Discover Your Discipline With Taylor's Pre-Major Track

The Pre-Major Track

At Taylor, there’s a place for students with undeclared majors. With nearly 20% of our students entering college undeclared, you are not alone in your journey to understand your vocation—you are surrounded by people cheering you on and dedicated to helping you pursue your passions through our pre-major program. 

Pre-major students are able to take their time searching, because they are not required to declare a major until their junior year. In the meantime, they sample a variety of disciplines to prepare for a diverse range of career opportunities through Taylor’s liberal arts curriculum. 

Being pre-major means you get to “test drive” a variety of disciplines, so that when you do declare a major, you feel more confident about your choice. 

Undecided does not mean limited—it means a world of choices and prayerful exploration is ahead of you. 

Vocation: A Faithful Response

One way Taylor equips pre-major students for excellence is through the Calling and Career Office (CCO) and its Vocation: A Faithful Response course, taught by CCO director Jeff Aupperle. 

The class focuses on assessing students’ strengths, identifying interests, and understanding the themes of work that are rewarding to them. Students in the class encourage each other in this shared season, processing their apprehensions and their hopes for the future together. 

When it comes to declaring a major, students often get caught up in:

• Whether or not it’s their “calling” 
• Mourning all the major possibilities they said “no” to 
• Wrestling with practicality vs. passion in their work. 

“Some of that (apprehension) can be caught up in how we think about calling,” Aupperle said. “Too often we think of calling as a future destination that we’re supposed to find. Calling is always in the present, it’s not something we look for in the future. Our major is just another place where we can learn about ourselves, learn about God, and learn about the work that’s meaningful to us. We try to take the pressure off as much as we can.”

Aupperle encourages students not to see their major selection as the determinant of their life’s work, but rather a place to start. He believes there is a misconception that declaring a major puts you in a box, limiting your options and “locking you in” for life. 

“(College) is not a treasure map, where there’s this ‘X’ that’s the ‘calling’ and we have to do all the right things in order to find it,” Aupperle said. “Instead, college is just a grand laboratory, where we get to test that through the classes we are taking, experiences we have outside the classroom like internships, job shadowing, and connections with alumni … Try as many things as you can to affirm the kind of work you want to do after graduation.” 

The Calling and Career Office

Want a head start on setting your career trajectory? Want to learn more about what “calling” really is and if you’re pursuing it in the present? If you are interested in Pre-Major at Taylor University and the Vocation: A Faithful Response course, the Calling and Career Office is ready to connect with you. For more details about the Pre-Major program, click here.