Why would-be engineers end up as English majors

Why would-be engineers end up as English majors


Science and math students struggle to complete their degrees in four years, if at all
Researchers say higher education must "weed out" students

(CNN) -- Amenah Ibrahim vividly remembers her first introduction to thermodynamics. It was her freshman year at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and she sat in a large auditorium filled with students aspiring to degrees in chemical engineering.

"The first thing the (professor) told us was, 'You should expect to see this class dwindle down as the semester goes on.' It was the first thing they told us," she said.

Ibrahim said the professor's expectation came true. As the semester progressed, students began to drop the class, some switching to other majors entirely.

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http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/05/17/education.stem.graduation/index.html?hpt=C1

Computer Science/Engineering -- Mathematics -- English (final switch made second semester junior year)

Well, that sets it. English majors (and arts and social science majors by extention) are losers, and their degrees are boobyprizes, because they won't go on and develop sugar shit as engineers at PepsiCo.

Americans see education as job training, and nothing more.

..a crackerjack ancient Greek student in high school. He graduated a bit behind me... who am a practicing classicist.

My graduating class's classics majors wound up in a flat-footed tie -- 2 M.D.'s 2 Ph.D.'s

don't have the financial luxury of attending college for the purely intellectual benefit.

hard science or your gut feelings?

I ask because the vast majority of undergrad students I saw at the U. of Wisconsin ca. 1986-90 were extending their adolescence by 4 years on Mommy and Daddy's nut. "Intellectual benefit" and "Job Training" both seemed to have very little to do with why most students were there. But 20 years have passed since then, so things may have changed.

majority. The students that I associated with, during my college years, were struggling financially, like myself. I was in an Engineering program, starting in September of 1956 and paid under the GI bill.

around the same time at U. of Missouri. He has described exactly the same phenomenon you describe, although there apparently were many affluent children of the middle class attending Mizzou at the time also (as evidenced by the large numbers of Greeks). My Dad came from dirt-poor Depression-era farm family.

farm in North Dakota in 1937 and we moved to Washington state.

Well, oldlib, it's not really like that. The 1950's are actually cited in the literature on the history of higher education in the United States as kind of a watershed moment for "practical" focus in education, probably only matched by recent trends over the last 5-10 years. There are many factors for this, including, of course, the age and experiences of "non-traditional" students in college on the GI Bill. But it also relates to changing theories of progressive education. (Of course, William Whyte offered the scathing indictment of the way colleges were changing in The Organization Man. Certainly an interesting period in the history of higher ed, but not exactly demonstrative of anything today.

:hi:

are completely deluded. Outside of a few technical majors, your undergrad major's specific discipline doesn't matter for shit these days. Most students would be better off investing in themselves, in their ability to think about and analyze the world rather than staying in one of the "good job" majors. It's the mental abilities that'll prove to be much more valuable to them anyway. . .

And I actually have a job doing that stuff. Who'd have thunk it.

I've never had a job where the English degree mattered particularly... but I did have a programming job for a little while that the not-quite-minor prepared me for semi-nicely.

Moral of the story... it's not what you know, it's who you know (the programming gig came through a friend I met while doing the Software Shite... until the startup funding imploded).

Meritocracy is a Myth.

of the entering first-year class had pre-declared as business majors . . . before even setting foot in a college classroom. The first- and second-year English composition, creative writing and technical writing classes, IIRC, were used to filter people for admission to the business school (typically after the end of the sophomore year). Talk about a disgusting situation.

I always told my students (those who were listening) that they should be in college to get an education, not to get a fucking job. But the entire culture in the latter stages of Reaganism seemed arrayed against me and those like me in the humanities and social sciences.

The title and tone of this CNN piece -- with its sundry implied slanders of English and those who teach it -- really says it all, that English is where people go when they can't hack science.

No self-respecting English major would consent to drink a Pepsi, even if his or her life depended on it :)

Edited for clarity and garbled syntax.

drifted into business degrees. Business was at the bottom of the totem pole. By the 1980's, business began drawing all the best students and started increasing their requirements. At the same time, schools that didn't have business degree programs began to expand their Economics offerings. A degree in Economics was a proxy for a business degree.

Also in the 1980's, education majors started to be the last refuge of those who couldn't make it elsewhere. I can only imagine what kinds of students the education major draws these days.

Popularity and demand for majors follows the perceived future compensation of students.

At least I took some ethics classes in college, and some classes where I learned to think about possibilities and consequences, like what happens when you eat genetically modified tomatoes and should nuclear power plants be built on faults, where there are tsunamis???

I will take a liberal arts education from someone I might hire for most jobs any day!

I'm back in school for my second masters in a fairly multidisciplinary field. My first MA was in English Lit and while it didn't do much for me on the job front, in my current class of about 80 which combines students from ecology, engineering, geography, business, political science, sociology, criminal justice, architecture etc. every single class and assignment is *owned* by the three of us who majored in English, Philosophy and Photography even though our majors are technically the furthest from what we're studying now.

English Lit teaches you how to close read. I can buzz through things that take my classmates four or five readings to "get". It teaches you how to write and communicate. I'm amazed at how difficult some of my classmates find this- even a business major who had no idea how to extract the key points of what he was trying to say to make a presentation. It teaches you how to craft an argument, how to find the subtext, how to make creative leaps to solutions other people might not have thought of.

Philosophy teaches you how to think carefully and systematically. It includes logic and ethics- two things all too often missing in the world of "real majors" like the hard sciences and business.

I totally understand why people major in business, pre-med, science, math, etc. especially when they come from low income communities and are struggling to escape poverty. But people who imply that English (or other liberal arts) are only for people who can't hack it in other disciplines are making a really stupid and offensive argument.

I have some experience working with engineers and computer programmers. I have one skill set; they have another. I don't denigrate what they can do; why should they denigrate what I can do?

Well, that sets it. English majors (and arts and social science majors by extention) are losers, and their degrees are boobyprizes, because they won't go on and develop sugar shit as engineers at PepsiCo.


It's more a reflection of CNN's lack of knowledge about education and how to write about it.

I teach English and for many years, prior to going back to teaching at the university, I taught at corporations, particularly corporations that were in technology. My specialty was teaching writing, interpersonal communication, and speech to technical types. Many of them have a very hard time grasping how to put their thoughts across. Not knowing how to speak and write proficiently is a career-killer.

I was called in many times when a talented engineer, programmer, or physicist's job was on the line. In addition to classes, I did one-on-one work with these individuals.

The fact is, people go into certain fields because they have a talent or ability for that type of work.

I don't think English is any easier than math, engineering, etc., but there is room for ambiguity in English where there isn't in math and science.


Cher

or subject to some kind of audition.

I hope they like my stories.

:)

Teaching remedial English and writing to engineering students, that is.

Teaching written communication to engineers at Douglas Aircraft, this proved futile so eventually she just became a permanent filter between a department of engineers and polite society with every letter, memo and presentation going through her.

She left the first time because other women resented her being "one of the boys" and resented her being considered to be a draftsman rather than a secretary which drew more than double their salary and persistently harassed her and spread malicious rumors about her being everything from a lesbian to having had an illegitimate child with every single man in the company, to her husband having left her and the state of California declaring her an unfit mother!

Jason, re: your last note on customer #$%$%33

They can't run two SIP servers at the same co-lo as we don't support AOR today. We can do a MPLS-VPN if router is running r5.6p8 or later. On last note, we do support div. and ref. message.






Okay English major, now go bastardize that note since you have no clue what I'm talking about :eyes:

... but not those who teach well.

Changing the culture
Schools admit more science majors than they expect to graduate, and don't teach students to support each other, Hrabowski said, instead fostering an atmosphere of cutthroat competition.

Two reasons that I hated Purdue engineering school.

My graduate school, which I would very much like to see struck by a meteorite or small comet someday, put something absurd like 75% of the scoring weight towards tenure on research, which meant the teaching and service components were not so much discouraged as actively penalized. (Hell, I sat in on some hiring interviews where the departments gave applicants hell for having hobbies unrelated to their work.)

My undergraduate school's departments generally put about half the weight on teaching, with the rest split between research and service.

The top-tier schools do seem to weigh more like my graduate school, which I find depressing, but there's certainly exceptions out there.

If it has to be a comet.

Assistant Prof won a Superior Teaching Award, that would be grounds for immediate denial of tenure because obviously the professor was spending too much time on teaching :)

Now I have a Ph.D. and teach Engineering students to communicate effectively.

He taught me all kinds of cool things like terse or verbose writing, connecting clauses with double-dashes, using metaphors, etc. I would enjoy teaching that. My technical writing is my strength at work.

The real test of whether somebody has thought out their argument is whether it make sense when they put it in writing.

What do you think about this idea: "Anglo-Saxon words are often stronger than Latin-derived words"? I stumbled across the concept a few weeks ago and have not really explored it. It is at the end of this page:

http://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/writing.html

With Linguistics in between.

Higher-level chemistry courses are FUCKING INSANELY HARD.

:toast:

:hi:

But that was me. Chemistry, for some reason, just makes sense to me.

Now my music program was a ball buster for everyone - 90% attrition rate before graduation. Most of the student who transferred went into easier degrees like engineering and medicine.

To step out on a limb I'm going to say that my experience was non typical.

not good enough (or thought so at the time) to make it as a performer. But then I ended up really loving English too. Kept piano as a hobby but also taught myself guitar (much more portable than your average piano :)

Although I never played Carnegie Hall, I got the best of both worlds.

But that was me. Chemistry, for some reason, just makes sense to me.

Of a brilliant friend, who has now passed on. But while he was here, he was a top Wall Street stock analyst. He specialized in Intel.

But his hobby was lawsuits. He had to learn how to handle himself in court because he sat on the boards of so many start-up companies. Apparently this is the ticket to legions of lawsuits.

He became so good with the court stuff that lawyers would sometimes ask his wife or friends how he got into these high-level suits and maintained them as a pro se right up until the very end (he would hire a lawyer for the final stages). His wife once responded, "Oh, he just does it for a hobby. Stress relief, you might call it."


Cher

that was too hard so he changed his major to chemical engineering. After that he flew planes for the Air Force (ROTC scholarship).

Chemistry courses are no harder than biology or psychology or linguistics courses, it all depends on where your aptitude lies. When I was a grad student teaching freshman chemistry, I felt bad for the kids who washed out and ended up redirecting their major away from pre-med or engineering. But I came to realize that their initial direction was often imposed upon them, sometimes in the way of parental expectations, and they had not come to the university to discover where their talent lay. I ran into a bit of that myself, as my undergrad school was so dominated by electrical engineering and computer science that I took a detour in that direction before returning to where my aptitude lay, in chemistry.

I would agree with the the article, that teaching of undergraduates needs to receive more emphasis. Along with that teaching, they need to put more effort into helping each student discover what they are good at. But if teaching is a time burden, helping each student individually is even more of a burden. It requires lots of faculty to student one-on-one interaction, and that doesn't turn out research papers.

When I had my T.A. orientation to graduate school, I remember a presentation given along the lines of "courses don't have to be designed to wash students out; there ARE ways to get 90+% of the students to learn 90+% of the material". Then I got promptly sent to T.A. a course that had a reputation for a high flunk-out rate. That has stuck with me when I see poorly designed curricula that end up being obstacles to education. This is one area in which the military is more enlightened than academia. The military believe in teaching the content until the content is learned. And they also make better use of aptitude metrics. The only people who go to the military's language schools are people who have shown an aptitude for foreign language.

But I don't hold out much hope for the situation to get better. They have to make a 180 degree turn from thinking of students as education "consumers" who are there to purchase a career and get back to making education a voyage of discovery.

"FUCKING INSANELY HARD." Indeed. Hats off to you for even attempting!




ONLY 36% of white, 21% of black and 22% of Latino undergraduate students in STEM fields finished their bachelor's degrees in STEM fields within five years of initial enrollment. Nearly 22% dropped out after five years.

Low graduation rates among science and math undergraduates affect how the United States competes globally. Fewer biology and math majors means fewer doctors and engineers later.

"Statistics show most children around the world don't like math and science. They find it hard, and it's not really their favorite thing. But that doesn't matter. ....in other countries, ALL children study chemistry and physics somewhere along their education.....

"....other countries have much higher demands on their students, especially during the middle grades -- grades six, seven and eight. In those countries, they study algebra, geometry, physics and chemistry. In this country, our kids, most of them at least, are still studying basic arithmetic and they're doing very elementary, descriptive science; I call it 'rocks and body parts.'"


We can do better. We all don't have to get advanced degrees in bio-tech, but it laughable how scientifically illiterate, even in the basics, our general population is.

China is going to eat our lunch and will be OUR fault.

**over 40% of Americans do not believe in evolution**

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and about 20%, when asked if the earth orbits the sun or vice versa, say it's the sun that does the orbiting--placing these people in the same camp as the Inquisition that punished Galileo almost 400 years ago.

All of my career happened without spell-check.

teachers were demanding. I had to produce good work to not have english and writing not cause bad grades for me.

We are now friends. 40 years later.

Colleges compete hard for students--one result of which, thanks to lavish dorms, fitness centers, gourmet food courts, etc. used to lure them in--is the inflation in the cost of higher ed that has done such damage to the past two or three generations.

Nope, we're on the business model now, complete with administrators who fancy themselves to be CEOs and CFOs and the like, so there will be no weeding out. Lots of dumbing down, though. One must keep the customers happy, you know.

substantially lower degree completion rates for STEM programs than non-STEM. Science technology engineering and math programs are not being dumbed down, they are tough programs requiring hard work, lots of grinding hours, a serious commitment. The problem is see is not that college is too plush, it is that our kids are opting out of the tough programs, and these programs are the ones we need our kids getting degrees in if we are going to compete with europe and asia in the 21st century.

Nobody is going to weed anyone out. We might shift them to other programs, as this article describes, but the corporate mindset is too firmly entrenched in higher ed for anyone to think seriously about upsetting the customers.

The bit about students opting out of tough programs, well, you are right about that one, and it's an interesting topic, but one that I am always hesitant to discuss in public, because when you do someone always posts that Socrates quote about disrespectful kids and declares that you are just an old meany who hates the precious little snowflakes.

But, having been teaching college kids for just shy of twenty-two years, I can tell you that there are some generational factors at work here, things having to do with work habits, attitudes toward learning, and the like. It's discouraging, and I say that as someone who has loved teaching ever since that day I started teaching my first freshman comp class in 1989.

(Also, having completed a literature Ph.D., I resent the living hell out of the notion that English is a gut course for lazy would-be engineers.)

All of my kids went for tough degrees, but their peers: not so much. The last of my lot is in an engineering program and was living with friends who were coasting through degree-mill programs. It took him quite a while to figure out that his lifestyle was not at all compatible with theirs. English isn't the gut course for the lazy, that would be the undergrad business degree program. You actually have to think to major in english.

And it another reason that I quite teaching. Students were customers at recruiting time but commodities when it came time to deliver the goods.

lately: one colleague recently received, from a student who made some totally unreasonable demand and was turned down, an indignant note reminding him that she hired him and she was going to get what she was paying for.

That's how many of our students now see education: a financial transaction in which tuition dollars are exchanged for A's. Professors are there to hand the grades over, like the counter help at Burger King, where you can always have it your way.

One student handed in an assignment bt forwarding the email from her mother that contained all the other emails between the mother, student and the person who the mother hired to do the students assignment. Back when I went to school this would have been a slam dunk; auto F for the class and expulsion/suspension.

The outcome? Student slapped on the wrist via admin override of my wife's objections. That was her last semester.

that such students are actually redefining intellectual production in ways that privilege collaborative creation of knowledge over the old model of ownership.

Quite a few of our current students genuinely don't see anything wrong about using other people's work without attribution. It's not that they are deliberately cheating or anything like that--they honestly have a difficult time understanding that information does not belong to everyone simply because it's on the WWW.

That is priceless doublespeak! :)

who told tales similar to what you describe. I was at county community college at the time. He told of his experience teaching at a neighboring county college. The students would give him hell about their work deserving higher marks, then their parents would get involved calling dept heads, admin, etc furious over Johnny or Susie not getting the grades they "deserve". It isn't about knowledge or being able to think.... it is all about the piece of paper, and getting a job (even though a lot of those kids would NEVER be able to DO the jobs they get hired for. Service is atrocious at ALL levels, in all fields). This teacher was really good, and even though the subject could be tricky, with just a little bit of effort anyone could pass, and pass well. He finally stopped teaching in the neighbor county, in large part, to the grief involved.

My own experience in the campus writing lab was similar, though less extreme. I had students come in with some vague notion of what their paper was supposed to be about and then would get angry because I would not actually write the paper for them. Um, that isn't my job and I am happy to help you work through it, but no way am I going to do your work for you, kiddo. It was pretty stunning what the students expected from the lab.

And the school doesn't risk being blamed for the collapse of any bridges.

Why should students struggle to learn difficult material unless they absolutely love these subjects? Even then, they need to be prepared for the reality of limited job opportunities, competition from cheap foreign labor, long hours, boring work. Right now I know more math and science than did most of the very top scientists of the 20th century. Outside of writing papers and tutoring graduate students, this knowledge will never get put to much use because I don't want to design weapons or move to Switzerland.

I have to laugh when I hear people complain that we don't graduate enough scientists and engineers. Tell that to 5 dozen candidates who recently were turned down for a low paying postdoc position at my alma mater. They were all highly qualified, most vastly overqualified.

There has not been a single great scientists in history that did not have jobs that sucked before they changed the world as it was known during their day.

You do not have to produce weapons or go work at adding more detail on the make up of the atom in Switzerland. Look around you, there are many problems that you can have a major impact on. Why not work at increasing the efficiency of solar cells to where they are competitive with fossil fuel based energy generation? Why not work at making those same solar cells be efficient during in climate weather? What about cleaning up existing pollution and figuring out how to prevent pollution by developing cost effective technologies? No great scientist or engineer in history had their great discoveries handed to them and many of them were under employed when their masterstrokes were worked through.

Rethink. Some how, some way work to make technological change that improves the condition of human beings, animals and plants.

decide that the financial sector is easier and more lucrative.

She had a very hard time finding an employer that was not part of the defense industry. She finally found a job designing/engineering heart monitor devices. Now she works for Bose.

It seems to me that if one graduates as an engineer you really have no choice but to work for some large corporation. Even if you join a start-up, it just gets swallowed by the bigger fish. So one would have to have a personality compatible with what goes with that type of job.

In1969.

It happened to me, and it had nothing to do with difficulty - I was getting A's and B+'s in a few different sciences. It happened when we stopped talking about science and started talking about employment.

On the first day in one science class, the instructor explained that outside of school, it doesn't really matter how good you are at science. You're going to be on a team with a couple hundred other scientists, and you're going to bid on jobs from large corporations. Any personal, intellectual, or political traits you have that reduce the team's chances of winning bids for jobs are going to be held against you by everyone else on the team, and the odds of you being so outstanding at science as to win bids by your personal reputation are pretty low.

Another professor, in a different science, made it clear that at this school, students were being trained for corporate employment. If you wanted to be an environmentalist, you were expected to to so while working for a corporation, and you certainly weren't to do anything, or research anything, that threatened corporate money to the department. There was always a way to clean up, or mitigate, or prevent, a problem that was profitable to the powers that be, and part of your job as a 'scientist' was to make decisions for the public as to what is the 'pragmatic' option.

And in general, the quality of the instruction, and the student body, was such as to produce a staff of well-trained, competent machine operators to whom it wouldn't occur to ask any scientific questions without potentially profitable answers.

The English department, on the other hand, doesn't care what students say as long as they say it competently. They even find it amusing when you bite the hand that feeds them, as long as you do it with paper teeth. Getting professors fired by writing about them is not considered kosher.

pronounce it properly.

-Professor Henry Higgins

DO NOT GET ME STARTED.

but Fluid Dynamics, Circuit Theory, Mechanics, Physical Chemistry, Advanced Calculus, etc. are tough too. If you can't get Thermo, you may not be cut out for an engineering career.

I'm a Registered Professional Engineer in New Jersey and have enjoyed an interesting, lucrative career. I would recommend electrical engineering in the power sector as a major. It's not a glamorous major, but the country will need to replace a lot of coal fired capacity and build a lot transmission infrastructure to support renewable energy. That will require a lot of electrical engineers in the future. In any case engineering is a good career; I doubt you'll starve, but you should probably fail at sports or entertainment before you dcide to take it up (just kidding).

Another career worth looking into for non-College graduates is in power plant operations. A good way to break into this is in the Navy or merchant marine. Running a power plant is very much like running a ship. I've been in the power business for almost 30 years and many, if not most of our plant operators and maintenance people came from there.

I didn't go to college to be in an all boy's school so I changed my major to biology.

That was in 1978.

They're unrelated. A lot of programs take in more students than they have room for in the advanced courses. They want the kids that don't need a lot of tutoring, a lot of ancillary work, kids that are good in the disciplines or who are disciplined enough to be good.

My frosh year, first day of chemistry, the prof said that the dean had talked to him. They had aimed for 400 students in the entering class and had room in the sophomore class for 375. But they got 440 students who accepted and showed up, so he was to make sure that 375 students passed the course. Period. And, at the end of the year, he announced that 375 students had passed the course because he adjusted the grades on a curve to ensure only 375 passed.

Such is life.

The up side was that the chemistry course was rigorous. There was no need to worry about making sure every student passed. If you didn't get a bit, you got to figure it out (unless you were in some protected class, Cuban or black). They didn't care unless you cared. They didn't need to care. If you went to get help, you'd get it--it's not that they were heartless. It's just that they didn't make special provisions to teach to all 4 learning styles, etc.

They produced engineers with BEngs for industry, but they also want to have some go on to get their MEng or PhD. Back then you *wouldn't* be part of some large team. Like my friend, who's "large team" when he got his BEng in EE, his team consisted of perhaps 8 people. His largest was maybe 16, then he went into consultancy where he worked with one other guy, sometimes.

The smartest scientists I know have art and music backgrounds, and I think arts without science is dead.

Hell, look at Da Vinci. The man was a master scientist and a brilliant artist, and nobody thought he should have to choose between the two.

unless you arrive with a lot of AP credits. And every year of extra college means another year of tuition, which a lot of students can't afford.

With an Education degree, especially if you're going into secondary education. You are essentially getting two degrees, one in Education, and, excepting the capstone courses, a degree in your field of specialty. Generally takes five years.

with a degree in Mech E from a good school. It took him a year to find a job, and the pay level was quite disappointing. But at least he's employed, and he does like the job.

I could have taken at least one additional course per semester if I did not have to dedicate four to eight hours a week to lab classes and lab work. Lab fees and time commitments limit the amount of classes one can take.

My daughter will be heading off to a state university this fall with the intention of majoring in some sort of science/engineering ... she's been admitted to their honors program ...but, we shall see.

avoid the student loan debt and over-qualifications

This is a worthwhile topic.

During the course of my History degree, I saw lots of fellow students drop out. Historiography really did a number, one of the reasons my adviser called it "boot camp". Poli Sci majors face the same thing, my intro to political theory was a brutal course that saw fellow students crying with frustration over Plato.

Education does the same as well, I saw several fellow students drop off after a couple of different methodology courses.

Every major has a tendency to "weed" students out. In some ways it is a blessing, it points students towards a more suitable direction in their lives.

The odd thing is that the prof was one of the most liked ones in the department; even the failing students got a lot out of his class. People would go around boasting about a C minus from him, because it felt like getting an A from most other instructors.

A brutal course, but he was well liked

Intro, American politics, political violence, terrorism (and wasn't that interesting when I took it in '04)... He taught a summer course on espionage and international relations that I always wished I'd taken. Crammed two courses' worth of instruction into each semester - he assigned a few books he tested on but didn't cover in the lectures for each one - and got reams of teaching awards over time. T'was awesome.

What decent-paying jobs are there for someone with an M.A. or Ph.D. in History, aside from those precious few tenure track positions that have 50 or more applicants for each one?

Because if you know of any other way to get a decent job with a graduate degree in History, tell me please!

You can actually find work as a corporate historians, big corporations like Ford, etc. have on staff historians.

But history is best combined with some other degree, or at least a suitable minor. I combined mine with Education and a minor in Poli Sci.

Lotta museums, historic sites, and so on are the obvious spots; another response here mentioned some less obvious things like corporate archivists or historians. I know a few people who do consulting on one level or another, whether it's contributing to work on archaeological sites or more mundane things like assistance on TV shows or movies.

Most of the thirteen people in my history MA program ended up shifting into law or info science on the strength of our degrees (the latter because there was a fantastic prof teaching about historical archives; it became my cohort's favorite class). A few are working in museums at curator-level positions and a couple more are doing higher academic stuff - and the rest of us envy them - but for the most part people are doing okay. I'm working wildly out-of-field right now, but I burned out on the program of study about the time I completed it and was looking for Oh God Anything Else for a couple years to recuperate.

wtf. I started out studying math and bio. Anything math-y or quantitative has always come very easily for me. (Was a reasonably adept computer programmer at 10.) I switched to English because I found poetry to be more challenging. Lots of people can graduate with a science degree, but can you put in the decades of sweat and toil necessary to write an immortal poem? Can you best Milton? Eh? I'm not saying that I can, but I'm sure as hell giving it my all.

"Paradise Lost": "No one would have wished it any longer."

Best of luck beating Milton, btw :)

Don Quixote, maybe? I may be misremembering the specific book . . .

only heard that he said this in reference to "Paradise Lost".

I may have slightly mis-quoted Johnson (from a faulty memory). According to Wikipedia,

Samuel Johnson praised the poem lavishly, but conceded that "None ever wished it longer than it is."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost

"Was there ever yet anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim's Progress?"

lol. Strikes me as an odd mix.

is a bunch of crap, a Cracker Jack prize.

Even though I agree that we need to be teaching our children to be better at math, essentially calling other majors crap because they aren't STEM is B.S.

... are today what going off to Oxford or the Sorbonne to study scholastic theology and philosophy was in 1240.

In the 13th century, those were the majors that got you jobs, and showed you were serious about the worship and veneration of the God popular at the time -- the Trinitarian, Christian God. So they were two-fers.

in Archaeology will essentially be a bunch of crap because it's not STEM.

And nothing that can't be modeled mathematically is real.

It's the theology for a new Middle Ages.

and nail his or her 95 Theses to the doors of academe. Hasn't happened yet, but one can always hope :)

There are lots of stories of drunken, rowdy students causing trouble in Medieval Paris. Some things never change! :rofl:

I'm heartened to see more people rejecting the "education as business" model. Reagan Repugs pushed this idea, vocalized loudly especially by the Newt. It's done more damage to higher education than just about anything else in the last half-century. Fully in keeping with the Repug habit to degrade and destroy while calling it "reform".

Yes, college should be a voyage of discovery. And it is also a giant (and rather heartless) sorting machine. I found in my first year of college that some of the majors I was considering (including the one I chose) were very different from what I had expected -- not necessarily harder, just different in culture. I also learned that there were fields of study I had never heard of, and had never considered for a major. Students who enter college certain of what their major will be may be setting themselves up for disappointment, or passing up opportunities of which they are unaware. Best to take a variety of courses and explore the options in your first year or two. Take some of the hardest courses in your major EARLY; if you can't handle them at all you need to reconsider your major, and if you think you can handle them OK on the second try you still have time for that. Most students put off their hardest courses for last, thinking they'll be better able to handle them then. WRONG! Take each course as soon as possible after completing the prerequisites satisfactorily, so that the material is still relatively fresh, and you'll take best advantage of what you've recently learned. It always appalled me to see students who had placed their graduation in jeopardy because they had postponed their hardest courses and ended up doing so badly that switching majors was just about their only option -- and couldn't do that without spending another year in college (which they probably couldn't afford).

who proudly boasted, over and over, about how he was going to run the uni more like a business.

ugh.

After all responsible have escaped with their golden parachutes?

This is what I think of when I hear the phrase "like a business".

I have a kid starting college soon and I'll be sure to pass this along. I kept putting off the harder courses because I loved my major so much, but I was just postponing the inevitable. Despite my experience, however, I never thought about applying the point you made to anybody else. I think my son has stars in his eyes about his chosen major and has no idea how hard it will be, and it's not as though he has fire in his belly about pursuing it--so your advice may help steer him more quickly to a major that suits him better. Thank you so much!

And advice I wish someone had given me. I was the first in my family to get a college degree, so I wasn't familiar with the culture. I think too many advisors assume their students basically understand how things work. In fact many students don't ask questions because they don't know enough to figure out which questions to ask -- and don't know it! I know that certainly described my situation at first. By the time I learned better, it was to late to use the info.

Hope your kid does OK, whether he listens to your advice or not. ;)

not easy to achieve in light of the other subjects. Still have trouble in the job market. I'm going into coding and billing now.

Too bad for them. I have never found my choice to be a detriment, but also, I didn't expect a job to be handed to me after graduation.

to most people.

:evilfrown:

It's not a job I particularly like, but it pays the bills and a few instances of that left me as kind of the office rockstar, so it sorta balances out even if I'd probably go more in-field if I saw some good opportunities.

How is this news?

Chemistry, beginning of first semester 250 students, end of second semester, 12 students remained, all but me chem majors. Calculus first week of semester 1, 300 students in an auditorium, end of second semester, 25 in a small classroom.

This was quite some time ago. It has always been done this way.

Usually switched over to the business school. So often that engineering classes were jokingly called "pre-business".

of students that showed up for his first class. On opening day the auditorium was full. Grad assistants had to stand. My mid semester, the class was down to five rows. The dropout rate 80% or more. Of the remaining 20%, approximately 25% failed the class. I was among the survivors and would finish the year of training, to the extent that that same professor looked at me like a student god whenever I passed him on campus. That year was difficult, I was young and did not like that professor. Many years later that professor stands as one of the top shapers of me as a scientist. He taught me that scientist is difficult and discoveries illusive, but that I can never give up.

Your comment of not liking some teacher, then seeing they helped you, I disagree with.

There are some that think those that wrongly put you in hardship deserve some credit for making you stronger.

Or they think that is the system and how it is suppose to work.


A person would not have to be that strong if there were not people doing that, furthermore, the credit does not go to those that create unjust situation, but those that give help during those tough times.

If that was the system, they wont want me to graduate, becuase I would change that system.


That concept is spoken of in the idea of Hazzing in fraternities. Where you can be treated wrong by a sadistic asshole, so that you know how, and will treat someone else using those same sadistic means later.


I think it is better to be nice, and have no part with the sadist that have no concept of how to treat people with dignity and respect, nor do I think those that treat people wrong outside of justice and compassion get any credit for putting you in a position you have to make it through.


But then again, I am due beer and travel money.


The Movie 'The Game' had that as a plot line.
The Game
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWmcDLOjkjI


I don't play the game, and champagne and being part of that group at the end is not something I would accept by the actions they do, and if around them, I would be there to show them they do not have to be broken. Side note, those that accept that role, are actually those that break and allow themselves to coast by some other control. There are many people that drink champagne not like that, but if you watch the end of that movie, you see why it is wrong. It is actually the exact same think as the show punked, where they treat you like crap, or get you to worry, then think becuase they were pulling a prank on you, that makes it ok. Forget them, I never enjoyed the idea of treating someone wrong for someone elses fun. It is sadistic.

I don't play the game. There is no reason to break.


To many good people, stories, and songs out there to spend time thinking on.

Elisa - heaven out of hell
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xcd7ucSfgLo

And I been saying this since day one, and have not joined the group that says have fun out of being mean to people, or making them sad.

I will find something other then that type of existence a bit further down the road. And there is so much good stuff on the journey.

I have never, ever heard of any curriculum that teaches thermodynamics to freshmen. That's just ridiculous to try to introduce it that early, especially before more advanced calculus and differential equations. You simply CAN NOT delve deeply into the study of thermo without having some idea of how to solve a partial differential equation.

On the other hand, it should be hard to get through an engineering, science or mathematics program in college. It should be hard to get through English, history, foreign language, art and psychology, too, for that matter. There is too much of an emphasis in this country on everyone "needing" a college degree, and as a result, we have people with B.S.'s and B.A.'s flipping burgers or doing data entry.

nt

They graduated in the top 10% of their classes. They took AP classes with them to college. They stuck it out as long as they could, hoping to get chemical and computer engineering degrees. But the college in Madison kept throwing up new hoops to jump through. After five years of taking classes and getting screwed, they've moved on to other degrees.

Too bad. They are bright young men with a passion for learning and for their chosen majors.

This grind-them-up-and-spit-them-out attitude will not keep us at the top of our game as a country.

Anybody can have the aptitude to be ANYTHING!

:eyes: