The Higher Education Thread: Justify Poor Life Choices

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kegkilla

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OU Ariakas said:
A legit alternative to going to a 2 or 4 year college with actual vocational training? MUST BE A SCAM.

I know or have worked with dozens of people that either dropped out of high school or didn't go to college that went to ITT Tech and turned their shitty jobs into careers.

What a fucking joke.
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To be fair those people you know are probably the exception. The employment rate out of for profit mills is abysmally low and the default rate on the loans people take to attend is astoundingly high.
 
Swagdaddy

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Cad said:
I mean, if you don't like dealing with people, specifically sick people, day in and day out and being "busy" (not an office job) then I would say being an RN is not a good choice. You really need to think about the job you're signing up for.
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The dream job would be in humanities like teaching or social work, but the salaries are just such shit in comparison to the medical field
 
Cad

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Swagdaddy said:
The dream job would be in humanities like teaching or social work, but the salaries are just such shit in comparison to the medical field
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Medical jobs just tend to take over your life so I wouldn't get into it thinking it's going to be a 9-5 and you can party otherwise. All of the medical people I know are slaves to their schedules which are shitty and long hours for no discernible reason.
 
BrutulTM

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Xequecal

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Cad said:
Medical jobs just tend to take over your life so I wouldn't get into it thinking it's going to be a 9-5 and you can party otherwise. All of the medical people I know are slaves to their schedules which are shitty and long hours for no discernible reason.
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Yeah, this. Everyone keeps telling me I should go to back to school to become a PA because I have the experience/grades to get in.....but then I see how many hours the PAs work for that salary, and I realize there's actually no reason to bother with years of PA school when I could make the same salary simply by getting a second full time job instead. I work 10pm-6:30 AM nights, and it's not uncommon for the PAs to still be there at midnight or 1 in the morning after having gotten in at 9 AM.
 
Xequecal

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BrutulTM said:
Ouch. I don't know anything about ITT, but that would be pretty rough to go through a whole degree program and then have your school shut its doors a month before you graduate, especially since those credits probably won't transfer well at all.
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The silver lining is that a school shutting down before you finish your degree program generally discharges your student loans, so whatever credits they got that they can transfer, they get to keep those for free.
 
Cad

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Xequecal said:
The silver lining is that a school shutting down before you finish your degree program generally discharges your student loans, so whatever credits they got that they can transfer, they get to keep those for free.
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You don't get back the one thing you can't get more of: years of your life.
 
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ZyyzYzzy

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Yep, only job I'd consider pursuing in the medical field would be a high paying doctor specialization due to hours. If I need to work that much I want to be making a million+ a year.
 
Swagdaddy

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It's biggest appeal honestly is the amount of demand in a region that really has none for anything else but counting the boomers pills

Appreciate the perspectives
 
kegkilla

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Swagdaddy said:
It's biggest appeal honestly is the amount of demand in a region that really has none for anything else but counting the boomers pills

Appreciate the perspectives
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Do you already have a degree and are now pursuing Nursing? I'm thrown off by your comment that you're moving back to the region.
 
Xequecal

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ZyyzYzzy said:
Yep, only job I'd consider pursuing in the medical field would be a high paying doctor specialization due to hours. If I need to work that much I want to be making a million+ a year.
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There's plenty of hourly jobs in the medical field, they're just not the six figure ones. I'm not sure how much you make now but you can make something like $60-$90k as a med tech on 40 hours a week.
 
Frenzied Wombat

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yerm said:
You say that the very nature of the subject exclude those forms of teaching: why? The assignment very well COULD have been comparing themes and foreshadowing etc, I am going off decade old second hand account here for that example. The point wasn't the specifics, the point was to have these courses deliver the problem-solving aspects they currently lack. I see no reason why both approaches can't be taken concurrently; have parts done in abstract while also dropping in more specific "math-like" problem solving on your social sciences. Attention to detail is also more an issue of the bullshit level of relativity permitted here; while it probably won't ever reach lab-course levels, a good social science should still have it as a valuable tool (and many of my history classes did, some did not).

Meanwhile, I think we only slightly disagree on 1 and 2. The problem is of course 3. With these bullshit courses, I assert that they are only bullshit because they are being taught that way when I fail to see why these couldn't at least be held to the same standards as 2. Why is there no content? Because the subject matter doesn't allow it, or because the majors have evolved to not include it? I 100% believe it's the latter. First and foremost almost every one of these bullshit-laden majors has a glaring omission of statistics and statistical analysis that should be beaten into every part of their major. Next, women's studies often skip or gloss over history while anthropology students are (in my experience) shockingly ignorant of geography. These end up being 95% pseudo-philosophical bullshit with no wrong answers. Maybe they'll never make STEM, but they can at least be held to your category 2 level.

Painting is a whole other beast. Art school is its own level of scam bullshit. Even still, it IS possible to have solid course work there, but that's going to be the very few and far between courses that assign challenging projects rather than art history feels-based BS. The people who did art that I know were basically taking 3 or so total courses equal to one of these brutal lab-based sciences and then the rest (90%+) were gender studies level bullshit.

In both cases (gender studies etc and painting etc) a big issue is that people coming in know perfectly goddamn well they're diving into completely useless and inapplicable bullshit. They want it. They are deliberately avoiding a real major. If Gender Studies involved intense statistics and history learning up front, followed by rigorous projects with real grading (eg researching cause and effect properly, conducting surveys and correctly calculating error and bias), with actual work loads and potential for failure, I assume most of the dipshits would bail. Meanwhile, the purple hairs that actually cared would still take it, but in this case, they'd end up tumblr blogging with at least some semblance of background on the matters at hand. Sure, they'd probably still be authoritarian moral crusaders, but at least maybe they'd be zealots who know shit like how the wage gap actually works and acknowledge that obesity is unhealthy. Maybe.
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In the case of point 1, I'm just saying the very nature of the subject matter is not meant to be taught in any form of quantitative or non-subjective fashion. Sure, you can shoehorn some quantitative exercises into your English class, but then you're not really teaching English anymore. There's a reason why an English paper can get a totally variable grade depending on the teacher/TA who grades it, while a math/science test should get the exact same grade no matter who marks it. It's just the nature of the subject matter.. At the Uni level your education is supposed to be focused, so imho if this were to be done anywhere, it would be better off at the HS level, particularly for those that make it clear they don't plan on choosing a career in STEM.

Probably agree with you regarding arts majors knowing that they chose a bullshit easy major, though I've never found one that would admit it. In fact, they seem to be convinced that their shit is really hard (and I believe that they believe that) mainly because they haven't taken anything that is actually really hard in their life. These punks decided by grade 7 that they would take every remedial math/science class through HS, and only the ones they have to.

As for introducing anything "rigorous" into tier 3, good luck with that. It would probably be considered an aggression lol.. People take these majors *specifically* to dodge courses like intro to statistics.. I remember psych majors crying that they had to take one or two basic statistics courses, so the blue hairs would fucking melt if they had to do the same.. Not to mention the blue hair teachers would suddenly have to be qualified to do so..

IMHO, if there's a root cause to be addressed, it's at the High School level. The standards and requirements for math/science in HS are pathetic, and the gender studies idiots are being incubated there. Those that make it clear that they have no interest in STEM related courses should get the alternative education you allude to.
 
ZyyzYzzy

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Xequecal said:
There's plenty of hourly jobs in the medical field, they're just not the six figure ones. I'm not sure how much you make now but you can make something like $60-$90k as a med tech on 40 hours a week.
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Eh I make 120k and will hopefully move up the ladder to senior manager/portfolio manager in half a decade making a decent amount more. Like I said, I need to make million+ per year to consider working shit hours and with sick people like a doctor.
 
Swagdaddy

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kegkilla said:
Do you already have a degree and are now pursuing Nursing? I'm thrown off by your comment that you're moving back to the region.
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Just finished a 6 year stint in the armed forces, moved back to my hometown a few months ago and am just finishing 2 semesters for the RN degree (In MI to take the NCLEX for RN only requires an associate in applied sciences in a pre-approved program)

For context I'm 27 and trying to make my next career path choice ideally the last.
 
kegkilla

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Swagdaddy said:
Just finished a 6 year stint in the armed forces, moved back to my hometown a few months ago and am just finishing 2 semesters for the RN degree (In MI to take the NCLEX for RN only requires an associate in applied sciences in a pre-approved program)

For context I'm 27 and trying to make my next career path choice ideally the last.
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If I was in your shoes I would get into a professional services firm (they have a lot of trouble hitting their quotas for military hires) on some path that leverages your military credentials - I know there's a lot of gigs in the DC area that require security clearances.
 
TJT

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Swagdaddy said:
Could use perspective of college educated folk due to the lack of their existence in my personal life, after moving back to my home rust belt region (Mid-Michigan) I quickly discovered the only in demand and decent salary positions were medical field related.

I'm now in a RN program and it's going well but and am I a retard for going with a degree that I really have no personal connection to? It's by far the safest and most reasonable for the community I live in.
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I went a similar route to you in life. Joined the Army at 18 got out when I was 23. I had always known I liked working with computers and had experience programming and scripting when was a teenager. Along with constant pet projects with statistics and coding while I was in.

Anyway, I heavily abused the CLEP test program and was a DLI graduate. So I walked into university with just about everything completed but core major classes. Two degrees in two years (CS/Statistics). Been working in the IT field for 4 years and now I am seriously considering working for myself full time as my sidework in database engineering/query report design and app development steadily picks up steam. I'm 29 now.

I grew up in Oregon originally, but there's really three questions you need to ask yourself.

1.) Am I cool with moving?
2.) Do I like medical(or whatever)?
3.) What lifestyle am I looking for (work/life balance and salary)?

Figure out the answer to those and you're set. Seems to be you're in the medical field just because its the most logical? Nothing wrong with that but you need to be cool with it. Medical field makes it very hard to do things like work for yourself. If that's something you think you might want to do.
 
Swagdaddy

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It just seems like the closest I can get to my natural humanities type interest but without making piss fucking poor salary
 
TJT

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You may want to consider government work then. You can maintain your humanities interest, not make piss poor salary and have good benefits. Vets preference and all that too.
 
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