Minor not always major help to resum?? - Though minors are increasingly popular, they do not necessarily give students an edge

You're a college student. You need a major. That's easy. No options there. But, in order to be a competitive candidate in the graduate school and employment markets, do you also need something more -- maybe a minor?

Not necessarily. According to Senior Academic Advisor Dr. Richard Sanders of the Office of Academic Advising, "No one cares about how many labels you have on your resume."

This is the philosophy that Sanders and other advisors use when speaking with students debating the addition of minors and double majors to their academic programs.

It is meant to encourage students to enroll in courses that they want to take without trying to spread themselves across too many programs.

"It's a problem if the minor becomes an obstacle to getting the undergraduate experience you'd like to have," Sanders said.

Hopkins undergraduates have the opportunity to select from five engineering minors and 27 Arts and Sciences minors.

Among Arts and Sciences students alone last year 333 sophomores, juniors, and seniors had declared minors.

Claire Kim, a senior IR major, plans to graduate with a Writing Seminars minor. "I always liked writing, but I truly feared the whole "you do Writing Sems., you work at McDonald's thing,' so I just decided to go with the more lucrative major," she said. "But by the end of sophomore year, I really liked writing a lot."

Despite what Sanders says about the lack of advantage a minor adds to a resume or a transcript, Kim, asserts that the completion of a minor acts as proof of her academic experience.

"I also plan on applying to writing programs for grad. school," she said and comments that schools will be less apt to question why an International Relations major is interested in such a writing program when they see her minor.

The popularity of minors has increased in recent years at Hopkins and the school has seen what Sanders calls a "minor rush" since the introduction of the W.P. Carey Entrepreneurship and Management Program in 1996.

Generally referred to as the business minor, the program was last year's most common undergraduate minor. (Writing Seminars and Economics are the school's second and third most popular minors).

"We seem to have an awful lot of students who would like business skills," Sanders said. "These are students who tell us they would be business majors if we had a business major."

Civil Engineering major Jamie Graziano is one of those students. "Business experience is, in general, good experience to have," said the senior.

Records of a students' minors are kept in their respective school's advising office until they undergo graduation clearance at the end of junior year and then are passed on to the registrar's office.

Upon graduation, evidence of the completion of a minor is documented at the end of a student's transcript.

But again advisors urge students to remember that this documentation need not be the most pressing thing on his or her mind when course selection time comes.

"Plan for extra credits outside the major," Sanders said. "Sometimes that translates into a minor, but we aren't pushing these."