71–80 of 263 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, but there are other fields of work where poli sci grads would be more common than math and physics grads.
Government, I suppose, but then that's basically what they're trained for, so...
Take English majors as a more straightforward example. Virtually no English majors are employed doing anything directly related to their studies.
The author was quite harsh on the soft sciencies and humanities and I'm going to attempt a defense. First, he characterises these subjects as merely what, facts to be learned, instead of how, skills to be mastered. Let's take history, which seems very what, full of dates and names. A great course in history teaches you how to think differently and with deeper context about world events and your country's politics. I…
Indeed. I owe a significant amount of my professional and financial success to being able to communicate my/my teams' ideas and breakdown and communicate company strategy to my teams.
After a certain base level of excellence in engineering or another technical field, the distinguishing characteristic among levels of accomplishment seems to be communication, not a further 0.5% better at engineering. I see so many great technical people who are unable to communicate effectively and suffer badly from this.
The author was quite harsh on the soft sciencies and humanities and I'm going to attempt a defense. First, he characterises these subjects as merely what, facts to be learned, instead of how, skills to be mastered. Let's take history, which seems very what, full of dates and names. A great course in history teaches you how to think differently and with deeper context about world events and your country's politics. I…
The author was quite harsh on the soft sciencies and humanities and I'm going to attempt a defense. First, he characterises these subjects as merely what, facts to be learned, instead of how, skills to be mastered. Let's take history, which seems very what, full of dates and names. A great course in history teaches you how to think differently and with deeper context about world events and your country's politics. I…
For anyone interested in learning more about people (and yourselves) I highly recommend Jordan Petersons' lectures on youtube. I believe he has started working on an online university for the humanities with all the money he's bringing in from patreon (he wisely hid it recently but it was close to 60k per month last time it wasn't)
The author was quite harsh on the soft sciencies and humanities and I'm going to attempt a defense. First, he characterises these subjects as merely what, facts to be learned, instead of how, skills to be mastered. Let's take history, which seems very what, full of dates and names. A great course in history teaches you how to think differently and with deeper context about world events and your country's politics. I…
An MIT professor can be naive. A history major learns how to read and analyze documents...and how to write. An art major learns how to create art. An even more significant difference between these and many contemporary STEM subjects is that an undergraduate is expected to know how to create original work...there's no copying art homework especially not in an advanced class. These days I think that the creative elemen…
Seeing past this level of understanding is an attrition gate in any subject. What I mean is, the students who got past freshman chemistry to become good chemists are the ones who saw the creative element in chemistry.
Those same students may have taken the programming course and seen different codes as fungible with one another. Or in math, proofs, or in English, essays. I know people who came away from the freshman programming course, with the conclusion that "it's all just memorization." Clearly it means they didn't get it, but it also means it's a widespread impression.
As for chemistry, for reasons we don't know, part of developing creativity as a chemist is to get what they call "hands," which means being able to take care of yourself in the lab without wreaking havoc on everything. You need to have a sense of what can and can't be done in a practical process, in order to see your way through a difficult project.
The author was quite harsh on the soft sciencies and humanities and I'm going to attempt a defense. First, he characterises these subjects as merely what, facts to be learned, instead of how, skills to be mastered. Let's take history, which seems very what, full of dates and names. A great course in history teaches you how to think differently and with deeper context about world events and your country's politics. I…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't speak for MIT, but I can speak for a couple of Ivies. The content covered in the curriculum and the speed at which it is covered is one potentially challenging aspect of one school over another. The more important aspect, imho, is your peers. Speaking for myself and what I have heard others experience, peers can push your thinking to more sophisticated levels -- this can be in terms of something like elegance…
Then one should prefer the universities in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan. Students from those countries outclass everyone else on every level of the education system. Just look at PISA results and TIMSS -- it is almost scary how good they are. In fact, one should avoid all American colleges since American students are quite a bit below the international average on those rankings!
1. PISA is a widely administered test for 15 year olds.
2. TIMSS is a widely administered test for 4th and 8th graders (Advanced TIMMS does "last year of secondary").
3. We are talking about university -- specifically elite universities.
4. I am extremely familiar with education in East Asia (most familiar with Japan), and their teaching of the fundamentals of math in junior high school and high school are in fact excellent. Sadly, this does not translate well into creative thinking. The best math people in Japan are largely limited to a small number of schools (3 or 4 elite ones and maybe a handful of others that have some players).
5. While you are correct that the average quality of education in the US is lower than other places (there are lots of US-specific reasons for this), the education at US elite universities and the US high schools that feed into elite universities is quite a bit higher than the US average. It's tough to find hard statistics on this because it would reveal a class bias in the US (gasp, there is one!), but spending some time in these classrooms and talking to and working with the students from these schools is fairly convincing anecdata.
I'm not sure what you have against US schools and/or US elite universities, but I encourage you to open your mind -- there is a reason why we have a lot of world-class top-rated (by any measure other than cost) universities here.
This was written in 1997. "From the Association of Alumni and Alumnae of MIT April 1997"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An MIT professor can be naive. A history major learns how to read and analyze documents...and how to write. An art major learns how to create art. An even more significant difference between these and many contemporary STEM subjects is that an undergraduate is expected to know how to create original work...there's no copying art homework especially not in an advanced class. These days I think that the creative elemen…
These days I think that the creative element of programming is why software is eating the world at the pace it is. Undergrads can look at each other's code and say Wow! while one titration is fungible with every other. Seeing past this level of understanding is an attrition gate in any subject. What I mean is, the students who got past freshman chemistry to become good chemists are the ones who saw the creative eleme…