To be blunt, in this author's opinion, minors are weird. They are not as important as majors; how often does a minor come up when a great aunt asks what you have been doing in school? But they are at least a little important, or why would universities spend the time hiring the faculty to teach the extra courses to provide them? Minors are the academic equivalent of friends you share memes with but never actually hang out with. They live in a gray area, making deciding on a minor tricky. Unfortunately, this article can not tell confused students what minor to choose, but it will provide a series of questions to help those facing this conundrum decide for themselves.

Should I Just Double Major?

Maybe! Spoiler alert: the answer to these questions will be some variation of "it depends." I promise, however, that I am not doing this to be cryptic, and I will provide the criteria it depends on. In the case of double-majoring (often done instead of a minor), consider the following: Will the second major divide my attention in a way prohibitive to my academic performance? Is the bigger commitment of the second major providing a meaningfully higher return on my effort than a minor? Will this second major require me to stay in school longer to complete it? If you answered "no" to all three, you might want to go for that second major. This is especially true if it overlaps meaningfully with the original major. This was the path I took myself. Political Science and International Studies had so many overlapping classes at my university that the foreign language requirement was the only addition to my prior course load.

Is There a Skill a Minor can Help Develop and Demonstrate?

People often joke about English majors being "useless" degrees. First, all majors have a purpose, and we should support our English degree-earning friends. Second, and more to the point of the article, English degrees are some of the best minors. This sentiment also goes for communications, foreign languages, math, technology, and any class that might suggest an interpersonal skill (leadership or something similar). The reason? Anyone can put “effective communicator” on a resume. But that English or Communication minor will definitively prove experience with that skill that may be hard to prove otherwise. If there is a skill like this a student is good at or companies in their desired profession are asking for, a minor might be just what the employer ordered.

Does it Sound Like Fun?

Many students have a hard time believing this, but they can enjoy their classes. Engineering has a reputation as a challenging degree. There is nothing wrong with pairing film studies or creative writing minors with an engineering degree. Even in terms of how it will look on a resume, a "fun" minor can do something a more "serious" minor often fails at, making that applicant seem like a real person with interests and hobbies. The number of people who gain or lose opportunities because of their minor is slim. In a vacuum, I would consider the opportunity cost of taking a more enjoyable but technically less applicable minor to be quite low. Some of those more enjoyable minors are also pretty good GPA boosters; no offense to the History of Rock 101, but rarely are those courses students struggle in. I would, however, caution st udents against a minor they have no interest in just for a perceived GPA bump. If anything makes History of Rock 101 tough, it is not actually being that into rock music.

The last piece of advice this article can offer is that students should contact their advisor for help choosing a minor. Advisors are there for expressly this purpose, and no one on campus is as well suited to be a resource for minor or double-major selection. Advisors are great, generally underused, resources.