Identifying Study Areas
So you have this list from the last lesson with your top interests, academic and others. The next step is to identify study areas that are related to your interests.
Slide 1: How to Choose a Program/Major
Lesson 2: Identifying Related Study Areas
All right. So let's move on to Lesson Two of How to Choose a Program, which is identifying related study areas. So you have this list from the last lesson with your top interests, academic and others. The next step is to identify study areas that are related to your interests. You might think this would be really simple and straightforward for academic-related interests; that if you like chemistry, you will look at chemistry programs, for instance. However, there are a number of related study areas for many different academic interests. For instance, chemistry could include, of course, chemistry, but would also include pharmacy, biochemistry, chemical engineering, integrated science programs, and chemical technology, just to name a few.
So we're going to walk through the stage together. We’re going to use an example from a member who is a freshman and does not have a clear academic interest area yet, which is totally fine. It's still early in the game.
Slide 2: Ellie’s List
All of these (except animals) fall under cultures, media, or arts
- Musical theater – watching
- Social media – pictures, Instagram
- Writing
- Animals – dogs, recently elephants
- International travel
- Pop culture – including other countries
- Reading – fiction, mostly modern day, some set in other countries
- Reality competition shows – cooking, top chefs, etc.
So here's an example list based on Ellie's answers to the action steps in Lesson One. You'll see we don't have a lot of academic interest stuff on here. A lot of that's because she just started high school. But unfortunately, even if you've been in high school for a while, it might be that you have not been inspired in the classroom as of yet. And that's fine, we can still work with it. What we want to do is make sure that you have specifics added to your short list of interests. So for instance, social media, she really enjoys things that have to do with pictures like Snapchat and instagram.. She prefers creative writing — I didn't put that up there — rather than structured. She really likes dogs. And she recently watched this documentary called Love & Bananas about elephant sanctuaries in Thailand, which got her pretty interested in that area.
So anyway, as you can see, we just put these different specifics around her interests. So all of these, except for animals, fall under the areas of culture, media, or the arts. So you want to categorize your interests and see what categories they fall into. So animals, I happen to know that though she loves animals, it's not a huge area of focus. You'll know that for yourself too. If you have an outlier category that really is one of your passions, totally include it. But we're going to be looking at programs that fall under or related to cultures, media, or the arts for Ellie.
Slide 3: Related Study Areas
- Anthropology
- Area and Cultural Studies
- Arts and Entertainment Management
- Arts Related Studies
- Communications and Media Studies
- Developmental Studies
- Digital Arts
- Film/Video Arts
- Interactive Media
- Journalism
- Multimedia Design
- Sales and Marketing
So how we're going to do this is we're going to look at — we're going to work backwards from the database to create a search. So you'll find on an action step a list of every specific area of study we have in the database. So what I want you to do is go through that list, and circle or write down every one that is remotely related to your list of categories. A lot of these might be words you aren't familiar with. I can tell you,, there were so many things I've never heard of either, and Google is your friend here. So don't worry about whether the Google definition of the field of study sounds interesting, just whether it's aligned with your interests.
So for instance, a Wikipedia definition of Anthropology is that it's the study of humans and human behavior and societies in the past and present. Social Anthropology and Cultural Anthropology study the norms and values of societies. Linguistic Anthropology studies how language affects social life. So that's a little bit dry and vague, and really won’t inspire me. However, we see that it's related to cultures. That's one of the areas that we're looking for, so we add it to the list.
So this is what we came up with for Ellie's related areas of study.
Slide 4: Ellie’s List
All of these (except animals) fall under cultures, media, or arts
- Musical theater – watching
- Social media – pictures, Instagram for BTS
- Writing
- Animals – dogs, recently elephants
- International travel
- Pop culture – including other countries
- Reading – fiction, mostly modern day, some set in other countries
- Reality competition shows – cooking, top chefs, etc.
You know, as we can see, they were these. They were musical theater, social media, writing, international travel, pop culture, reading, and certain types of television shows that all fall under cultures, media or the arts.
Slide 5: Related Study Areas
- Anthropology
- Area and Cultural Studies
- Arts and Entertainment Management
- Arts Related Studies
- Communications and Media Studies
- Developmental Studies
- Digital Arts
- Film/Video Arts
- Interactive Media
- Journalism
- Multimedia Design
- Sales and Marketing
And so now, we have these related study areas for her to start to investigate. So now that we have this starting point, we want to look into what these programs really are and if they seem interesting to you or not. So you know, before, in this last step, we were just looking at whether or not they're related to your interest areas. Now we want to see if it actually is of interest to you. So we're going to do that by doing specific searches for the areas we identified above. So I want you to go to the database and do a search with the only criteria of that specific area of study. Don't worry about tuition, don't worry about country. None of that. We're not looking for specific programs for you to apply to, we're just trying to identify whether this is an area of interest.
So I can tell you that some schools and some countries are just better at writing up their descriptions in an engaging way. Northern Europe usually has more compelling descriptions than others so you might want to start there if you have several on your search. But just remember that keeping a related study area on the list here, not disqualifying it, doesn't mean you're choosing that area of study. It just means that it's worth looking into further.
So again, so you're going to go into the database, and do the search for each category. Okay. So we're going to walk through this again. So when we go through Ellie’s and we go to the specific area of study for Anthropology, she sees one program that notes that this can include the development of video production. So she's not sure if that's indicative of the field as a whole or of this particular program. But it looks pretty interesting so she's going to keep it on the list. She goes down to Area and Cultural Studies and she sees that these are mostly about specific areas. European Studies, for instance, or Asian Studies, things like that, and there is not one particular culture that she's really interested in. And it also seems to have more of a political science spin which she's not interested in. Same with Developmental Studies. So she crosses those off her list.
When she gets to Arts and Entertainment Management, she sees some programs that talk a lot about economics. And it might be fine, might not. She doesn't know much about economics. But since that's her only area of concern, and other parts and descriptions look interesting, she's going to keep it on the list for now, and she's going to check in with a family member who works in this area to see if he can give her sort of a concise definition, an understandable definition of economics.
So then she gets to Communications and Media Studies, and there is a lot here that appeals to her. There's a lot about media and culture. The Media Studies programs seem to appeal more than Communications. She doesn't have to worry about all that now, she just knows she's keeping it on the list. For Digital Arts and Interactive Media and Multimedia Design, they are too sort of tech and too computery for her, so she crosses those off the list. Film and Video Arts, though she enjoys those things, she sees that these programs are very focused on that — kind of a singular focus, and too focused for her, unless that interest develops down the road. So for now, she is crossing that off.
When she searches Journalism, the ones that look interesting to her are already listed in the Media Studies section, so she's crossing that off. Sales and Marketing, she's keeping that on, but really being clear that it is only social media marketing that is interesting to her.
Slide 6: General Study Areas
- Social Sciences – Anthropology
- Business – Arts and Entertainment Management, Sales and Marketing
- Humanities – Arts related studies
- Communications – Communications and Media Studies
So she has this shorter list now of things to look into more. The next thing she's going to do, those areas that are still on her list that she didn't cross off, she wants to find out the general study area that's connected to that. Every program in the database has at least one general area of study attached to it, as well as a specific area of study. So she sees that Anthropology falls under Social Sciences. Arts and Entertainment Management and Sales and Marketing, both fall under Business, and so on.
So what she's going to do is she's going to do a search just like she did for the specific areas. Instead, just for the general area of study and just do a quick search to see if there's any program name that catches your eye. So now, from your list of interests, you have a list of corresponding study areas. And you've gone through the first step of weeding through these possibilities, sort of the surface level weeding through.
In the next lesson, we're going to go deeper and look into what these study programs involve, as well as what they lead to after graduation. So I will see you then.