ZyyzYzzy
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Those are trivial and meanial professions. Nothing compares to working in a call center
The Higher Education Thread: Justify Poor Life Choices
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BrutulTM
Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun.
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This is a fundamental problem with college IMO. You are supposed to pick a field when you are an 18 year old retard and then you spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars going to school and when you graduate you still have almost no idea what working in that field is even like. Then when you have 3-5 years in at a job and you realize that you made the wrong choice, you are so invested in that field that it is really tough to scrap it and go do something else.
With regard to the basic value of a college degree, I think it is vastly overrated when it comes to how we value employees based on it years down the line. I worked with a guy who was closing in on 60 and had spent 35+ years working at the same company but for some reason they considered him unqualified to be a manager because he didn't get a master's degree back in his 20's. Now that is absolutely fucking retarded and the idea that a 25 year old coming out of grad school would have any advantage whatsoever over this guy in doing this job is beyond ridiculous. Plenty of guys with master's degrees and even PHDs were walking into his office daily to get help from him on technical shit but he only had an associate's degree so he was shut out of certain career paths with the company even that far down the road.
On the other hand, while I can't speak to degrees like psychology, my engineering degree was absolutely useful to me in my job. Obviously people at work had to teach me a lot, but they didn't have to teach me how a transistor or an op amp worked or how to use a computer and that would have been a huge waste of time for the company. When I went to college I thought you learned how to do a job there, but you don't. College just gives you the background info that you need in order to learn a job once you get out.
College can also be a nice transition between being a kid and being an adult where you have the chance to fuck up a bit and have a soft landing vs. what happens when you fuck up in the real world. If you're in college for that though, you better be going someplace cheap because you can't afford $50k a year unless you're getting a degree that will get you a good paying job.
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ZyyzYzzy
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Ugh fine.
I think that if you major in one of those useless things (communications, womens studies, and so on) all you electives should have to be hard sciences with labs. Scientific method and critical thinking are invaluable and I don't think you get those skills really reinforced with a lot of classes. Also math, high level calc should be a requirement for any degree.
yerm
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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You are making a mistake in assuming that the actual knowledge should be applicable. What you should be learning is as much HOW to obtain knowledge. Getting homework assignments completed and on time is as important as having them correct, as silly as that may sound to you. Same for tests - completing the test and answering the questions that are asked in the manner requested is as important as having the correct knowledge-based answers. Ever had a teacher that gave you a zero if you did not put your name on an assignment? Go thank them. Ever had a professor that let you arrive late, skip class, complete tasks after their due date, and the like? They fucked you up.
I agree with you on the importance of a well rounded education, but for the reasons listed above. Forcing STEM majors to take unrelated electives is useful because exposure is useful, being pulled out of your comfort zone is a part of life, and dealing with subjects that are common but not interesting is just something adults need to do. Obviously the same in reverse, forcing a history major to take a math course isn't just about needing to know how to do math, but also being able to do something people say they hate and/or are bad at and getting it done regardless. Every student needs to be exposed to at least one course that requires them to look outside their comfortable norm to succeed.
My company's biggest partner hires pure math majors for their CSRs. It sounds absurd at first, but according to the VP, math majors can be counted on to learn anything if given the means and are the natural best at handling nonsensical requests. They do probably zero actual college level math, ever, at all. It's not about being sociable or extroverted, it's about solving ANY problem without breaking down or giving the customer lip.
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Mist
REEEEeyore
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I actually think we do elementary education pretty well in most parts of the country.
If you talk with educators, 7th and 8th grade are like completely lost years for most students. This is where the problem starts.
At that age, a small subset, less than 10%, of students are already mentally prepared for rigorous high school-level courses. Good school districts will shunt these students off into specific programs for them, bad school districts will just waste their time.
Meanwhile, the rest of the students at that age are too distracted by hormones, social/personality development, etc to get much of anything useful out of sitting in a classroom. This would be a great time to put these kids in an experience-based learning environment, and instead of trying to teach them 7 hours a day of math, grammar, etc at this age, get them into community service projects where they can learn life skills, teamwork, etc and burn off some of that energy. You could work some more applications/reinforcement for various academic subjects into the projects, make them into combination project-lessons, this would help prevent some atrophy of academic skills. You could continue this service project into the 9th grade, but during the latter half of that year you'd have some kind of capstone type classroom experience where the students explored what they learned in their project and how they're going to apply that to future learning, etc.
High schools would then work basically like community colleges do now. Currently both high school and community colleges are trying to teach the same stuff for most of the students, we're literally doing it twice, wasting tons of time and money in the process. We should just combine the best aspects of both and offer it to students starting at grade 10.
The biggest problem you have here is that you create basically a two-tiered system where you have one track for very academically focused students, and another track for everyone else, and this tracking starts as early as 11 years old in this proposed system. But from what I understand, Germany already tracks students like this to a large degree, and gets significantly better results than our system.
Cad
scientia potentia est
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People say tracking is racist since it will overwhelmingly favor white students at the expense of black/latino students. So it is therefore bad.
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ZyyzYzzy
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Pure math is probably the major that provides you with the most diverse opportunities. Work with a few mathematicians now on modeling and simulation programs. All have been employed in a ton of different industries. Also, a good mathmetician can make bank in banking/finance.
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Mist
REEEEeyore
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Medical school is an entirely different animal. Medical school in its current form is an invention of the AMA and I have no idea how you would even improve it. The general idea of it is semi-sound, you pay a lot up front, and then the back half, you're getting paid while you learn.
As for nursing, the number of useless cunts with CNAs is staggering. There has to be a better way of doing this process.
ZyyzYzzy
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Cad
scientia potentia est
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Mist is smarter than everybody... except when it's time to complain about how shitty her life is.
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TJT
Mr. Poopybutthole
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Mist
REEEEeyore
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The smartest person I've ever met is a kid I went to high school with who got a degree in EE, worked in the field for 18 months, then decided he wanted to be a doctor instead of programming sonar systems.
He is a cardiologist now.
He told me "it's staggering how many not-very-smart people are in medical school and get through just fine because they have a good work ethic, but then end up being not-very-smart doctors."
Mist
REEEEeyore
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I wasn't mixing them up, I was just making a related statement about how useless CNAs are.
Cad
scientia potentia est
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Uhh... you serious bro?
In education, EVERYTHING is racist. IQ tests are racist. The SAT is racist. School districts where anybody can buy a house there but the district is 90%+ white are racist.
In shitty school districts/schools they used to try to separate the kids who were there to learn but that has been deemed racist as well.
THIS IS FROM 1988 30 motherfucking years ago
The Tracking Controversy
ZyyzYzzy
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Wife and I plan on trying to get our daughter into Thomas Jefferson High Shool, one of the best public schools in the country and harder to get into than some Ivy League colleges (based in acceptance). Being half white and Asian will make it more difficult for her to get in.
Not all public schools are bad mist.
Not all public schools are bad mist.
Cad
scientia potentia est
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Every person in every profession is a combination of work ethic and native intelligence and that mixture is not always static. There will be "dumb" hard working doctors and "dumb" hard working IT professionals... then you have your highly intelligent but lazy ones, and the rare rock star highly intelligent hard working one. Doctors are no different.
Dumb AND lazy? Probably working in a call center.