At Marquette, a major is a comprehensive course of study consisting of a minimum of 30 semester hours in a chosen discipline. Put simply, it's a specialization in academic achievement. When you graduate from Marquette, this is the one area in which you will be most proficient. An expert, if you will.
But how do you pick just one area of specialization? That's the hard part. Marquette offers more than 80 majors. Some students have known what they wanted to do since kindergarten. For others, it takes a little time.
Depending on your focus, you might face several paths after graduation. Some of our students head to graduate or professional school. Others take the skills they have learned into the working world. A great service available to students who want to learn more about where their career path could lead is our Career Center located in our Lemonis Center for Student Success. This is a place where students can meet with advisers to talk about their next steps.
You also may choose to pursue a minor (or two). Minors typically consist of six courses focused on an area of interest outside your major. Minors can add breadth to your area of expertise, and at Marquette, we encourage pairing your major with a minor. In a few of our majors, you also can pursue a concentration, which is a cluster of focused courses within the major.
Not sure what major to study? We prefer to consider you multi-interested. It's not that you haven't a clue. It's that you can see yourself in several different fields. That's great. In fact, multi-interested is our most popular major. The most important thing to note is that you're not alone. More than 20% of our students enter as undecided. Once you're here, you'll find advisers and services prepared to help you figure out what you want to do.
Perhaps our best tool for the multi-interested student is the Marquette Core Curriculum, or MCC. The MCC is the center of every student’s educational experience, and it can be extremely helpful for discovering academic areas of interest. The learning outcomes of the MCC are rooted in Jesuit perspective and values. The intent is to focus on shaping students who communicate responsibly and ethically, engage the world as moral actors and citizens with purpose, collaborate with diverse others using a broad disciplinary focus, and become leaders in discovery to solve global problems.
Marquette offers countless combinations of majors and minors. With all of the options, you'll be able to pursue the best academic program for you.
