From "I Don't Know" to a Direction: Researching Majors and Careers with Soar
September 10, 2026
Most students can name a handful of majors before they can explain why any one of them fits. There are 641 named majors offered at ten or more U.S. colleges, and each one leads to a different set of careers, yet most families are working from a mental list of maybe twenty. This session covers why that gap matters more now than it used to, and how Soar helps close it. It walks through three ways the same underlying problem shows up: a single word like "computer science" or "business" that actually hides a wide range of different majors requiring different skills, a whole field like health that hides well over a hundred majors most families have never heard of, and the harder question underneath all of it, which isn't "what pays well" but "what could I actually become excellent at." Rather than a feature walkthrough, most of the session is three live research conversations with Soar, built around imaginary test students, so the panel could show what the tool actually does rather than describe it. The panel also talked candidly about how they use Soar day to day: as a thought partner rather than a smarter search engine, as a shared workspace that brings students, parents, and counselors into the same conversation, and as a source that is deliberately careful about where its information comes from. The audience included independent educational consultants, school counselors, parents, and students. Questions were taken throughout rather than held to the end, so the transcript follows the conversation as it happened.
