Business has risen to become one of the most popular undergraduate majors in the US. The practical student thinks, Money is what I want, and money comes from business.

One of my students told me he would major in whatever would most likely lead to a high-salary career. While I have always discouraged a purely resource-driven approach to choosing a college major and planning a career, if I can’t change the source of the motivation, I’d say consider Oprah Winfey, who majored in speech communications and performing arts at Tennessee State; or Brené Brown, the thought leader and speaker with a net worth of close to $5 million who majored in Social Work; or Jack Dorsey, the cofounder of Twitter with a net worth of $4.5 billion who was a masseur and even dabbled in fashion design.[1] It seems that more than studying what sounds lucrative, studying what we love and excel in (and putting in the time) will lead to greater financial success, sometimes in unpredictable ways. The first part – finding what we love – is relatively easy but fairly misguided. What grabs our attention will change with age, exposure, relationships, and what’s streaming. The second part – finding what we excel in – was a more difficult and expensive task until the advent of reliable, online aptitude assessments. Once we have exposed these raw aptitudes in ourselves, we can rely on them through time, changing economies, and different living situations. They become a compass.

It’s not just that I want my students to enjoy their future studies; I don’t want them to direct so much time and resources away from their natural gifts, making school, life, and work so much more of a slog than they need to be. Just as genetic testing is helping many people make smarter choices about their health before they’re sick, I think aptitude discovery can help people focus on college and career wellness before they need to be put on life support.

It’s why when I guide young adults, I don’t start by helping them choose specific majors; I encourage them to first get acquainted with their aptitudes through one of assessments available at youscience.com.

Here are a few important factors that will come to bear:

Spatial Reasoning: Knowing whether you are naturally a more 3D or Abstract thinker is the difference between choosing architecture or real estate development, mechanical or industrial engineering, psychiatry or psychology. The former makes sense of the world in spatial terms, while the latter does so more abstractly.

Inductive Reasoning: Inductive Thinkers easily spot connections, are comfortable filling in the missing pieces, and can come to conclusions based on the available information. They love the “hunt” of solving for unknowns and treading unfamiliar territory. Their opposites, the Fact Checkers, excel when they have complete information, and they will not give you a premature answer; they’ll keep digging and mulling over things until they’ve collected enough data points. The former may choose archeology and anthropology, while the latter may prefer medical technologies and accounting.

Work Approach: Perhaps most important to our satisfaction in what we’re studying and doing is the degree to which we wish to specialize. While Generalists can easily shift between a broad range of tasks, oversee a diverse team of experts, and hold an objective eye on their work and the world, specialists thrive when they can “go deep,” focus on their craft, and maintain some coveted expert knowledge in their field. Generalists are happy studying management or engineering, while specialists want to study African Studies or 17th Century Literature. It might also mean the difference between eventually choosing family medicine or podiatry.

The old “Know Thyself” axiom may be a cliche commandment, but it remains a necessary step in discovering our life’s work, even in- or especially in – our hyper practical, rational society that can often lead us to make decisions based on every possible factor except what we are uniquely suited to do. But recognizing our aptitudes is only the first step; experience and exposure have to follow. How else do you discover that medicine is not all Grey’s Anatomy and criminal justice isn’t all CSI: Miami?

Alex Ellison runs a college and career guidance practice, Throughline Guidance, which serves clients around the globe. She writes and lectures extensively on the subject of careers and college readiness and has been a featured speaker at SXSWedu and TEDx. Her forthcoming book, Your Hidden Genius: The Science-Backed Strategy to Uncovering and Utilizing Your Innate Talents hits shelves in January 2025 and is available for preorder now. She lives in Santa Cruz, California.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/profile/jack-dorsey/