Calendar Your Major: How Voting Works & How to Win

What Calendar Your Major is and who runs it

Calendar Your Major is a public-vote ballot run by Pacific University, a university in Forest Grove, Oregon. The program's premise is printed in the university's own words on the ballot page: there are connections between democracy and every single field of study at Pacific, your major is on the ballot, and your voice is critical. That framing makes this a civic-education vote rather than a commercial readers-choice poll. The thing being voted on is a field of study, not a business, and the audience is the university community rather than a metro-area shopping public.

The organizer's own website is where the ballot lives. The voting URL is pacificu.edu/calendar/your-major-ballot, a page titled "Your Major on the Ballot" and carrying the university's own copyright line. No third-party balloting platform sits between the supporter and the vote, which means the rules, the timing and the format are entirely whatever Pacific University prints on that page for a given cycle.

The physical anchor of the program is the Forest Grove campus. The university's address is 2043 College Way, Forest Grove, OR 97116, and the in-person component of the 2025 cycle was held at the Washburne University Center on that campus. The vertical here is best-of in the loosest sense: a ballot that elevates majors the way a community poll elevates businesses, but with an educational purpose underneath.

The dated record: which editions ran and when the window falls

This ballot carries two confirmed edition years: 2025 and 2026. Both fall in November, which is not a coincidence. The 2025 cycle was deliberately timed against election season, and the ballot page says so directly: ballots for the November 4 election were already in the mail, and the university's message was that now is the time to make a plan to vote. The campus ballot is framed as a companion to the real ballots arriving in Oregon voters' mailboxes, a way to connect the habit of voting to the subjects students actually study.

The in-person session in the 2025 cycle carried its own date and time. It ran on Wednesday, October 29, 2025, from 12:00pm to 1:30pm, at the Washburne University Center in Forest Grove. The university described it as a stop-by session where students could learn how their major impacts, and is impacted by, elected officials and public policy. That session preceded the November window and served as the campus-facing on-ramp to the ballot.

What the university has not published is the precise open and close of the online voting window itself, and no nomination round is described anywhere on the page. The category list for the ballot is likewise absent, and nothing is printed about how often a person may vote or who counts as eligible. The university has also not printed a forward calendar confirming 2027. Each of those facts lives only on the live page when a cycle opens; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter votes today

The literal mechanic is simple, because the ballot lives on the university's own site with no third-party platform in the way. Voting starts when someone brings up the ballot page at pacificu.edu, reads the university's framing about majors and democracy, and follows whatever submission format the current cycle's page presents. There is no separate registration step described, no nomination form to fill first, and no platform account mentioned. The page's own call to action is about preparation rather than process: make a plan to vote, and the university says it can help.

That help took a physical form in the 2025 cycle. The stop-by session at the Washburne University Center, running 12:00pm to 1:30pm on October 29, put staff in a room with students to explain how a field of study connects to elected officials and public policy. For a supporter who finds an online ballot abstract, that session is the place where the vote gets explained face to face, and it is reasonable to expect a similar campus anchor in future cycles given the two November editions on file.

The timing advice the university itself gives is the most useful instruction on the page. Because the campus ballot is deliberately aligned with election season, and because Oregon runs its elections by mail, the natural moment to vote is when the November window opens and real ballots are already in hand. A supporter who calendars the first week of November, checks the ballot page, and votes in one sitting has done everything the program asks.

How this ballot sits beside its Oregon neighbours

Across the Oregon pages here, public votes are dominated by readers-choice programs run by local media: Best of Portland, Best of Eugene, the Bend Magazine Readers' Choice Awards, the Best of the Mid-Valley Community's Choice Awards, the Coast Weekend Readers' Choice Awards and the Eugene Community's Choice Awards. Every one of those asks a geographic public to rank businesses. Calendar Your Major is the outlier: a single university asking its own community to vote on fields of study.

That difference changes what support means here. In a readers-choice poll, a business campaigns for customers it has never met. In this ballot, the constituency is already defined: students of Pacific University, whose majors are the ballot itself. Outreach happens in departments, in dorms and at campus events like the Washburne University Center session, not through metro-wide advertising. The scale is smaller and the stakes are civic rather than commercial.

It is also the only ballot in this Oregon group hosted on the university's own domain rather than a balloting platform. That gives Pacific University full control over format and rules, and it also means nothing about the vote is standardized. A reader moving from Best of Portland to this page should expect a different rhythm, a different audience and a different purpose, and should read the university's own page as the single authority for each November cycle.

Strengthening support on a campus ballot

Support in this program is built through the university community, and the organizer's own materials point the way. The ballot page asks supporters to make a plan to vote, which is the same advice election organizers give, and it backs that up with an in-person session where the case for voting is made in person. A department that wants its major to perform well can do the same at smaller scale: a group message to classmates, a mention in a department newsletter, a professor willing to bring the ballot up before class. Those channels cost nothing and reach exactly the people eligible to care.

The university publishes no statement about outside help, paid votes or third-party promotion for this ballot, and a civic-education vote run by a university is an environment where purchased support would sit badly with the program's purpose even before any rule is consulted. The honest play is the one the ballot itself models: show up, explain why the major matters, and make voting easy for the people around you. For readers weighing paid support on other ballots, the service options are described on our award-votes page, but on this ballot the campus route is the one the organizer itself endorses.