While the connection between major choice and career goals seems logically obvious, research exploring this process is limited, particularly concerning how socioeconomic class, based on parents' educational levels, influences the choice process. An important initial step in understanding this larger process is to explore how SES-based differences affect the process of choosing a major, a career goal and the way in which students link their major to a possible career. This study utilizes a comparative interview design to explore the lived experiences regarding major and career aspirations of first generation and traditional college seniors who have transferred from a community college to Portland State University. This study considers a first generation student to be any student that does not have a parent that has graduated from a four-year university in the United States. A traditional student is any student that has one or more parents who have earned at least a four-year degree in the U.S. Using a conceptual framework based on Pierre Bourdieu's work on social reproduction, this qualitative interview study examines how social and cultural capital as well as habitus influences first generation and traditional community college transfer students' choice of career, major and the link these students make between the two. This research found that the majority of students, both first generation and traditional community college transfer students, gained domain specific information that
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.