Choosing a Major Works Exactly Like Picking Stocks

Here is a view I hold now: whatever you do, you look a lot like a speculator in a market.

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

Whatever industry you choose, whatever you study, you can treat it as one huge market, like the stock market. This is for applicants who are still choosing a major, because you still have time and a chance to switch.

Start with two kinds of value. One is intrinsic value, how much the field really creates and how many real problems it solves. The other is face value, its valuation, what the market thinks it is worth right now and how many people are fighting to get in.

Take biology, chemistry, environmental science and materials science, the fields Chinese students call the bottomless pit. When they got that name, the industry was in fact on a downslope. Its intrinsic value may have been falling, or at least its visible value was falling. Its valuation and face value were dropping.

Flip it. When everyone piles into a field, its face value rises, while its intrinsic value may be falling at the same time. So how should we make career choices? The same way.

So, point one. Choose a major the way a value investor picks stocks, and look for undervalued fields. Unpopular does not mean worthless. Some fields really are shrinking, value and valuation sinking together, and those you should avoid. Others are simply overlooked for now, cheap but still valuable, maybe even gaining value, and those may be the opportunity.

Point two. Do not chase what is hot. Hot means high valuation, and high valuation means high risk. CS and AI are the current example of high valuation. Everyone is switching into coding, from biology, from chemistry, from mechanical engineering. I am not saying CS is bad. Its intrinsic value is high. But its valuation is already high too, so you have to do more just to beat the average. And the high salaries you see were earned by people who got in years ago. Nobody knows what the market will look like when you graduate four years from now.

More important than choosing the right major, though, is point three. Build the ability to transfer thinking across fields.

One ability I think matters a lot for me is that I am good at transferring ways of thinking. I am good at making associations, connecting different things, a kind of interdisciplinary thinking across different modes. Like right now, I am using valuation and intrinsic value from investing to think about choosing a major.

Hot fields turn cold, and cold ones turn hot. Betting everything on one major is like putting all your money into one stock. If you can take the way of thinking from one field and use it in another, you can move between markets. When one market turns bad, you can go to another.

To be honest, I am not perfect either. I used to learn fairly slowly, and with AI’s help I am now pretty fast. My ability to act is decent. My problem is that I want to do too many things and I am not focused enough. That can be fixed too, by doing things over and over and trying more.

Majors go out of date and industries change. The ability to carry thinking from one field into another does not.