Book Review: Major in Success by Patrick Combs
This paper offers a critical review of Patrick Combs' Major in Success: Make College Easier, Fire Up Your Dreams, And Get A Great Job (5th ed.). The review summarizes Combs' core arguments about passion-driven career development, overcoming fear, building marketable skills, and networking. It then compares Combs' accessible, reader-directed approach to peer-reviewed scholarship by Hassan Ballout and Peter Heslin. Finally, it evaluates the book's greatest strength — its frank, comprehensive, and inspiring tone — alongside its primary weakness: an occasionally unsupported, assumption-heavy style. The reviewer concludes that the book's practical resources and motivational clarity make it a valuable guide despite its limitations.
- Introduction and Overview: Book's purpose, tone, and overall assessment
- Summary of Core Arguments: Passion, attitude, fear, and action planning
- Analysis and Comparison with Scholarly Sources: Combs versus peer-reviewed career scholarship
- Personal Reaction and Evaluation: Strengths, weaknesses, and reader value
- Conclusion: Final verdict on the book's overall worth
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What makes this paper effective
- The review moves logically from summary to comparative analysis to personal evaluation, giving each stage its own clearly labeled section.
- Comparisons to peer-reviewed articles by Ballout and Heslin ground the evaluation in academic context without overshadowing the primary text.
- The reviewer identifies a single, well-articulated tension — the book's greatest strength (accessibility and breadth) doubling as its greatest weakness (lack of rigorous support) — which gives the review a coherent critical thread.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates comparative evaluation: rather than reviewing the book in isolation, the writer benchmarks Combs against two peer-reviewed journal articles on career success. This technique contextualizes the book's tone and scope, allowing the reviewer to make a specific, defensible claim about its relative value rather than offering only impressionistic praise or criticism.
Structure breakdown
The review opens with a brief orienting overview of the book's purpose and thesis. A detailed summary section then walks through Combs' main arguments in sequence — passion, attitude, fear, and action planning. The analysis section introduces and briefly describes two scholarly counterparts before drawing a contrast. The personal reaction section delivers the evaluative verdict, and a short conclusion synthesizes the overall judgment. Citations follow MLA format throughout.
Introduction and Overview
Major in Success: Make College Easier, Fire Up Your Dreams, And Get A Great Job by Patrick Combs seems to cover every aspect of college, career, and life in very readable terms. His frank approach is both inspiring and far more enjoyable and comprehensive than that of other authors who write about career success. Combs' approach has both strengths and weaknesses, but the inspirational nature of the book, combined with its suggested resources, makes it very useful.
References
Ballout, Hassan I. "Career Success: The Effects of Human Capital, Person-Environment Fit and Organizational Support." Journal of Managerial Psychology, 22(8) (2007): 741–765. Print.
Combs, Patrick. Major in Success: Make College Easier, Fire Up Your Dreams, And Get A Great Job, 5th ed. New York: Ten Speed Press, 2007. Print.
Heslin, Peter A. "Conceptualizing and Evaluating Career Success." Journal of Organizational Behavior, 26(2) (2005): 113–136. Print.
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