My friend currently works as a tour guide at the University of Delaware. She’s a junior in nursing, and she’s been a tour guide for about a semester.

On the tours, she shows prospective students around the campus and gives them helpful advice. She told me that as a tour guide, she must accommodate the interests of the diverse group of students. It is important that she gets to know them in order to determine which places to show them.

She did this by asking a certain question to get to know them: “What is your dream job?”

The students in her tour group were taken aback, since they were expecting to answer a different question (“What major are you pursuing?”). The students and parents were all silent, waiting for someone to say something. Eventually most of the kids answered; some said they wanted to work for Google, BMW, Goldman Sachs, or just to make a difference in the world.

My friend asked this question atypical of normal tour guides, thinking outside the box. She wanted to see how the kids would react to the question and by them answering it, she had a better understanding of them. By asking them what their dream job was, she could see what they actually wanted instead of just a vague representation of what their future was, their major.

As my friend explains it, majors do not really mean anything.  . From their dream job you can easily deduce what major is suitable. If they want to work at Google, you know that it is related to computer science, or if they want to work at Sloan Kettering you know that they want to be a nurse or doctor that works with cancer patients.

Even when we begin college,  Focusing on your major limits your boundaries instead of being able to branch out.

When you think about your dream job, you start to think about the bigger future of what lies ahead of your college career. Your major only tells people what you did in college, not what you want to actually do in your professional future. When you tell people your dream job, they see that you have a goal in life and that you know what it takes to get there. There are many ways to get your dream job, but the path you choose is what makes you different from your peers.