Answer to Question 1
Questions like these:
What do I know about myself in terms of my knowledge, skills, and values?
What topics do I find most interesting?
In which academic subjects do I excel?
What careers am I most interested in pursuing?
What kinds of problems do I find most compelling?
What can I learn from talking to other people?
What might my academic advisor be able to do to help me?
What could my professors this term do to help me?
What might my friends who are juniors and seniors be able to tell me about picking a major?
What could I learn from talking to people who work in careers that I think are interesting?
What can I learn by consulting other available resources?
What resources exist on campus to help students pick a major or pick a career?
Answer to Question 2
Critical thinking is the process of reflective judgment that uses skills but is not equivalent to a simple linear set of skills. We use the skills in concert with one another to form the judgment about what to believe or what to do. Critical thinking has certain important features in common with looking for an address while driving on a busy and unfamiliar street. The key similarity to notice here is that critical thinking requires using all the skills in concert, emphasizing one or the other or multiple skills at the same time, depending on the ever changing situation. It would be an unfortunate, crude, and misleading oversimplification to reduce critical thinking to a rote list of skills, like the steps in the recipe on the lid of dehydrated soup: first analyze, then infer, then explain, then close the lid, and wait five minutes.