Major Decisions: How Students Choose What To Study At Warren Wilson
Ryleigh Johnson | Nov. 8, 2025
Students at Warren Wilson College (WWC) must declare their major after completing 44 credits at the college, prompting deep consideration and last minute, impulse choices. While faculty advisors can offer some wisdom, WWC students often find the major that works best for them in their own, offbeat way, with their varied approaches to this decision reflecting the diversity of perspectives on education at WWC.
Gretchen Whipple, math professor and outgoing faculty director of advising, remembers a time when faculty advisors at WWC received no training on how to best direct students.
“When I arrived here in 2001, I said, ‘Our students need good advising, and faculty are not trained,’” Whipple said. “I complained about that as a math professor...I think it was 2009 [when] the provost said to me, ‘Gretchen, guess what? We want to do something about it, and we've decided that you should take the charge, because you've been complaining about it for nearly 10 years.’”
Whipple helped create the Center for Integrated Advising and Careers (CIAC), which housed multiple full-time staff who focused solely on advising. These advisors were primarily focused on pre-major students. They were responsible for facilitating major exploration, answering questions and aiding in class choice and registration.
The CIAC was dissolved in 2023, putting the responsibility of pre-major advising back on First Year Seminar (FYS) professors. Whipple facilitated workshops to help train faculty on how to best help students, but maintains that the best outcomes occur when students take the lead in deciding what path works best for them.
“[Advising] has to be student motivated,” Whipple said. “A faculty member could recognize [that] you seem to enjoy [a subject] and suggest that the student consider it, but it really has to be the student who says, ‘This is what I want to do.’”
Courtney Warns, a senior on the Wellness Crew, began her time at WWC when the CIAC was still operating. She lamented its dissolution, explaining that she feels it represents a larger pattern within the institution that leaves students under-resourced and places a lot of responsibility on those who may simply need guidance from trusted adults.
“We’re losing the elders of the college with institutional knowledge,” Warns said.
Warns entered her freshman year believing she would be a psychology and philosophy double major, then quickly realized she was mistaken.
“I took one philosophy class, and I was like, ‘Can't do it, not here,’” Warns said. “I like philosophy, but I can actively put philosophy into my other courses, so I got into the psychology major.”
Warns now looks back on that choice with complicated feelings, saying that if she could go back, she would choose a different major, likely anthropology/sociology. Many of the frustrations she feels with her major, like its inability to move past theories based on unscientific and outdated ideas, a lack of real-world human connection and its overly cognition-focused approach, first bothered her during her freshman year. Despite these qualms, she continued in the major and found ways to supplement its approach with other ways of learning.
“Psychology aligns with some of my values, in the form of helping people...working with people where they're at, assessing people and their environment–it's all part of psychology,” Warns said. “I don’t love it all fully. [But if you’re] dead set on a major, that limits you so much to explore other things.”
For Warns, this looked like leaning into her role on the Wellness Crew, spending more time volunteering in Asheville and taking a variety of classes from anthropology to sustainable agriculture. Her advice to those still undecided on what they would like to study is to assess their values and pick a major that allows them to lean into what they care about while still exploring new ideas in other areas.
“In college, you have so much more of a choice than you do in high school,” Warns said. “You have a choice where you live. You have a choice of what you want to eat. You have a choice of who teaches you. How can you find opportunity in all those things you choose?”
Much like Warns, sophomore Kaia Caduff sees learning as a holistic endeavor, much of which takes place outside of a major or a classroom. This approach was central to her major decision process when she came to WWC as an undecided student with a strong interest in environmental science.
“To me, the point of college is to teach you to become a lifelong learner,” Caduff said. “I think that I can learn the things that I'm interested in in other ways throughout the rest of my life, which could be grad school, but it could also be in the career that I choose, or with the people that I meet...I just started putting less pressure on myself to pick my major based on what I'm going to do with the rest of my life, because I don't even know what that looks like.”
An abundance of transfer credits meant Caduff needed to declare their major at the end of their first semester, choosing a double major in international and social justice studies and environmental studies. She has since dropped her international and social justice studies major due to the stress of double-majoring and institutional changes to class offerings.
“The Spanish program doesn't exist anymore here, and I thought that that was lame for that major,” Caduff said. “I felt like the timing [of dissolving the Spanish program] was really bad, and doesn't reflect what Warren Wilson strives to be. I [also] realized that I don't want to go into international law. I don't want to do anything necessarily that has to do with that portion of it, so I just didn't really want to put in all of that work [into] double majoring.”
Despite these factors, Caduff still appreciates her time in the major, seeing it as supplementing her learning in the environmental studies major.
“The classes that I took for that major were really good,” Caduff said. “I know that I want to do something with my life that incorporates social and ecological justice. Spending a little bit of time in [the international and social justice studies] major really solidified that for me, even if I'm not going to have it appear on my degree.”
Freshman Jonah Igleman is also leaning into this ethos of exploration while considering majoring in anthropology. His interest in anthropology grew organically from the connections he made between multiple classes that focused on studying people and their cultures, a longtime interest.
“[When I first came to WWC], I was really leaning towards history,” Igleman said. “My idea when I came here was to really focus on a trade within the facilities crews and try and pick up a life skill and then just study something random, like anthropology, [that] will benefit my life. I didn't really have an idea, and I was just going to take some classes. These classes that I picked have really lined up, so it just kind of happened to happen that way.”
Igleman, Caduff and Warns’ stories all reinforce one of Whipple’s maxims: the process of choosing a major is “as varied as Warren Wilson students.”
Her advice, which echoes that of Warns and Caduff, is for students to use college, especially their first year, to explore as many majors as possible.
“If you're not sure where you want to go with life, just learn as much as you can about as many different things as you can, and hopefully you'll find what really lights your passion,” Whipple said.
Choosing a major at WWC is now a highly student-led process, often leading students to develop a robust ideological lens through which they assess their values and expand their ideas of education outside of the classroom. However, this system also leaves students to their own devices and sometimes unable to access institutional knowledge that may help guide their decisions. Ultimately, as in many facets of life at WWC, students rise to the occasion and meet their major decision with curiosity and open-mindedness.