at every mixer, the label on every mental filing cabinet, the shorthand we use to decide, in about two seconds, who someone is and whether we have anything in common. It's a fine icebreaker and a terrible summary.

One label, a whole person behind it

A major tells you exactly one thing: what someone is formally studying. It doesn't tell you what they're good at, what fascinates them, what they've already done, what they're building right now, or what they want to do next. It captures a course of study and nothing about the person taking it. And yet we routinely let it stand in for all of those things, quietly deciding that a biology major and a business major have little to discuss before either has said a second sentence.

Consider a few of the people that single label erases. The computer science student who writes poetry at two in the morning. The biology major running a small clothing brand from a dorm room. The English student who designs better than most people who call themselves designers. The history major teaching herself machine learning for fun. None of that fits on a department roster, and all of it is exactly the part that makes someone worth knowing. People are almost always wider than their transcript — usually far wider than the version of themselves a major implies.

Here's a self-contained way to think about it: a major describes the path a student is on, not the person walking it. Two students in the same program can be almost nothing alike — different skills, different ambitions, different projects, different reasons for being there — while two students in wildly different programs can be near-perfect collaborators. Sorting people by major optimizes for the least interesting thing they have in common and hides everything that would actually make a connection worthwhile. If you want to know whether you should meet someone, their department is one of the weakest possible signals.

Why it matters for who you meet

This isn't just a philosophical point about labels — it has a real cost in who you end up knowing. When we reduce people to a major, we miss most of the genuine reasons to connect. The best collaborations tend to come from unexpected combinations: a coder and a storyteller, an economist and an artist, a scientist and someone who can explain things to normal people. A department list would never put those pairs together. It's built to separate them.

A richer picture of a person is simply more useful. Skills tell you what someone can do. Interests tell you what they'll happily talk about for an hour. Goals tell you where they're headed and whether your paths might help each other. Experience tells you what they've actually pulled off. Availability tells you whether now is even the right time to reach out. Any one of these is a stronger reason to connect than a shared major — and together they describe a person a major never could.

There's a flip side to all this that's easy to overlook: the major is a bad summary of you, too. If the only thing people can see is your department, then the only reasons they'll ever have to seek you out are department-shaped. The photography you're good at, the app you shipped, the cause you care about, the thing you're trying to learn — none of it is visible, so none of it can bring the right people to you. You end up findable only for the one label you happen to share with a few hundred classmates, and invisible for everything that actually makes you worth finding.

This is why the fix isn't just about looking past other people's majors — it's about showing more of your own self so others can look past yours. A major is what a form needs to file you. It says nothing about the projects on your laptop, the skills you've built outside of class, or the kind of work that would make you say yes without hesitating. Those are the things that turn a stranger into a collaborator, and they're exactly the things no course catalog will ever record.

That's why Paxuni is built around the whole person: skills, interests, goals, experience, availability, and what someone's actually working on — not just the department they happen to be filed under. The idea is to let people be found for the reasons that actually matter.

Your major is a starting point, not a summary.

The more of yourself you can show, the more reasons other people have to find you — and the more interesting the people who do. A transcript makes you sortable. Everything else makes you worth meeting. So when someone asks what your major is, answer it and then keep going. The interesting part of you starts right after the word they were expecting.