"My degree in French and Spanish – despite being a decent grade from a good university – is not worth the paper it's written on."
we're probably talking about a few dozen thousand dollars piece of paper anyways, nothing cheap.
I wasted four years of my life – don't make the same mistake
41–50 of 71 posts
Re: I wasted four years of my life – don't make the same mistake
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do people assume that making more engineering majors = making more people analytical and reasonable? A whole bunch of things: - doing engineering isn't magically going to change your thought process. Some people don't think the same way as others - they probably wouldn't enjoy engineering if they did it (I don't doubt they could apply themselves to get a degree). You think if Obama did a BEng the world would imme…
I'm pretty sure biology falls within the S in STEM. "Guns, Germs, and Steel" is a pop-science book, surely you could have used a more literary example to represent "the arts."
I chose that book because: engineers love it. Engineers don't necessarily love Marlow's Faust, or the Ring Cycle, or any other great achievements of the arts. Also, there's a significant anthropological and sociological component to GGS. OP's sort of engineer hates "soft sciences" like these.
"The arts" was probably a bad choice of words, because few people are brazen enough to say art isn't good. Instead they'll say art is a good hobby, surely you can program by day and still write some little operas or something at night. Of course, this completely understates the dedication and focus required to produce a work.
I really wanted to defend the soft sciences: psychology, socioligy , anthro, and other things people on HN don't see the need for.
Re: I wasted four years of my life – don't make the same mistake
#43FTA: > My teachers recommended that I study economics and statistics as my A-level subjects, but I had my mind set on a life fulfilled by the arts. And in the next paragraph: > Without realising it, I was a victim of a gender stereotype reinforced since birth, that men do science and maths and women do arts or languages. Society was encouraging her to go into the sciences. Or was it that she was trapped by a "gender…
She also wrote: "Computer science, technology and physics just did not figure in my teenage world view. Nobody popular in my school chose to study those subjects." She gave more weight to the peer pressure from other teenage girls, especially from the popular girls, than she gave to the word of her teacher. Not very uncommon. Peer pressure on what is considered "cool" vs. "lame" is a strong force in teenagers. I don'…
It is easy to not succumb to peer pressure. You have to just change the way you are thinking - people follow peers to become accepted. But if you do, you will not get noticed.
You have to stand out. You have to do what the others are not doing - and make a stand for it. And you will get noticed. For example if everyone in your class smokes, and you politely decline everytime you are asked to, people will notice. If everyone wants to do a PhD but you think of it as a waste of time and want to get out, people will notice.
And people will even follow you.
Re: I wasted four years of my life – don't make the same mistake
#44As the parent of a sophomore history major, this is something that I think about a lot. However, my son has a deep, deep passion for history. Advising him to get a CS degree just for job purposes seemed stupid, and considering how much help he needed from his high school sister to get through his Python class last year.... Although I am happy that his liberal arts college requires everybody to take 2 CS classes, I am…
I would advise your son to look into some of the digital humanities programs – people are doing very interesting things using CS techniques (e.g. text or image processing, large-scale data mining, visualization, etc.). It doesn't pay as well as working at Facebook but it would probably be far more interesting for someone like your son.
One of my favorite examples was someone I ran into at the NIPS conference years back who was using machine learning to classify the handwriting for manuscripts in the Oxford library collections in an attempt to identify the copyist when that information had been lost over the centuries.
Someone phrased it beautifully that they preferred having CS being their superpower in a different field. I think that's a great plan.
Re: I wasted four years of my life – don't make the same mistake
#45As the parent of a sophomore history major, this is something that I think about a lot. However, my son has a deep, deep passion for history. Advising him to get a CS degree just for job purposes seemed stupid, and considering how much help he needed from his high school sister to get through his Python class last year.... Although I am happy that his liberal arts college requires everybody to take 2 CS classes, I am…
Maybe watch this with him, it's George Dyson (Freeman's son) recounting the story of the development of the computer at the IAS. It links CS to that fulcrum of the 20th century, the invention of the nuclear bomb. It's also highly entertaining, a very story told through coffee and ink stained punch cards. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg5gJxXBh8s Thinking about it perhaps your son is more into knights, emperors and…
Actually, he is a pretty big fan of cold war paranoia :) Military history is his passion. He is hoping to turn into a job as a historian with the National Park Service or something like that.
I'm definitely going to watch that video though.
Re: I wasted four years of my life – don't make the same mistake
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am guessing this is sarcasm but the mind boggles at how much progress could be made if more people went into science and engineering majors. Not just due to their increased direct contributions, but also the effect it would have on political discourse and culture. We could do a lot worse.
It's difficult to overstate how misguided this is. Engineering types are already seen as the ones who picked the right major, so we're seeing a flood of people heading into those fields. The result thus far has been that we have more ways than ever before to target advertisements and share stupid pictures of ourselves and offer interpretations of rap lyrics. Has this improved western culture, as far as you're concern…
Science and engineering has influenced culture far more then traditional literature in the past half century. You might not like the direction our culture has taken, but you are far more likely to be able to change it with technology then with prose.
Re: I wasted four years of my life – don't make the same mistake
#47In his 2005 Stanford commencement lecture, Apple Computer founder and college dropout Steve Jobs credited a Reed College calligraphy class for his focus on choosing quality typefaces for the Macintosh. He seems to do alright.
He was not exactly a technical illiterate. In fact, I get the feeling quite a few media folks / commenters (not the parent post) who say he has a lack of technical knowledge have does less electronics work than Jobs did.
Re: I wasted four years of my life – don't make the same mistake
#48> Anybody can learn to code and these days it's as important as reading and writing.
So, assuming like 1 million Americans can code (....might be a bit exaggerated), approximately 99.68% of Americans are illiterate? Holy shit, we're doomed!
As of 2012, 16% of the American population lived in poverty, including 20% of children. Learning to code is difficult enough, and even more so if you are struggling to make enough to eat and keep a roof over your head.
> I was wrong as a young woman to presume that technology was not a creative subject – that's sadly a presumption still shared by a third of school-age girls today.
Many young men also presume technology is not a creative subject. In her case, she was just a regular human being that wasn't interested in computers. This has nothing to do with gender.
You also don't have to be a genius to realize a degree in literature or language isn't going to have a huge job market. There is a market for translators, and being bilingual helps a lot in a variety of fields, but just speaking spanish or french is not a career path. Gender stereotype did not determine she had to pick that degree.
Re: I wasted four years of my life – don't make the same mistake
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't agree with the statement that[...]language and art are a waste of time I agree with you, they're excellent hobbies.
I'd go with "foundational parts of the human experience," but feel free to dismiss them as "hobbies," I guess.
> I'd go with "foundational parts of the human experience"
But not necessarily professions. The notion of "professional artist" is fairly recent. Most of the great artists, pre-20th century, had day jobs: from Chaucer (diplomat, astronomer) to Lewis Carroll (Mathematician).
And, if anything, I'd think that art not being a profession only made their art better. I mean, how much can someone who all he does is write all day can possibly have to say?
Take Asimov, for example. I wonder how interesting his science fiction would have turned out had he not been, first and foremost, an actual scientist?
Re: I wasted four years of my life – don't make the same mistake
#50Go to school for your job, study what you love for a lifetime. Get that degree that will pay the bills, but then once you start work, make it your hobby to study music or 17th century French Lit or whatever.
If you like the group study dynamic, join a book club or audit some classes at the local community college or state school. Most of the higher level lit classes have very few students anyways and they'll welcome another voice in the discussion.
Better yet start a book club, or a lit discussion group. Put that tech degree to work and make an online version of this group. If it gets big try and monetize it!