As millions of recent Chinese high school graduates prepare to start their first year of university, some incoming freshmen are a bit dismayed by the lack of suitable majors to choose from.
According to Wu Jingyi, director of academic affairs at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, approximately 30 percent of its students reported disliking their majors.
In fact, it is a common and widespread phenomenon at most Chinese universities that students tend to sacrifice their personal interests in order to get accepted by a better-ranked university that may not offer their first choice of majors.
As a university student myself, I know how hard it is to change majors at a Chinese university. Most institutions of higher learning in China have very strict requirements about switching majors.
Generally, only the school's top-scoring 5 or 10 percent are able to gain the right qualifications to do so. The rest of us "average" students are stuck with whatever we first enrolled in.
Meanwhile, the more student-friendly Western university system allows students to change their majors at every whim at any time.
One of my Chinese friends studying at a U.S. university told me that the first two years are spent attending core courses (i.e. English and math and history) in order to have time to learn more about which fields they may eventually become interested in.
By their junior year, they will decide on a major to pursue. But even if a third- or fourth-year student at a U.S. university decides to switch majors at the last moment, it's quite easy for them.
She feels very lucky that she was offered more opportunities to freely explore her true interests while "discovering" herself.
Pretty much all freshmen, foreign and Chinese alike, enter college confused and uncertain about the long life ahead of them. But by their junior or senior year, once they've got all their experimentations and anxieties out of their systems, most students know who they are and what they want to do.
Meanwhile in China, our overly rigid university structure is set up to give students less, not more, flexibility. Chinese universities are more of an extension of home that tells students exactly what to think and do rather than allow them to figure stuff out on their own.
This paternal-style authoritarianism of restricting students of freedom and responsibility actually begins at the high school level, when Chinese students are thrown into the sleepless, unending preparation of the gaokao (national college entrance examinations).
During our final few years of gaokao prep, students are stripped of all their spare time and any mental and physical energy that we otherwise would have applied to exploring and developing our own interests.
By the time we graduate, it's little wonder that most of us have no knowledge about the real world beyond what we've read in books and tests.
Thus, the decision of which major to pursue is usually influenced or wholly decided by our parents or teachers, who, unfortunately, don't have much understanding about the real world either - the world that we students will inherit by the time we graduate from university.
When I was still in high school my parents believed that majoring in English language and literature was all about appreciating and analyzing literary works, which sounds like a rather elite discipline. So that's what they decided for me.
However, after my first year of college studying English, I found out that the major includes abundant linguistics testing, which is quite boring and difficult for me personally.
I also realized that I am not so passionate about reading literature, which is a requirement. It's just too bad that I didn't know this earlier.
I think Chinese universities could learn a lot from the U.S. and other Western countries about offering students more opportunities to self-discover our personal interests and explore various disciplines before finally deciding on a major.
