When your second-year college student wants to switch majors: My kid switched from IT to maritime, here’s what I learned
The turkey platter was still half full when Jake pushed his mashed potatoes to the side and said it out loud, halfway through our second Thanksgiving of his college career. “I hate IT. I’m switching to maritime.”
I’d spent the last 10 minutes bragging to my brother about how Jake was already getting recruiting emails from tech companies, so my first reaction was pretty sharp. “Two years in, and you want to throw it all away? Maritime? That means working on a fishing boat for 10 hours a day, right? What happened to the stable job we talked about?”
Jake didn’t blow up, which surprised me. He just pulled out his phone and scrolled to a folder of photos he’d taken on fall break, when he told us he was staying on campus to study for midterms. Instead, he’d driven two hours down to the coast to shadow a family friend who works as a port captain, something he’d arranged on his own because he knew I’d react this way. The photos showed him leaning over a chart table, testing a new onboard communication system, standing on the bridge of a coastal survey ship. He said he’d spent 12 hours a day there the whole week, and didn’t check his phone once. When he was doing IT homework, he couldn’t make it through two hours without getting distracted.
I went to bed that night stressed, thinking about all the tuition we’d paid, the scholarship he’d earned for the IT program, the plan we’d all agreed on when he graduated high school. But I also couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d said: that he’d gone to every class, turned in every assignment, and still couldn’t shake the feeling he was just going through the motions for us.
Over the next few days, we landed on a middle ground that I now tell other parents about when their kid springs a major switch on them. We didn’t say yes right away, and we didn’t say no. We gave him a 30-day timeline to answer all our questions, and he had to do all the work himself. First, he had to make an appointment with the maritime program advisor at his school (it turns out our coastal state university has a whole maritime operations department, something I didn’t even know existed) and get a written breakdown of which of his existing credits would transfer. Second, he had to go back down to the port for three more full work days, and write down every task he did, even the boring ones like cleaning the deck and filling out safety reports. Third, he had to pull job opening data and average starting salaries for graduates of the program from the school’s career center, and add up the extra tuition and loan costs of the extra semester he’d need to graduate.
Thirty days later, he showed up at our house with a manila folder full of printed papers, which felt way more serious than a phone full of screenshots. Turns out, all of his general education credits transferred, and 12 of his IT credits counted towards the maritime program’s technical requirements—modern ships run on all kinds of digital navigation and communication systems, so IT experience is actually a big plus. He only lost one semester of progress, not two full years. The extra tuition came out to about $11,000, which is a lot, but he qualified for a $5,000 a year industry scholarship that the IT program didn’t offer, because there’s such a big shortage of skilled maritime workers right now. Starting salaries for entry-level operations jobs in our area are actually higher than entry-level IT support roles, and there are more open positions than graduates.
That’s the biggest thing I didn’t expect: I assumed switching to a less common major meant less opportunity, but that’s not always the case. The practical steps we put in place kept it from being an impulsive decision driven by one bad midterm, and it also kept me from letting my own fear of the unknown shut down something that made sense for him. Making Jake do all the legwork also meant he had real skin in the game—this wasn’t just a random idea he could blame on us if it didn’t work out.
Jake switched over this spring semester. He still calls me every Sunday, but now the calls are 20 minutes long instead of 5. He rants about his navigation class, talks about the training boat he’ll be staying on for a week next month, asks me questions about engine repairs I don’t know the answer to. Last week he sent me a photo of himself leaning against the boat’s rail, grinning with salt wind in his hair, and that’s the most engaged I’ve seen him with school in two years.
I still worry sometimes. He hasn’t done a full multi-day voyage yet, and he might hate it when he does. We’ll still end up paying more for his degree than we planned. There’s no guarantee this will work out perfectly, just like there was no guarantee IT would have worked out perfectly. I still catch myself thinking about what would have happened if we’d made him stick it out. He would have graduated, probably gotten an IT job, and maybe he’d be miserable showing up every day just to collect a paycheck. The extra semester of tuition is a small price to pay compared to that.
For other parents staring down a surprise major switch from your kid, don’t answer right away, make them do the legwork, and don’t assume that what sounded good to you at 18 is what’s good for them at 20. It’s still too early to tell how this will end for us, but right now, it feels like the right call.
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