Very few things are as disheartening as when someone tells you your major has less value than theirs. It’s degrading. Now, most people don’t explicitly state this. Instead, they get their point across subtly by comparing how much time they spend studying for exams, how many papers they have to write, the number of all nighters they’ve pulled in a semester, or how little sleep each night they get because of homework.

It’s hard to place a value on a major based on the time it requires because time is all relative. Theater majors spend hours in rehearsal during the weeks leading up to a show. Art majors are in the studio night after night, crafting their senior projects and masterpieces. Nursing majors dedicate their time to hours of clinical work. English majors invade the library and stay up until the wee hours of the morning, writing their literary analyses. So to say that one major requires more time than another is fairly ridiculous because all majors have demanding elements that come with them. Most people can’t accurately measure how much time people with different majors than their own put into their studies.

I’ve had people tell me that one of my majors, communication studies, is the “easy major.” Whenever I hear this, I laugh to myself because in a way, they’re not wrong. It’s easy for me because it’s a subject and field I’m good at. I have a strong interest in it, which makes studying it more enjoyable, and therefore, typically easier for me than other subjects. The same applies for other people and their major. What’s easy to some, such as math and science, might be someone else’s hardest subject. Some people excel in working with formulas and computations, but hate writing. It isn’t fair to assign one major as “easy” and another as “hard” because those words are arbitrary and relative to what someone’s strengths and weakness are.

Comparing majors results in major shaming, which attempts to rank certain majors as “better” than others. To me, it seems pointless because we all are in fields that are interesting to us – fields that we want to pursue a career in. Why dismiss someone’s major because you don’t think it’s as good as yours? Instead of comparing, it would be wiser to try to understand different majors and the craft that they are. There’s no use in trying to have the “better” major when we’re all struggling through college together, trying to figure out what we want to do with our lives. It’s not a competition.