How to look for a suitable job?

[Lilith]

Hmm. I 'doubt' that you're older than 20, and 'suspect' you've never had to tough it out in the real world. This is based on my observation that you spout the same nonsense I did before I was hit upside the head by the working world.

 

Okay, Ghaldring, you know quite well that this kind of personal attack isn't acceptable. You've evaded multiple permabans and the only reason you were still allowed to post here is that we hoped that after a long break from the forums you'd learned to tone it down. It's obvious that you haven't, and our patience with you has run out once again. Find somewhere else to post.

[Alorael at Large]

You want lots of analysis? Georgetown University has you covered. Although some majors are more valuable than others, all of them boost income. Unless you go for a very, very expensive education in the least paying field you'll get your money's worth.

 

And while you do need money, other research has found that the cap on correlation between income and happiness is quite low. You don't actually need to be rich to be happy, and you could well derive more pleasure from being middle class with more time for hobbies, or middle class and doing work you find fulfilling rather than soul-crushing and mind-numbing.

 

—Alorael, who has not much to get out of continuing now, but maybe someone wants to see the relative advantages of different degrees. Oh, and get a graduate degree. Those things also pay well, and the best of them will pay you to get them!

[Mistah Q]

Wow, what a derail. At least it seems like the original question was answered pretty well, before page one got off track.

 

I guess it's not necessary with Brocktree banned, but maybe a separate thread about the state of education, so here we could talk about what Red Night Saint is doing with biochemistry.

 

There are a lot of companies that employ chemists to test things - Alcoa, BASF... but probably more on the other side. Biochem you may be more employable in the nutrition industry perhaps? Especially if you're willing to take a bribe, er grant, to conclude that some additive or another is GRAS. Kidding, but only sort of.

[*i]

Many of the BS and BA liberal arts majors/degrees often do not lead to a job in that particular discipline. Universities exist to give people a diverse background, which makes them versatile to many employers. There are many jobs out there that require an educated person with critical thinking skills, but not really specialized knowledge that can be taught at a university -- that's what on-the-job training will address. Now, there are plenty of exceptions out there, but a BA or BS in a liberal arts major is certainly not a waste of time, you just may not end up doing a job that relates to your major.

 

The professional and STEM degrees are usually different. There is simply too much specialized knowledge required in those jobs for on-the-job training to address in a reasonable amount of time. The people I hire have to have learned the basics of how nuclear reactors work and how radiation moves through matter, which itself requires a reasonable level of mathematics and physics to understand. I can certainly teach my people in ways that supplement their knowledge or help them fill in gaps, but I simply do not have time to go over everything taught in the requisite courses.

 

So for me, I cannot simply hire an intelligent critical thinker with a liberal arts undergraduate degree and have them be productive in any reasonable amount of time. I do know other people with jobs that are non-technical or semi-techical (requiring basic math, computer skills, etc.) who certainly can.

[Mistah Q]

The people I hire have to have learned the basics of how nuclear reactors work and how radiation moves through matter, which itself requires a reasonable level of mathematics and physics to understand. I can certainly teach my people in ways that supplement their knowledge or help them fill in gaps, but I simply do not have time to go over everything taught in the requisite courses.

I am, in part, pursuing an interest in contributing to thorium as a future energy solution, and it's staggering all the layers of chemistry and tiers of math I have to put together, before I even get to the "good stuff." I sometimes feel like I'll be studying for another decade before I can start putting together queries that are truly meaningful. And there's no way around it really.

[Student of Trinity]

I'm confused about what education is really for. I feel bad about that, being a professor, though being a professor in Germany, I don't feel as bad as I would if my students were paying tuition. But they are still paying a big opportunity cost by taking several years of their youths to study. Why should they do this?

 

I can think of two kinds of reasons, but they're very different, to the point where it's not at all clear to me that it makes sense to try to serve both reasons at the same kind of institution.

 

On the one hand you can learn things that are directly valuable only to you, and whose value to others is more intangible. People like learning cool stuff about stars and numbers and poems and plays and old battles and stuff. Yay; learning stuff is fun. People will pay for it, in time and in money, and so they should. Yay learning.

 

On the other hand you can learn useful skills that enable to do things you otherwise couldn't, valuable things that other people for which other people will want to pay. So people will pay to learn how to perform brain surgery or audit company books. Then they need to get a credential to certify that they can really do those things. So this makes sense.

 

In practice there's not actually so much overlap between these two kinds of education. They tend to concentrate pretty strongly (though by no means perfectly) in different faculties or schools. Maybe the fact that these diverse schools are nominally part of a larger structure called a university is just a historical coincidence, as are the facts that the instructors bear the same 'professor' title, and credentials called 'Bachelor's degrees' and so on are issued by all. It's arguably unfortunate, though, that these superficial similarities tend to conceal such an important distinction. Maybe fewer people would make choices they later regretted if there were a choice between getting a Bachelor's Degree in English Literature at a College, after being lectured by Professors, and getting a Diploma in Electrical Engineering from a School, after being trained by Instructors.

[Slawbug]

...cthulhu-on-a-cracker, REALLY?

 

Are we really going to do this again?

 

SoT, we KNOW that you think the sciences are somehow better than the humanities. We know that you are constantly looking for new ways of saying that that don't use literal words like "better" but nonetheless make your conclusion quite clear. We know that you are inevitably going to use backhanded insults when you talk about the humanities. We know that you present yourself, perhaps genuinely, as feeling tortured about your conclusion.

 

And you know that some of us find your comments on this subject disrespectful, because we've told you so. We're treading on old territory here and not going anywhere new. For the love of the Nine-Headed Cave Cow, can we please just skip this?

[*i]

I am, in part, pursuing an interest in contributing to thorium as a future energy solution, and it's staggering all the layers of chemistry and tiers of math I have to put together, before I even get to the "good stuff." I sometimes feel like I'll be studying for another decade before I can start putting together queries that are truly meaningful. And there's no way around it really.

 

It's a long and, at times, emotionally draining ride, but it's not as bad as it feels (and I'd know!). An undergraduate degree focused on math, physics, and chemistry can give you a good foundation, but you are right that it is very difficult to make any significant contributions prior to that. After that, you'll probably end up going to graduate school, and there you can really drill down and focus on the learning the highly-specialized knowledge you'll need. This typically takes about two years.

 

Adding this up, if you can get through undergraduate in four or five years, then that's about six or seven until you really get to start contributing in a significant way. So definitely not the path of least resistance to a successful life, but if this is your passion, once you make it past all of that the rewards are worth the journey. And while we never know how the economy will shift, you'll have plenty of broadly applicable skills that have historically been in high demand for quite a while.

[Alorael at Large]

If you want to be an engineer there is, practically speaking, no substitute for an engineering degree in the appropriate field. If you wan to be a scientist then you need a graduate degree in your field, and to get that you need an undergraduate degree in that field or a closely related one. If you want to be a doctor there is literally no substitute for getting any undergraduate degree followed by an MD. If you want to be a plumber the best path is getting plumbing training; college really doesn't enter the picture. And if you want to be a professor you need a doctorate in the field you want to teach (or, again, a closely related one, particularly if the field you want to teach in is somewhat interdisciplinary).

 

If you want to do countless other jobs there's no clear need for a particular degree. Lots of jobs tend to hire from particular related fields (at least for hires just out of college) but don't do so exclusively. Others have no degrees that really apply at all and just hire whoever seems like a good fit. And these are lots of jobs that are almost certainly as productive, if not more so, than all the scientists churning out papers no one even in the field really wants to read.

 

—Alorael, who thinks there may well be something wrong with asking people to study art history in order to work in an office, but he's not sure how to fix it. Because he's pretty sure that completing college does provide information about potential hires. Not directly or optimally, maybe, but companies don't care about that. They just want the info.

[Kelandon]

In practice there's not actually so much overlap between these two kinds of education.

I'm aware that you think this, but I hope you're aware that a lot of people here think you're wrong. And not just a little wrong. Ludicrously, horribly, outrageously wrong. It's also not clear why you think that you know better about fields that you haven't studied than people who have actually studied these fields.

[Student of Trinity]

...cthulhu-on-a-cracker, REALLY?

 

Are we really going to do this again?

 

SoT, we KNOW that you think the sciences are somehow better than the humanities.

 

No, you don't. I don't. You have leapt to conclusions about what I believe. No doubt for understandable reasons; no doubt because I've been unclear. Unclarity, however, is the inevitable norm. In my view, you should have been more charitable in your interpretations. You should have followed more carefully my actual reasoning, persisted a bit more in trying to see what I was getting at, based on our long acquaintance, and perceived my genuinely valuable points, rather than noticing the first superficial resonances between my points and various tedious bagatelles, and assuming that I was offering no more than the same, warmed over.

 

Slarty: of course I'm doing a bad job explaining myself. If you haven't noticed, notice now: explaining is hard. Cut some slack. Try harder. It's worth more effort than you're giving it, it seems to me. The role you are choosing, of carping at people who are trying to solve actual problems, is easy to play, but pointless. Get back in the game. Stop blowing the whistle. Start kicking the ball.

 

Most of the pure sciences fall on the same side of the usefulness divide as the humanities. There is a largish demand for education in star appreciation, just as there is for education in Shakespeare appreciation. Kelandon nailed this one. But understand what he nailed, and what he didn't. Nobody ever recovered from a heart attack because of star appreciation, any more than anyone ever did from Shakespeare appreciation.

 

There is a smallish market for people highly trained in satisfying these largish markets for appreciating wondrous things. So a few people should be trained to teach star appreciation, and to teach fiction appreciation. This is in fact how physics departments have worked for some decades now in North America. Something like 1% of North American undergraduates study physics, and these few do so mainly to become physics teachers or professors. And that's probably the reasonable and sustainable proportion. Physics departments in North America mainly subsist on research grants and on large-enrollment courses for engineers. And that's probably the reasonable and sustainable situation.

 

Humanities departments should probably work in a similar way, I think. This is the full extent of my prejudice against the humanities. As a matter of fact I've studied them a bit. I took four lousy undergraduate English courses. On the other hand, I won the freshman English prize in my circa 10,000-enrollment university for what turned out to be the lowest grade I earned in English, and my three following courses were a narrowly period-specific progression of seminars to an Honors thesis on Paradise Lost. Somewhere along the way I've read a lot of books. I've met and talked with lots of people in fields outside my own, including some who are famous within their own fields. I've sat on search committees to hire professors in fields outside my own — search committees always have some faculty-external members.

 

I know full well I'm not an expert outside my field. I am not an ignoramus outside my field, however. It's not true that every field is entirely autonomous. In the end there is only one pie to carve up, and everyone judges everyone else. Rightly or wrongly, every academic expert has to justify their existence to people like me, just as I have to justify my existence to them. I ask questions. I don't accept buzzwords and snow as answers. So far, I have always been satisfied, though sometimes I've had to ask twice. In my judgement, my colleagues in the humanities are peers. Not on politically correct principal, but because having grilled them, they've passed muster. If you think I'm being arrogant in saying that: what do you think 'peer' means? They judge me, too. So far, I have always left humanities professors nodding, reassured that physicists are not idiots after all. I can speak their language. I can understand their answers. I can explain myself to them.

 

Why should anyone study anything? Getting a job isn't the only reason, but look. I'm a professor. This is my job. I need an actual answer, not just a politically correct affirmation of what things are not the only answer. After quite a few years of experience, it seems to me to be like this. There are the reasons that, if you need to ask about them, you ain't never gonna know. Fine; they're real reasons. But then, there are the reasons about acquiring skills that are of use to other people. Those reasons aren't crap. Those are good reasons.

 

Somehow you have to balance the different kinds of reasons, when you decide to go to one lecture, or another. In my sophomore year I pulled a miserable B in thermodynamics, because I skipped every third lecture to attend the Renaissance poetry and prose seminar. Now my research is on quantum thermodynamics, and although I think about stuff I learned in those two thirds of physics lectures, sometimes I also think about Milton's picture of creation from Chaos.

 

I wasn't thinking about a job either way. In retrospect, I was lucky, but that was stupid. Universities have not yet quite caught up with this. They need to.

 

There is a lot of money in telling bright people in their twenties not to think about this.

 

It's blood money.

[nikki.]

There is a largish demand for education in star appreciation, just as there is for education in Shakespeare appreciation

 

aaaaaaaaaaah!

 

fiction appreciation

 

*headdesk*

 

Please. Please stop using the phrase 'an education in [x] appreciation' to refer to the study of a field you consider inferior, substandard, or less academically rigorous. Just stop. I, personally, find it incredibly insulting that you continue to use this language. I worked hard to earn my degree and having it compared to 'star appreciation' (an improvement on the last comparison, I must admit) just leads me to the opinion that you really don't have any idea what studying a B.A, in the humanities actually entails. If that's the case, then please take a moment to educate yourself. You'll find Kelandon, Alorael, and myself all spoke about this the last time this issue reared its head.

 

That said, I fear, as I increasingly do when addressing you, that I'm speaking to a brick wall; as Slarty notes, you're set in your belief that the sciences are better than the humanities, and I'm not sure that anybody here will be able to convince you of the merits of the latter. We have certainly failed before.

 

Edit: Blah. Either I am very poor at reading, or you added some things in there after I posted. Anyway, now my post feels a little harsh, but I'm gonna leave it as it is.

Edited July 6, 2014 by nikki.

[Slawbug]

Yeah. At this point, SoT is just trolling us as far as I'm concerned. (Man, talk about people I never thought I'd be saying that about!)

 

 

This looks like trolling PARTICULARLY because the previous topic discussing this ended with SoT's idea receiving heavy criticism from numerous users, the majority of which he refused to address in any way.

 

He then, in a subsequent thread, defended his practice of only presenting his own ideas and refusing to have an actual dialogue about them.

 

 

I assert that it is a show of incredibly bad faith to be bringing this up again without having addressed the loose ends that I and others brought up, as part of our labor of trying to understand SoT's position. We put in a lot of work to try and build a bridge between our own understandings and SoT's. SoT, instead of throwing platitudes at me about "Get back in the game" ... How's about YOU try doing that? You literally refused to engage in the game of come-to-a-better-mutual-understanding that we were playing before. We're already in the game. You're the one who's out of it.

 

(edit: and by "addressed" I don't mean "satisfied" -- I just mean "acknowledged and responded to in any way whatsoever" -- you know, making it a discussion, rather than a lecture series)

 

Until we're all willing to respect the basic tenets of dialogue and of multiple-participant discourse, my comment on this thread is DON'T FEED THE TROLL.

[*i]

While the knowledge acquired in humanities and social science courses is often not directly applicable to a job, the analytical and communication skills required to get through those courses is quite valuable regardless. College offers a great opportunity to develop and, as far as an employer is concerned, demonstrate those skills.

 

My experience hiring engineers is that many candidates tend to be strong in the scientific, mathematical, and technical areas, but are lacking in those others, and I do not hire them. Like it or not, most STEM jobs involve working on teams, communicating work both verbally and through writing, writing proposals that persuade sponsors to fund you, interacting with those sponsors, managers, or policy makers (who are not always technically savvy), drawing connections between ideas, assessing the abilities of potential collaborators, etc.

 

Many of the skills I listed are not going to acquired in any classroom, but through life experience. Others, like the ones involving critical thinking and communication of ideas, are, in my estimation, developed better in liberal arts courses than in STEM ones.

[Alorael at Large]

you're set in your belief that the sciences are better than the humanities

Be fair. He's explicit in not thinking that and putting sciences in the useless bin. I agree that the "appreciation" label is belittling. And I'm not sure how physics is an exception, except in having a better match of number of students taught vs. number of students for whom there are positions in the field. But I'd argue that that's a terrible metric for undergrad education; most people don't stay in their major. Maybe that's not the case for highly technical/professional degrees, but for liberal arts—and that includes sciences—it is. It's okay to give out too many English degrees; most English majors will go into business, or journalism, or education, or work for a some policy NGO, or whatever else that isn't academia.

 

To be fair, I think SoT's point does have merit. It's not clear why we teach people English when most won't really directly or obviously benefit from having studied it. The only real argument, I think, is that we don't really know how to structure college instead that would be better. It clearly works, somehow, for something, and produces measurably better incomes. It wouldn't be more useful to have more people study physics, would it? We don't need more physicists; grant money's already tight. Granting that physics may be a more difficult and rigorous discipline than some others, how is that necessarily a good thing or useful for anything later in life if you're not going into physics?

 

—Alorael, who can come up with a counter to the blood money argument: if you don't want postgraduate education, and don't want to go into a technical field, it probably doesn't matter much whether you study physics or Renaissance drama. All you need is the paper at the end that says you're a college grad. (Yes, there are differences by degree, both in income and employment rates. It's worth pointing those out. But that's still complicated by other factors, like likelihood of postgraduate education.

[nikki.]

Be fair. He's explicit in not thinking that and putting sciences in the useless bin.

 

My post was made in response to the first version of SoT's post, as I pointed out in my edit. His revised post is different enough that it makes me look like I just plain didn't read half of what was said, and my post seems unfair and harsh as a result.

 

Sorry!

[Alorael at Large]

I actually had the window open for hours and didn't see your edit. Or any posts after yours.

 

—Alorael, who will also add that he's convinced colleges do have some absolutely useless classes. That tends to be more based on absolute lack of rigor or material in the class, not because of the subject.

[Kelandon]

Slarty: of course I'm doing a bad job explaining myself. If you haven't noticed, notice now: explaining is hard. Cut some slack. Try harder. It's worth more effort than you're giving it, it seems to me. The role you are choosing, of carping at people who are trying to solve actual problems, is easy to play, but pointless. Get back in the game. Stop blowing the whistle. Start kicking the ball.

It has been explained to you, repeatedly, why your explanations in these topics are less clear than they ought to be: you use the wrong words for what you're trying to express. You have a habit of using language that is vague, pejorative, or simply wrong. This is particularly galling when other language is available, superior for communication, and presented to you clearly, and you simply ignore it.

 

If you're going to ask others to try harder, I'm going to ask you the same thing. I understand that you're struggling to explain things. But when people are telling you that you're being unclear, they also tend to try to explain why. When you're getting a piece ready for publication and an editor or peer reviewer comes back with, "This paragraph doesn't make sense; here are four things about it that are unclear," do you reply, "Explaining is hard. Cut some slack."? Rather, I imagine that you respond appropriately. I ask you to do the same thing here. Try harder.

 

There is a largish demand for education in star appreciation, just as there is for education in Shakespeare appreciation. Kelandon nailed this one. But understand what he nailed, and what he didn't. Nobody ever recovered from a heart attack because of star appreciation, any more than anyone ever did from Shakespeare appreciation.

In a previous topic, you made a semi-legitimate point that there's no reason in principle that one couldn't train skills of critical thinking, communication, etc., in a science major in the same way and to the same degree that one does in a humanities major. I have my doubts, but, well, it's not obviously wrong on its face, anyway. Now, though, you've slid to a completely illegitimate assumption that that's currently true in practice: a science major trains skills in the same way and to the same degree that a humanities major does (in reality, right now). That's just wrong.

 

Maybe the logical error you're committing is equating the content of the course with the outcome of the course. That is, the class only exists to impart information to the students, and its value lies entirely in the information that the students acquire. Thus, in a physics class, you might learn about Newtonian mechanics, and in an English class, you might learn about a bunch of Shakespeare.

 

But that's clearly nonsense (which is the relevance of Stareye's post). The content of the course is part of the relevant outcome of the course, but the skills developed in learning and applying that content are probably far more important. At no point after my quantum class have I actually had to know what the Schrodinger Equation was or how it applied to a particle in a box. That information was useless. Nonetheless, the mathematical and quantitative analytical skills that I practiced with various applications of the Schrodinger Equation have come in handy from time to time since then (in jobs, no less!).

 

But the same thing is true of my Classics education. No one has ever paid me to translate Latin, but close reading of a text? I'm in law school, for god's sake. Close reading is what I do, and this summer I've gotten paid a ton of money to do it.

 

By way of further anecdote, I used to teach people how to score well on the LSAT. For all that science classes could, in principle, develop the kind of logical thinking that the LSAT tests (a field called "informal logic"), they generally don't. Philosophy classes do. It was noticeable among my students; the engineers (who wanted to become patent lawyers) struggled a lot more with informal logic than the Philosophy majors. This didn't have anything to do with the content of philosophy courses, which rarely or never comes up on the LSAT; it has to do with the skills that those courses develop, which are applicable outside the narrow content area in the courses.

 

Or consider what I teach now. I teach introductory economics at a fancy university (probably the fanciest in the country). A lot of my students are going to go into finance or consulting. The content of the course that I teach involves things like calculating deadweight loss under externalities, or imperfect competition, or whatever. At no point in their finance/consulting jobs is anyone going to pay these students to calculate deadweight loss under an externality. Yet they get paid a whole bunch of money for having learned what I taught them. But what I taught them involved quantitative (and sometimes communicative) skills that can be applied to financial/business topics, not the narrow content of the course.

 

(Yes, there's also signaling in play here, but, if anything, that supports my point even more. To the extent that doing well in these classes is not developing skills but just signaling the existence of skills, no class in higher ed is actually training you to do something that someone will pay you for. But I don't think that signaling is all that is going on.)

 

So if you describe an English class as "fiction appreciation" (or an astrophysics class as "star appreciation"), you're being a twit, but more importantly, you're wrong. Sure, an undergraduate History major who takes three or four classes on European history in the Early Modern Period is probably not going to get paid anything to know about Early Modern European history, but if you call those classes "history appreciation" classes and presume that the only value derived from them is that the student enjoyed them, then you're devaluing the skills of reading and writing (among other things) that the student invariably practiced in those classes. That's insulting, but more importantly, it's wrong.

 

Now that this has been explained to you, you have two choices for dialogue in good faith: 1) explain why you disagree, or 2) adjust your language and positions accordingly. If you choose 3) continue to use the same terms with no explanation, then you're trolling and will be treated as such.

Edited July 7, 2014 by Kelandon
If I were being less charitable than I am, I might suggest that the Early Modern European History student would be a little more skilled at "explaining things" and might not struggle so much with it. But I'm being charitable.

[Goldengirl]

In practice there's not actually so much overlap between these two kinds of education. They tend to concentrate pretty strongly (though by no means perfectly) in different faculties or schools. Maybe the fact that these diverse schools are nominally part of a larger structure called a university is just a historical coincidence, as are the facts that the instructors bear the same 'professor' title, and credentials called 'Bachelor's degrees' and so on are issued by all. It's arguably unfortunate, though, that these superficial similarities tend to conceal such an important distinction. Maybe fewer people would make choices they later regretted if there were a choice between getting a Bachelor's Degree in English Literature at a College, after being lectured by Professors, and getting a Diploma in Electrical Engineering from a School, after being trained by Instructors.

 

A lot of the points I'd make to respond to your arguments, SoT, have already been made. Perhaps more harshly than I would have made them, but nonetheless they were made. My only point of information that I'd like to add, then, is a rhetorical question.

 

Doesn't the distinction you're describing already exist in the form of trade schools as a distinct alternative to universities?