"sooooooo.....what's your major?"

chemistry. which is lol because i couldn't even remember year 8 chemistry now if i tried

english

modern culture and media - born from the english department as the semiotics department, then got renamed as it incorporated film and television studies

music

english will win btw

technically, "applied music - voice" which means "vocal performance"
xpost

journalism

should have done english

was there unapplied music?

think they call that 'music theory'...

economics and political science, i chose the former

yes, or music ed
xpost

english, the gnarliest of all majors

xxpost: just curious whether "composition" was considered applied music

poli sci

forestry will lose.

fuck forestry

everything but 'applied music' is just called what it actually is:

* Applied music (performance)
* Composition
* Jazz studies and contemporary media
* Music education
* Musical arts
* Theory

why is forestry so hated?

law & politics, picked politics duh. shoulda taken english lit.

i don't hate forestry.

what does jazz have to do with contemporary media?

I was a double major in philosophy and english: this added an extra year to my undergraduate education.

there should be a tandem poll- "are you happy with the major that you picked?"

don't ask me!
i think they should all just be renamed "bachelor of music in you will never earn a decent living"

lol xpost!

jazz and twitter studies

(Music history/musicology should also be on that list, obv.)

endless xposts I'm earning a living BTW.

english

there was no undergrad musicology major, grad only.
my sr year they added an extra certificate you could get in 'world music studies' or something.

xp tehresa - that's refreshing compared to where I got my undergrad degree, where it felt like the sensibility was to rename common majors such that one would often have to explain what it was.

so far it seems like music might be giving english a run for its money.

(maybe I shoulda used a different phrase...)

At my college "popular music criticism" was offered as an ethnomusicology class.

A fellow literature and philosophy person here.

lol wtf!
xpost

english

okay contest over english is gonna win

math but i have forgotten 95% of it in just 3 yrs :(

just imagine how much math those of us who haven't taken a math course in almost 20 years have forgotten!

a lot%

history

Philosophy aka degree in not-giving-a-fuck-and-just-talking-shite-and-only-going-to-three-lectures-a-week

(started doing maths and switched because I decided I'd rather read stuff and wanted to be challenged. I wish I'd just done a degree in something I understood and could pass exams in and stuck to the challenging reading in my free time)

Currently in journalism, will probably switch to, like, ENGLISH

xp alisa: tempted to classify my major as "creative writing" because there was sure a lot of bullshit, pulling-things-out-of-one's-ass going on.

in retrospect, would've gotten degree in studio art and/or geography

yeah i would have done geography or linguistics. i really don't like math anymore.

sarahel did you go to brown?

i liked physics but my school's physics BS was 5 years, no thx

xp tracer hand: Yes, yes I did. Put me in the category of current college tuition at alma mater exceeds current annual income.

philosophy = literature degree with bells on in terms of interpretation of books. No-one tells you this shit when you're 18.

English Lit, should have done more or less anything other than English Lit.

what no one told me when i was 18 was that i should stick to the subject i actually had a real aptitude for, and enjoyed, rather than thinking that a university degree was the right time to try something new

i minored in religious studies & super smash bros

What no one tells you when you're 18 is that 18 is probly not the right age to go to university.

NV restating some horribly emergent realisations of early real life

in retrospect, should have conquered my fears of drawing and looking at slides of old paintings and majored in art/semiotics, so I could have taken more classes making things rather than writing about difficult theoretical texts.

that is really true. was in no way ready for it then. on the other hand i seem to have landed on my feet, and that's as much because of the crapness of university as despite it.

xps re 18

lex OTM, which is why I gave up maths after a year to concentrate philosophy, which could and should have been an interesting interest while still acing maths exams.

(also noodle vague painfully OTM, but thankfully I (under duress) took a year out to grow up a bit instead of going at 17 like I wanted. Grown up me would hopefully still have made better choices though)

english involved not *doing* much, whereas all the art classes i took (late in my college career, having finished my major relatively early) were all work, all the time, and it was great. got really bummed for a while that i couldn't hit reset and do art straight from the beginning :(

Chemistry. Was alright for 4 years but don't miss it.

The first brief university experience I had (Lancaster) there was some modular system unique to the university that I never really understood, where you were supposed to sign up to your major in some sports hall on the first day.

Despite being offered a place in English Lit, I was told it was 'full up' and got offered the leftovers. I was so unassertive in those days I was going to be graduating in a combined Philospophy, Religious Studies, Sociology degree (with some element of antropology I think).

My track record on choices has been pretty shitty for the last 22 years but jeez I hope I'd've made a better fist of it at 25, having not developed bullshit drinking habits, than I did at 18.

Yeah, I started college at 17, and was pretty immature and didn't really start getting into it/getting valuable things out of it until I was 19.

xp gbx: I took a lot of English classes, and in retrospect felt like most were a waste in that I could have read those books in my spare time post-graduation.

Math, hence the stupid (re ILX) user name.

i huess i knew yall were english grads. ugh.

we have found collective solace in the wordier corners of the internet

Yes I regret not majoring in Business personally.

my degree was in political economy (of industrial societies) which was a mishmash degree that required political science / economics / foreign language classes. I really liked it because I was able to take random stuff that interested me (architecture and city planning) and but still had to take the econ classes to get a semi-legit background. I would've double majored in econ too but I was too lazy. also sorta wanted to double major in 'urban studies' but that woulda taken like 20 more years to complete.

yeah, see, that's the thing: i majored in english because i liked *reading* not because I liked criticism. in some ways, majoring in lit kinda ruined it for me, for a while. i read exclusively non-fiction for a long time.

i loved being an english major. it was perfect for me. i botched my senior thesis but everything else about it was fantastic.

and lo now i am in doctor school \(°_°)/

I was naive and actually liked books unlike some of my fellow undergrads I think

hoos are you serious? xp

in some ways, majoring in lit kinda ruined it for me, for a while. i read exclusively non-fiction for a long time.

oh man

i need to get back into reading, like, asap

how am i the only history grad so far? shit is fucked.

that is my plan for the summer. i read a short novel recently and it was like whoah haven't done *that* in a while

oh and I secretly regret not being an architect, george costanza style

law school has ruined reading for me. i've read one half of one book in 2009. i used to read like 2 books a month on avg!

I did two BAs in a row!

First: double major at Berkeley

Second: BA in English at Oxford.

I am a repeat offender English major. It was cool to experience the big differences between US and UK in the same field.

how am i the only history grad so far? shit is fucked.

I decided at 14 that I didn't like history and only got into it 10 years later when I picked up the Penguin abridged verzh of Macaulay's History of England. Funny guy, funny book. Bit iffy on Irish people.

I did two BAs in a row!

First: double major at Berkeley

Second: BA in English at Oxford.

I am a repeat offender English major. It was cool to experience the big differences between US and UK in the same field.

― Neotropical pygmy squirrel, Sunday, March 15, 2009 7:58 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagggggggggggggggggggggiiiiiiiiiiiiiiin

"harvard is my safety"

My degree had a LOT of history in it but technically prob closer to poli-sci.

yeah i mean i took 5 semesters of music history for my perf degree lol

My major was Computer Science. I am a huge nerd. :(

sometimes i wish my major had been computer science

or physics

hoos are you serious? xp

― HHooHHHooHH-oob (harbl), Sunday, March 15, 2009 11:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

no, not at all.

My minor was "Sociology of Popular Culture" lol

Whenever I tell people that I'm reminded of Nick Nolte in "Blue Chips" excorciating one of his players for failing "TV Studies."

HOW DO YOU FAIL TV???

hi dere history guy

thread connections:

-what is wrong with people? [Started by Dave Stelfox (Dave Stelfox) in May 2004, last updated 16 seconds ago by POLLonius (country matters)] 2 new answers
-"sooooooo.....what's your major?" [Started by iatee in March 2009, last updated 38 seconds ago by he sounded italian enough to give me something (the schef (adam schefter ha ha))]

poli sci and history

Voted "Graphic Arts" for my BFA in Photography/Computer Graphics, but I also got a BA in English at the same time (just 'cause I'm such a badass and all).

was it at berkeley/oxford tho?

Oddly enough, it was a different combination of A-list state university & ivied Euro institution: Michigan & Trinity College

I signed up to double major in history and sociology, found out the sociology department at my uni was balls, dropped soci, picked up a polisci minor, decided polisci was terribly boring, and came out of the whole thing with a major in history and a minor in nothing. I'm satisfied with that, although if I did it over again I probably would've done a double major or a minor in urban studies/geography.

English, which I predict to sweep it.

Doubled in psych and religion; picked religion because psych was boooooooooring

Was Journo, now Poli Sci

English. Double-minored in sociology and philosophy.

Actually not-sarcastically disappointed I didn't get the double in philosophy or sociology, but with my fuckups there was no way to get it done in 4 years.

what an xp and how i envy u jaymc

will be graduating in may with a b.a. in math

no clue what the fuck i'm gonna do with it

you could solve crimes using math like the guy in that show

http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r277/TJ_HALE/count von count/sesame_street_count_dracula2.jpg

that sounds like fun

you could solve crimes using math like the guy in that show - are you referring to Mathnet?

i was thinking of 'numbers'

Ha, HOOS. I basically decided to do the philosophy minor right before senior year, when I realized that there was room in my schedule for three additional philosophy classes before I graduated. I was friends with a couple of philosophy majors and was really into the idea of being an intellectual who could earnestly discuss Heidegger. I also really liked the three philosophy classes I had taken on an a la carte basis (philosophy of language, philosophy and literature, and aesthetics). But in retrospect, I'm not sure I got a whole lot out of those three additional classes (ethics, epistemology, contemporary continental), and I sort of wish I had taken more history and/or art classes instead.

English/Creative Writing

Also this: yeah, see, that's the thing: i majored in english because i liked *reading* not because I liked criticism. in some ways, majoring in lit kinda ruined it for me, for a while. i read exclusively non-fiction for a long time.

― i like to fart and i am crazy (gbx), Sunday, March 15, 2009 7:54 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

Is pretty much exactly how I felt.

journalism. i don't know if it was really necessary -- i learned as much from working on my school paper as from my journalism classes -- but i enjoyed the upper-level media theory, law and ethics classes, those were cool. minored in french, with a sort of side interest in film studies. best elective class i took was a semester of existentialism in the philosophy department. although the history of communism poli-sci class was pretty cool too. and the anthropology classes. and the russian folklore class. really, i wish i'd had another year or two to just take electives.

Music is the closest thing there, yet if I clicked it it would be a wrong, wrong option.

my major was english with a lit/creative writing concentration so i picked "creative writing." i'm not unhappy with that choice of major, but if i were just starting a bachelor's degree now, i'd go for something else. i don't enjoy writing as much as i used to, and most of my favorite books these days are nonfiction.

Am I the only English major here that loves theory??

In addition to writing and lit obv

would have liked to take more policy-oriented classes back then, but most of the kids in the "philosophy, politics, and law" undergrad major were overachieving, narcissist, student government a-holes. (xposts)

Am I the only English major here that loves theory?? - nope

where's "Dropped Out"????????

technically I'm still a fine art major, I think

xxpost: tho it's been a few years for me & I'm severely out of the loop.

ACCOUNTING :(

I liked theory so much I stopped reading fiction and just read theory instead.

yeah, I did the same thing for about a year or so. After college too, on my own time.

Am I the only English major here that loves theory??

This is why I branched out into philosophy and cultural studies.

it's funny, i didn't take many english classes, so my exposure to theory all came through media theory and film studies, which i loved. but most of the film majors in the classes (who had to take a certain number of theory-type courses) hated it. i remember during a discussion of the privileged gaze, a sulky dude with long hair going, "why do i have to know this? i just want to make movies!" there were similar reactions from some of the journalism students in the media theory courses.

Journalism -- in retrospect, a mistake.

pre-pharmacy

This is why I branched out into philosophy and cultural studies.

..my exposure to theory all came through media theory and film studies

This is one reason I loved reading theory: the funneling together of so many disciplines into one big inter-textual patchwork.

(In the end, I think I'm a bit grateful that "theory" still has a different meaning in music.)

im into theory but i cant handle 'theory' classes; i would have been a terrible cult studies major

My college didn't require a major (The Evergreen State College, Olympia WA). I voted Creative Writing, as this most closely approximates the classes I took. I consider it a degree in Rhetoric more than in Creative Writing, as my interest was broader than fiction, drama or belle lettres.

physics.

lol at you guys talking about "theory"

if someone gave me three/four extra years of life and the money to do another BA, i would do architecture or design or something, or maybe, at a push, french. i like history and reading english novels too much to have them ruined for me.

http://www.amiright.com/album-covers/images/album-Michael-Jackson-HIStory-Past-Present-and-Future-Book-I.jpg

lols creative writing, poetry concentration, with a minor in music composition.

if someone gave me three/four extra years of life and the money to do another BA, i would do architecture or design or something,

Yeah, my school had a good architecture program...I wish I'd done that instead. The people doing it called it "architorture," but they always looked like they were having a blast.

Architecture is pretty kickass. Maybe in another life. (I did anthropology & Russian instead, useless majors both!)

xp tipsy mothra: That is how my college weeded out the people who just wanted to make movies from the department. No making movies until you took several semesters of the privileged (male) gaze.

i guess penn state was the same way (i wasn't in the film department, but took a bunch of classes). you could really feel some of those guys chafing at being in a classroom instead of out doing it.

theory can be fun to read but i distrust a lot of it -- it's so easy to make a case for/against something while leaving REALLY IMPORTANT SHIT out, manipulating the data, etc.

i think it was good for me to read a fair amount of theory by ppl whose work i HATE.

oh and I secretly regret not being an architect, george costanza style

if someone gave me three/four extra years of life and the money to do another BA, i would do architecture or design or something, or maybe, at a push, french.

Yeah, my school had a good architecture program...I wish I'd done that instead. The people doing it called it "architorture," but they always looked like they were having a blast.

Architecture is pretty kickass. Maybe in another life. (I did anthropology & Russian instead, useless majors both!)

Architecture is always the most popular runner up major.

http://chelsearialtostudios.com/maxsteinerpages/fountainheadinsert.jpg

everyone wants to study architecture but the other building sciences aren't considered as glamorous for some reason. too blue collar?

english majors who wish they were architects ==> ayn rand ==> alan greenspan ==> global financial crisis

good job you guys

everyone wants to study architecture but the other building sciences aren't considered as glamorous for some reason. too blue collar?

it's like if you tell people you work for a construction company they'll think you're a drooling philistine teamster, but if you work in architecture you're considered all cerebral and you'll get laid by attractive english majors with enid coleslaw glasses.

pretty sure construction guys still get laid

prolly way more than architects

(Not by English majors.)

it's like if you tell people you work for a construction company they'll think you're a drooling philistine teamster, but if you work in architecture you're considered all cerebral and you'll get laid by attractive english majors with enid coleslaw glasses.

i am an architecture student and i can sadly confirm that this is not really how it works

was a women's studies and political science undergrad though, for this thread's purposes.

hahahahaha

Computer Science / Computer Engineering --who the hell concatenated these largely unrelated subjects into one? Don't want to be lumped in with no lowly Computer Engineers thank you very much.

I did, cause I had to cut the list down to 50

fwiw at my school electrical engineering and computer science are lumped together for one major - if that can work, surely computer science and computer engineering have enough in common

(was my logic)

chem / physics but only finished the chem part

modern language and lit for me! am i the first?

i sort of wish i had done engineering, sometimes.

psychology

what can I say? psych was big in the 70s. i started off as a double major w/english but got lazy.

philosophy, though i'm yet to finish my thesis. will need to branch out this fall, leaning towards journalism or history (which i'm taking now). or maybe i should just get a job.

Philosophy. Came really close to dropping out in the middle (not particularly because of the course) but managed to pull it back. Got me to work through a lot of stuff I wouldn't have got through otherwise and has made me better at thinking. It's given me a really good, broad background too and I feel confident&able looking at pretty much anything.

Architecture seems awesome but some of the other structural engineering type courses seem great too. I know a guy doing post grad seemingly just in some sort of forensic engineering, studying buildings that fall down, and in practice killing flies and looking at them under ridiculously powerful microscopes.

I did Philosophy and Psychology. In retrospect I shouldn't have attempted a joint degree and especially not in two subjects I didn't have a clue about and ended up hating half of the topics involved in either discipline.
I should have studied Chemistry in some form if I wanted to pass exams but I didn't want to do any of the career options it gave me.

if i could go back and do it again i would major in lumberjackery

I am a comp sci dropout, for an exquisite double serving of FAIL. ;_;

(I was the only computer nerd at a girls' school and figured that just being a nerd was sufficient - a recurring theme regarding a few of my other dashed aspirations too, for that matter. It was full of guys who'd spent every second of spare time since age 10 kernel hacking Linux. Also, some guys who were actually fairly normal and still better than me at all the pseudo-mathematical algorithm theory crap, which just rubbed it in, really.)

I don't know what I wish I'd done instead. Occasionally I think linguistics, but the books I've thumbed through suggest that would've been a bad idea too.

psychology

what can I say? psych was big in the 70s90s

Should've done comp sci instead!

Voted English even thought it was "Popular Cultural Studies"; the theories we studied were all standard lit. theory type stuff.

Computer Science first time around. Law second, when I realised that I couldn't code, do maths, count and so on.

English

Very well might have done psych (turned out to be my minor) if I went to a college that didn't treat it as Neurology With A Bit Of Stats Thrown In.

mine was a heady mix of computer science and graphic/media arts. who says collecting coupons doesn't pay off?

archaeology. don't know if I'll finish it though.

Computer Science / Computer Engineering --who the hell concatenated these largely unrelated subjects into one? Don't want to be lumped in with no lowly Computer Engineers thank you very much.

history and spanish. Thinking of going to uni to do english lit just so i can extend my adolescence until I'm almost finished my 20s.

yeah imo CE is definitely a way harder major than CS because it contains all the unrelated subjects

up until a couple of years ago they called it "computation" at oxford. it's still pretty much lisp and haskell and number theory and reimplementing the java vm in eiffel and stuff like that though.

film (the watching and writing about it kind, not the shooting and lighting kind)

molecular biology/minor in philosophy

were I to go back now I'd do something in like web analytics. Is that a major yet?

Math major until i got stomped by linear equations soul-crusher, then made it right to the end of an english major but odd circumstance led to dropping out. went back 6 years later and realized that i hated my lit major, changed schools and got super into formal logic and ended up with a philosophy BA.

formal logic is the shit, btw.

I wish I had been a music major.

English and Philosophy. Voted Philosophy as it was my home department.

What no one tells you when you're 18 is that 18 is probly not the right age to go to university.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I did better as a 'mature' student than I would have as a teenager. On the other hand, I'm now stupidly old and just spending all my time shooting shit about Adorno and Derrida, which I guess would be fine if I was clever enough to actually have an academic career, instead of leaving with an MA that is horrendously useless for any actual vocational purpose. Aaaarggh.

design and art direction but ended up pissing about with loads of attempts at incorporating music and media philosophy i had no chance of getting my head around when i should have been learning html. didnt do too well out of it as i had no belief i could ever make a career from it until i got in the back door doing club visuals and posters over the last couple of years. if i carry on at this rate i may actually have a junior designer job before the olympics

i was the only person who majored in fucking off & sleeping?

English, Repressed Homosexuality

mine sounds about the same as ian's. Smoked too much, read just 2 course text books and got obsessed with MS Pinball. Scored 12 million but got a third class degree.

BA and MA in Classics. Now I'm doing an MSc in Computer Science for some reason. Will have to get a proper job soon...(or you know if the economy (continues to) explodes and graduates are forced to fight each other in arena-style deathmatches in order to get on graduate schemes, I might have to fuse both disciplines into some kind of uber-PhD).

Business

this poll should have classified:

Accounting and Finance together

Business and Marketing together

philosophy. tho wish i did more of this --->>>> i was the only person who majored in fucking off & sleeping?

during my last two years of college, i was planning on doing grad work in philosophy, so i basically took nothing but phil. courses and worked my ass off to get as solid of a foundation as possible. didn't really party that much and i wish now that i did.

i also wish that i took a wider variety of courses. more history, art history, and music courses would've been cool.

Linguistics!

Shit is half interesting/half utterly inane.

ex-history major, btw

Business Administration :(

because it was all easy and common sense, and I liked writing essays about decision making (victor vroom was my fave, probably coz it's a little like victor von doom) and advertising.

History and English (but as a foreign language for me)
Voted for history cos I enjoyed it more I guess.

Psychology, for no reason. I was already mentally checked out before I started the final semester.

yeah i basically did psych because i didn't know what i wanted to do, it seemed like it would apply to a range of occupations, and i had psych AP credit i could apply to my diploma, but it was so booooooooooooring

my mother-in-law is a psychologist and for the first few years i was dating sarah her mom would try to engage me in discussions of psychology and i would just be like uh. she gave up on that eventually.

Mechanical Engineering and Italian

formal logic is the shit, btw.

yeah, it's great! I majored in math and computer science as an undergrad, then realized logic was what I really loved and so specialized in logic in grad school. Now I'm a professional logician and still agree: it is the shit, I stan for Gödel forever.

at first i didn't like formal logic, because i didn't know any, but it was very rewarding as i got on with it. have considered studying on a more advanced level too, but i dunno, what does a professional logician do? besides teach

i was the only person who majored in fucking off & sleeping?

I spent one year playing ping pong, one year playing spades, and two years fucking off and sleeping, and that's how you get a journalism degree.

xpost I teach but mostly do new work in logic and related areas, with the result being that I write and publish papers; in my case, on trying to understand how far incompleteness reaches into arithmetic, what remedies there might be for it, and what incompleteness really implies about mathematical knowledge generally.

I loved my formal logic courses as part of my philosophy degree, except for the whole making-me-regret-giving-up-maths thing. I much prefer problem-solving to critical thinking, and I wish I'd realised that sooner and chosen my academic path accordingly.

I am more of a critical/theory person and only did one logic module as part of my degree, but yeah, logic is awesome! I aced that one module, and part of me wanted to carry on, but a combination of being worried I'd reached the heights of my abilities already (I'm not good at maths) and having my choice of philosophy modules curtailed due to being joint hons meant I left it at that.

yea, i loved the logic course i took as part of my phil degree too. i wasn't a very good math student but i did really well in logic, and i thought it was fun. bummer that my college only offered one logic course. i liked learning all the symbols, too.

i found that it really helped me pare down my arguments, too. my philosophy papers got 1000x better after i took logic. it really helped to learn basic structures of arguments, how reasoning works, etc.

i huess i knew yall were english grads. ugh.

― FREE DOM AND ETHAN (special guest stars mark bronson), Sunday, March 15, 2009 7:52 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol. i thought about double-majoring in english + history and took a lot of history classes but i am too fundamentally flaky for it, i think.

Nursing! I have many jobs!

"Studio art" which is basically a big grabbag of all styles and media. We even had people doing performance art (fuck off to the theater dept, asshole!) and video art (get back to the Radio-Television-Film program, douchebag!)

Bloodmatch: which answer provokes more eye rolling from distant relatives they ask you what you studied: English, Psychology, or Philosophy?

DEF philosophy

At least philosophy gets you into law school. With art, you may as well just say "I'm majoring in coloring books."

euler et al could you recommend some formal logic reading for someone who never did any?

Wait, where's the 'depression' major?

^^^^ the guy that sucks

(that was supposed to be an achewood lol, soz)

i'm the guy that sucks, plus i majored in depression

doubled in Aerospace & Electrical Engineering, spent 6 years at school, first trying to write/produce sketch comedy, then switching over to college radio

Wasn't until I did all Aero classes that I kinda stopped caring and my grades went up as a result.

History. I regret not doubling in Microbiology/Immunology, but at least I knocked out 95% of the premed requirements.

if only I could find the article I read about which college majors have the most or least amounts of sex. we could see if it applied to ilxors

science students had the least i think

Russian and Slavonic Studies. Drifted into it via vague interest in learning Russian and Russian history. Voted linguistics, but that course was the most horrifically boring I took (history of the Russian language. only way I could write the essays was to cut up the course notes into single sentences and try to put them in an order I understood first).

Men who took Russian (there were about 3 to 40 women) did not get ANY sex as far as anyone could tell.

"up until a couple of years ago they called it "computation" at oxford. it's still pretty much lisp and haskell and number theory and reimplementing the java vm in eiffel and stuff like that though."

^^^ Basically my CS course. Quote of the course was a professor who said on the opening day of a particular AI course: 'If there are any CS students in here, this material will all be fine for you, computer engineering students, you'll probably be fine. Any computing and business studies students--please leave now.'

euler et al could you recommend some formal logic reading for someone who never did any?

I got really turned on by Gödel, Escher, Bach when in college and loved it. It's a good introduction to what's awesome about logic. It has very little formal-work-for-formal-work's-sake, and you get a good feeling for why formality matters. After that, it gets tricky on what to recommend. One of these days I hope to write something that meets just the purpose you're asking about; at this point in my career there's not enough professional incentive to do so. But soon that will change.

for what it's worth, I tried GED and stopped after 100 pages. heavy material + extremely distracting writing style was too much.

It's a heavy, heady book, but that comes with the subject matter.

I taught a "philosophy and critical theory for artists" course to MFA grad students in at the Art Intstitute in San Francisco, and I used this little 98 page book by John Shand called "Arguing Well" which lays out the basics of symbolic logic in a really clear and helpful manner, and he does a good introductory job of explaining "why use logic at all?"- which, to many of the artists, was a genuine question.

That's a good point. You can come at formal logic from the perspective of wanting to use it for your own work (for instance, to think more clearly about whatever you want to think about), or from wanting to understand the limits of human rationality. The latter, which we call "metatheory", is my main interest, and what Gödel, Escher, Bach concerns, but that's not to impugn the first perspective.

I have found that students "click" with logic when you show them that it can be a useful tool for figuring out how arguments- any arguments- work. Particularly if you talk about political rhetoric and advertising and show them a laundry list of typical logical errors that show up all the time in those arenas: this kind of use of logic appeals to people who may or may not have the standard leftist/theory-damaged sense that "logic" has blood on its hands because "Western instrumental rationality led to the atomic bomb, man" etc.

hey logic heads r u ready 4 me 2 blow ur minds

English. I'd say the early money would be, erm, OTM.

by at least ten votes

Gödel, Escher, Bach

loved this book in high school

russian and swedish.

thanks for the suggestions guys, i will give G,E,B and Shand a look

I have found that students "click" with logic when you show them that it can be a useful tool for figuring out how arguments- any arguments- work. Particularly if you talk about political rhetoric and advertising and show them a laundry list of typical logical errors that show up all the time in those arenas: this kind of use of logic appeals to people who may or may not have the standard leftist/theory-damaged sense that "logic" has blood on its hands because "Western instrumental rationality led to the atomic bomb, man" etc.

love this post. esp. as someone who took and thoroughly enjoyed a logic course, even after a couple years of first learning that it was responsible for the situation of all the world's oppressed peoples.

thank you, gayatri spivak

a while back, I was constantly posting this as a zing-like retort on some other board:

http://www.logicalfallacies.info/index.html

It's actually a good reference.

regarding books on logic, i remember "Language, Proof & Logic" by jon barwise being an extensive and thorough introduction. it's more of a textbook, but it's written for beginners.

Logic is immensely cool for the manipulation of symbols and defining their relationships. It needs to be handled with enormous care, when you begin to identify those symbols with reality.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

in favor of math as a major I offer the following po_Oem:

A mathematician was obsessed with things prime.
He thought about them almost all of the time.
Said to his dear wife, "It truly seems right
That we should only make love on a prime-numbered night."
His wife thought for a bit ('cause she was no dummy),
"At the month’s start this does seem quite yummy,
For there's two, three, five, seven
A three-night hiatus and then there is eleven.
But of the month’s end I start to be wary
Near the twenty-third day of the month February.
For the next prime day after will be March the first
Such sexual continence might cause me to burst!"
He shook his head sadly, "As it’s commonly reckoned,
The next prime day would be found on the second."

- John Drost , American Mathematical Monthly 112:10 (2005): 890

If Engineering wins I will be downright disgusted.

english is gonna win in a landslide, it's been pretty well established

Curious abt the humanities v non-humanities weighting.

double major, philosophy and english, i picked philosophy because i walked with that group at graduation. it was possible to take some of your upper division english credits in the foreign language department so long as they were literature courses, so a couple of mine were in french actually

basically being a lit-crit theory nerd

thank you, gayatri spivak

oh, god, you even understood *that* from spivak? aside from a nice article on the politics of translation, i could not figure out what she was saying to save my life. after a while i felt that her unnecessarily opaque writing was insulting to - or at least dismissive of - her readers.

daria: Did you ever have the "pleasure" of reading Derrida?

yes. in the original. actually i think he gets badly translated, first, and second, people take him too dead serious & don't see where he just enjoys playing with language. i believe his place vis-a-vis philosophy establishment in france is that he's more of a (smart, interesting) gadfly than a major thinker.

also, my memory is not great for a lot of these texts, which seemed like the world depended on understanding, several years ago. i guess if i jumped back into that domain my mind would be refreshed pretty fast, i just haven't. still a touch bitter and burned out from grad school world.

derrida is really fun and hilarious and incredibly smart!!

Electrical Engineering for me

after a while i felt that her unnecessarily opaque writing was insulting to - or at least dismissive of - her readers.

i think she's just a bad and lazy writer. i mean, maybe that's the same thing.

yeah i figured the same shit out that she did just by making an ilx poll CAN THE SUBALTERN SPEAK?

some classic posts in that thread btw

prob b/c i got stuck on subaltern and how early 90s it seemed to me and could only think of it being a mix of pixies and nirvana or something
i'm ok now

― rrrobyn, Friday, November 2, 2007 12:38 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

CAN THE SUBALTERN USE TWITTER

― El Tomboto, Friday, November 2, 2007 2:15 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i think she's just a bad and lazy writer. i mean, maybe that's the same thing.
^^yup.

oh, god, you even understood *that* from spivak?

ha, safe to say daria that i prob butchered even that pretty badly. thought i understood a bit when i read 'can the subaltern speak' but yea, not really. god reading that was so brutal

what happened to rrrobyn does she still post here?

that's the thread where rrrobyn says that essay is "in her files" <3

xps

Weird how all three mentions of Geography thus far have been would-haves. I am proud to represent the haves. I am rooting for you, my beloved non-rocks and chemicals oriented Earth Science major!

Can I just
boooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

hahahaha

yah where is rrrobyn???

these days

Biology and women's studies; I voted biology (not that women's studies was on the list...).

Oh, and the explanation: I was a pre-med who was interested in particular in women's health. (And now I'm picking up that nursing major so that I can do something about it... hopefully.)

shit is missing "fine arts"

mine was english but i voted 'aerospace engineering'

was politic science but switched midway through my senior year to asian studies after the department wouldn't let me do the thesis I wanted. alas, not an option in the poll.

yah where is rrrobyn???

― i like to fart and i am crazy (gbx), Tuesday, April 14, 2009 3:00 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

twitter afaic

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

lolllllllll

demographics!

even less science than I expected

Holy shit. I am amazed. What the fuck do you guys do for a living???

Is this just an ILX thing?

would imagine that ilm had even more writers, if anything

peace to my histoire brethren.

^^ represent

film, but i prob care about movies less than most people here these days...

such a waste of free college

you could have been building america's bridges

I'm the only accounting major :^[

I guess it was super boring and barely useful at all 'in the real world'..

haha. kinda shocked at only 1 classics major, though.

i considered classics for a bit!

haha. kinda shocked at only 1 classics major, though.

― Ømår Littel (Jordan), Tuesday, April 14, 2009 6:41 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

....Laurel?

/gbx.xls

civilisation is doomed if a deadly virus strikes the planet to which only ILX users are immune.

Happily there won't be any marketing peeps tho

wait is that a Hitchhiker's joke?

you'd be amazed at what english/humanities grads turn to xp

ahem, and music majors!

also, attn sara and asian studies dude:

Ethnic and Regional Studies / Gender Studies / American Studies

who is the other physics major?

we need more ilx geologists

forestry was robbed

;_;

surprised at lack of sociology majors!

yeah I was about to write that actually. I wouldn't have been surprised if that had been one of the top 3-4.

surprised by the strong maths showing

math = science's english major??

:(

science's english major is definitely biology anyway

well i didn't vote but if i had, mark 1 down for "Atmospheric Studies / Meteorology "

eschatology

my final year was all atmospheric physics and astrophysics, so you could put me down as half for those two, but my degree says "physics"

btw i didn't actually study Atmospheric Studies / Meteorology