FWIW, HK, I chose Materials Science to major in at UCB for reasons similar to your DD's - it let me double-major with the largest number of potential engineering majors, and therefore would give me the most flexibility down the road, given that I was going to the College of Engineering (there is a story about why the College of Letters and Science wasn't available to me, but that's not really germane here). I had to declare a major when I was a second-term sophomore in high school, again for reasons that are not immediately important. But when I finally took a course in it two years later, I loved it, and went on to get a Ph.D. in it. Sometimes serendipity works out just fine.