The Useless College Degree

(at least you only chose 1 useless undergrad major. I chose 2 -- political science and english).

Now, I also have three good friends that are plumbers. They each make approx $70,000 a year. But, they work there asses off. Up at 4am each morning, at the job for 6am. Outside in the heat all day, outside in the freezing cold all winter, outside in the rain. Sure they make a lot of money but would you want to bust your ass like that for the rest of your life. I bet that most of their bodies will be broken down by the time they are 40 years old. And they agree.

Psychology is a pretty decent degree though, you could go into Educational Psychology (pays OK), Business/Management Psychology (pays better), That-form-of-psychology-where-you-work-in-a-mental- ward (must be interesting but you get bullied by the psychiatrists i.e. the PROPER scientists), Sports Psychology and so on.

Taduez is right, Law is a pretty tempting option for a lot of Arts grads, but here in the UK legal course fees (CPE & LPC/BVC) cost anywhere betweem £8,000 and £12,000. Before living expenses and on top of your student loans assuming you have any.

The UK is crying out for teachers at the minute and will even give you £6,000 to help finance the 1 year training course. You'll be overworked and underpaid but you do get those nice long holidays and it's socially useful after all. I'd do it myself if my mum hadn't put me off it, and I still can't get GBS's "Those who can, do - those who can't, teach" dictum out of my head.

And anyway, isn't an Education supposed to be about something more than vocational training?

I have virtually no regrets that I've never done any pain manual work in my life (well, it's measurable in days rather than years...). And none that I've had formal education to a really quite large extent (B. A. ).

I want to move around and be outside and meet people. Or at least move around. I can't think of anything to study that would be likely to get me a career I'd really love, except if I were to get really lucky and do field research in anthropology or be a travel writer something, so I've decided on a hotel/restaurant/murder-mystery/Victorian reenactment business as the best thing to do if I could find the money for it. Oh yeah and I want a commune so I need to learn to farm.

I think, Mike, that you're suppose to get a Masters, or P.H.D. in psychology after your initial degree. That is infact, the purpose of gaining the Bachlors. People frown upon 2 year collages and trade schools for their short sighted attitude and infrence of the students lack of potential for "more".

Being an Art school graduate, every other degree seems to have more practical application than my own. But thats just my grass is greener perspective.

Hell, I'm doing it!

As the job market is slow for us all, now would be a great time to take Masters courses (as was suggested), or explore another field you've always liked. There's no shame in adding on to the skills you've already got. Employers look for people who are well rounded in hobbies AND academia.

The liberal arts education was meant to enrich the minds of wealthy people's sons and daughters so that they can become enlightened and effective leaders of the society. This tradition can be traced all the way back to Plato. Vocational training is deemed unnecesssary for the priviledge kids who are supposed to inherit the family business and get trained on-the-job.

For the common folks, the liberal arts education is a luxury. The more important concern for them is to acquire the skills necessary for them to enter the workforce upon graduation. Engineering, for example, is a ticket for most middle-class or lower-middle class kids to a well-paying, white-collar job. To some extent, film making and journalism also fall into this category. One rarely finds a well-to-do kid studying engineering (or film making, or journalism), for his/her future job function is governing the business (or community).

Current college programs tend to combine liberal arts with vocational training. However, this tends to confuse young minds as what is most important for them. Most kids do not come from a privileged background; hence for them, a vocational training is a must; while a little bit of liberal arts can enrich their minds. Hence a degree in electric engineering and a minor in literature, or psychologoy, or history, or whatever would be a sound choice. But majoring in literature without the talent of becoming a good writer seems ridiculous to me, unless the person comes from well-to-do family.

One can always acquire most liberal arts education through self study. After all, most great thinkers (and women) in history did NOT go to college. But acquisition of technical skills require practice, and hence cannot be done through merely reading books. Since most firms today use college degrees as a filter to sieve out under-motivated people, few opportunities exist for high-school grads to get into a position that allow them to practise complex technical skills at a firm today. Of course, there are exceptions. When the technology is new, one can get into the field with relatively little formal education. Consider Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Larry Ellison.

The American colleges provide a wealth of mind-enriching programs. If only the students know how to select! One can go a public state college and still get a decent education. I went to one here. I also went to an Ivy league school to get my doctorate (what a waste of time) and noticed that the kids there weren't that well educated as I had expected.

Finally, from my own experience, the academia in US is largely a scam. On each campus, there are a few professors who are serious and excellent. Taking a few courses with them is a great experience. But I don't see the value in spending four precious years of one's life devoting to academic pursuit. By introspection and reflection, any mature man and woman can figure out for him or herself most of the stuff that is taught today on campus. Yes, one may reach revelation five or ten years later after college. But such revelation will be from personal experience and hence real. An intelligent college student, with little experience in life, may "understand" what the professor is saying, be awed by him or her, and write a clever essay on the subject. But such understanding is not based on real life experience and hence unreal in my opinion.

College education today, and graduate education (ph.d and masters) has become more and more a self-serving system for the professors who need a large class of students to milk tuitions and a large pool of foreign graduate students to help him/her get federal grants. Most of the research coming out of universities is pure junk, permit me to say so.

The greatest time of America is the turn of 20th century, when the industrial foundation was being built by great men and industrious labourers, most of those had no college education, and yet still learned to govern well and write well. The arch example is Andrew Carnegie. I strongly recommend you to read his booklet "the Empire of Business." I wish had read it in college so that I would not have wasted five years of my life pursuing a Ph.D. degree.

My motivation for going to college was, in fact, to put off having to work full time. (I hardly had to work at all during college, since my parents paid for it.) In retrospect, I wish I had given more thought to how I was going to making a living once I got out. (Ironically, though, I wish I had majored in philosophy, despite the relative vocational uselessness of a BA in philosophy.) I was an English major and didn't have any career plans, beyond some extremely vague, and lazy, idea about going into publishing. ("We'll just send some resumes and cover letters out and see what happens.")

Anyhow, after floundering for a couple years, I decided to get an MLS and join the librarian's guild, so to speak. It was a strictly career-oriented degree. Even then, I didn't think nearly as much as I should have about what area of librarianship I wanted to go into. I almost dropped out to pursue graduate studies in philosophy, though the question of how I was going to support myself kept coming up. By the time I graduated with the MLS, I had a vague notion that I could find a job at a certain local university library and do a PhD there. I did very little research into the practical aspect of any of this (the fact, for example, that academic libraries tend to require an additional MA in a subject area). Although my MLS eventually found me a library job, I don't feel that the degree makes me very marketable. The range of positions which would be open to me seem limited.

There are many other things about legal education in the USA that piss me off, but I'd just bore everyone shitless.

I myself graduated with a degree in Art History and proceeded to work as a waiter and wine steward for two years before returning to school. I'll give you three guesses as to what I study now.

Having said that, the line between vocational and non-vocational degrees isn't exactly clear cut - sure, a BSc in Golf Course Management leads you in a certain direction, but what about Modern Languages, English Literature, History, Psychology or Philosophy? Whilst you aren't being trained to do any particular job when studying those subjects you WILL develop skills that are readily applicable to a number of 'professions'. OK, I accept that those professions range from Management Consultancy for the Oxbridge grads to Market Research and Spiritual Prostitution for everybody else, but on the other hand you might graduate to find that Golf Course Management isn't really your thing.

Re. Tad's point: Yes it is expensive to train to be a lawyer, but:-
a) any PRUDENT STUDENT will be aware of that before they apply to a law course and;
b) earning obscene amount of money must be some kind of compensation. Plus, if you're a barrister, you get to wear a wig - I mean come on! How cool is that?

I have never met an Art History student that didn't have a cocaine habit or a trust fund but don't get me wrong - I'm sure I'd be the same after 15 years in a single sex boarding school.

While I haven't used my MA degree in English lit as a career thing, the combination of teaching experience, critical knowledge and general associations gained from the activities outside of class (radio station, newspaper, etc.) meant I don't find it useless. But I will say that I was lucky enough to get a fellowship. Without it, I would sing a much different tune...

not over here, you don't. Nor are litigators called "barristers" -- just "litigator" or "trial lawyer" (if you do personal injury work).

i agree that the wigs are cool, though.

www.halfpastnine.com

blog and rant!

http://www.twentyhood.com/images/mydegree.jpg

mind = blown

I'm sitting here writing down receipt numbers and account numbers and dollar amounts from hundreds of receipts for entry fees for a juried art show, and all I keep thinking about is the relationship between artistic success and winning the lottery.

i like that being where I'm from I "wasted" four years doing a degree which hasn't been of any use to me since but I'm only £2000 pounds in debt and I pay it back at the rate of about £90 a year.

mind = blown

― fleetwood (max), Saturday, October 10, 2009 6:51 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Seriously, isn't all this sort of a given at this point. Does anyone, bachelors degree or no, find this controversial or enlightening?

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f all of u for pretending like i'm t-bombin

or challoping or whatever

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I didn't think it was a t-bomb or a challop, thought it was meant to be somewhere between a zing and a o_O post. but, ya know, done out of character.

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everyone told me while getting an english degree that it would be useless unless I was going into academia. we all thought we were going to go into academia (or, some people, law school). not many did.

I work with plenty of people who got liberal arts degrees. believe me, you can tell when people bothered to learn how to reason out an argument when they get into the workplace.

As someone who really likes school, when I look at the vast majority of my fellow undergraduates, and how little effort they put into anything other than getting their degrees over with, it's essentially: no shit your schooling was useless, you didn't bother to learn or take interest in anything. If you spend three quarters of your time skipping classes or not bothering to engage with things your interested in (which is why I personally can't fathom being forced into "useful" programs like engineering or business, in which it seems like only a small minority have an actual passion for), then when you 'don't get your money's worth' via a job, of course you're going to regret school.

hey, school was awesome, it's the working world's lack of willingness to hand out fantastic jobs to new graduates that sucks! and this is why some of us end up right back in grad school.

not to play devil's advocate, but ... what kind of fantastic job SHOULD be available to an English Lit major?!?

that said, i have known English and French Lit. majors who went to work for hedge funds and i-banks -- they also went to Ivy League (or Ivy-caliber) schools, and that's another debate altogether, but i know for a fact that it's happened.

not to play devil's advocate, but ... what kind of fantastic job SHOULD be available to an English Lit major?!?

As an English major, I assumed that since it was a major, that meant that it was preparing me for some kind of job market. People tried to warn me. People tried to warn me.

fwiw, the only "real" (non-service, non-dirtbag) job I had between college and medical school was a job that actively sought English majors. i was a copywriter for a small "creative" agency in Chicago, and, you know, writing was something i'd done a lot of as an undergrad

dunno about in this economy (thanks, grad school!), but the world needs competent writers and editors more than it needs academics. just don't expect to write about cool awesome stuff you're interested in, maybe? like, look for a job as a technical writer or as a copyeditor or whatever, and learn your craft

I'd love to see a new major that sorta between an English major and a major in another language, that would emphasize skills in translation (verbal and written). There are jobs doing this (especially in text translation), and a shortage of qualified people, and it's a nontrivial thing to do, so college-level training is a big plus. For one, it helps to understand what you're translating (though this sometimes takes more than college if you're translating something really serious). Plus the pay is pretty good, at least over here in Europe.

I'm kinda half-terrified for my daughter, who will be freshly degree'd next May. gbx, I hope you're right, because she's an excellent writer -- and beyond that, she's the go-to grammar nerd and prose mechanic for all of her friends at school who need help with their work.

be fully terrified

then encourage her to look for less glamorous prose wrenching jobs in markets that are not NYC

i dropped out of high school and didn't go to college til i was 22. i went to a pretty good school and through ridiculous katrina circumstances ended up with a BA in english and then a master's in english. i am working on a master's in library stuff. i spent a whole year after grad school #1 trying to get a grownup job with a tie and a cubicle and a water cooler and all that.

i am a bartender. i have one person in my bar right now (because the saints have a bye). i get pissed when people bitch and moan about their useless degrees because hey guess what if you paid any attention at all in college your interior life is probably way richer than it would have been otherwise.

i mean to say: learning is good for you, no one has a good job, everyone is poor, there are worse things than working in some debasing servile capacity and knowing a lot about keats--like working in some debasing servile capacity and not knowing shit about keats.

yall should be scientists

both of my degrees are ones got for the experience rather than guarantee of jobs. i don't think you can really place too much importance on the degree getting you the job if you're not doing the requisite networking and relationship building to excel in your field. in fact, i went to grad school more for the networking opportunities than the piece of paper (because no one even knows what my piece of paper means!).

yeah, kinda wish i was a physicist! though i met a guy who does rocket science and apparently the job prospects in that field aren't so hot, either. being in the pnw now, i realllly wish i had more tech experience. thinking of taking some technical writing classes on the side.

i wish i could have gotten a liberal arts degree (or linguistics or geography or something like that) in addition to or instead of my stupid math degree. i'm not using the math degree anyway. i also wish i had gotten a physics or chemistry b.s. instead of a math one. i wish i wish i wish!

btw i took technical writing and i promise you already know all there is to know about it! but it sucks because you can't just tell employers that. they wanna see you took the course.

i have no idea what to do with my math degree :(

can i be a detective who uses clever math tricks to solve mysteries

<3 mathnet!!

do the quarterback's homework

i mean to say: learning is good for you, no one has a good job, everyone is poor, there are worse things than working in some debasing servile capacity and knowing a lot about keats--like working in some debasing servile capacity and not knowing shit about keats.

i like this way of putting it! i'm really not hot on the idea of college as vocational training-- okay, in college i learnt to write clearly and quickly and to deadlines, and how to structure arguments, and some facts and a foreign language and etc, but the thing i really treasured was learning a whole new way of understanding a wholly unfamiliar kind of poetry, and even if i don't go academic places w/ it it's still something really important to me.

that said i often wish i'd done engineering instead.

Euler, the problem with translation work at the moment is that companies like to get a machine-translation done and then ask a translator to "proof-read" it, which basically means doing the translation all over again bcz guess what machine translations are shite, but they don't have to pay for a proper trans.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/nyregion/11twins.html?_r=1

c sharp major: yeah, totally. My wife is doing some translation work now that I think is exactly as you describe. On the other hand the pay is good! Or at least it seems good to me, compared to my shitty prof salary.

ive already said too much about that twins article on the ny times thread but: fuck those girls

dunno about in this economy (thanks, grad school!), but the world needs competent writers and editors more than it needs academics. just don't expect to write about cool awesome stuff you're interested in, maybe? like, look for a job as a technical writer or as a copyeditor or whatever, and learn your craft

― a perfect urkel (gbx), Sunday, October 11, 2009 3:31 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

fwiw been freelancing & resume bombing mad firms for like the last year with no real bites

and this is in austin, which is supposed to be ~insulated~ from the recession

trust me, i long ago got over the idea of being paid for doing what i want to do

i'd just like to not actively hate what i do and maybe have my work have some kind of relevance to my skills & talents

Good kids who went to good schools, the brassy, effervescent Barry twins, 24, always envisioned their young adulthood in New York City as a lush time of stimulating work, picturesque travel and a rich social orbit.

LOL rubes

sorry hoos :(

i got my job in 2006, at a time when this firm was in a period of expansion, so i lucked out for sure.

hoos weren't you going to move to china? then you can have a useless degree and a shitty job but be in china /:

As a credential I don't think my degree could be any more worthless than it is. I went to a state college (The Evergreen State College in WA), where one did not declare a major and I was able to design a course of independent study which centered around writing. No one in the business world would have a clue what any of this could mean. To them it probably looked like a generic community college BS.

Otoh, my college studies did exactly what I wanted them to do. I learned a ton. I studied like a demon because it interested me intensely. I read only what I wanted to read. I must have written a million words in 2.5 years. I never expected my degree to open any doors for me, and I have been very satisfied with my life and how my college experience enhanced it - more than almost anyone I know.

i feel you by the way, graduated with my useless english degree OH GOD TWO YEARS AGO done very little since. i am qualifying to teach english to foreigners soon so i can, basically, move to china and have a useless degree and a shitty job

xpost

English/Comp Sci--where it's at

also thomp, i have a friend who did basically the same thing but in Japan--he said he hated it because he was "that asshole who could speak English but not Japanese" and i said "go figure." do you speak Chinese?

that well-known language 'chinese' ~

i'm actually dithering between a bunch of places whose languages i don't speak. i intend to try and pick up at least a six-year-old's vocabulary when i get there, though, wherever there turns out to be.

Euler, the problem with translation work at the moment is that companies like to get a machine-translation done and then ask a translator to "proof-read" it, which basically means doing the translation all over again bcz guess what machine translations are shite, but they don't have to pay for a proper trans.

― eazy e street band (c sharp major), Sunday, October 11, 2009 2:37 PM (49 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i have a friend who does this a couple times a year for a lol hueg telecom manual for which she doesnt understand any of the technicalities - she hates it

hoos weren't you going to move to china? then you can have a useless degree and a shitty job but be in china /:

― thomp, Sunday, October 11, 2009 6:55 PM (41 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah, but 15 months feels like a long, long way away atm.

my mandarin is coming along slowly and i have a damn fine tutor, so that's a plus.

you guys are awesome and encouraging btw. it's comforting just to know that i'm not alone in the whole 'degree i'm not really using atm' thing, that it's not some personal deficiency i guess. thanks to everybody.

ftr i was just being general w/ "chinese"

hoos youre moving to CHINA tell me abt that

jho there is more info at Living/Working in China

but in brief i'm gonna go over and teach and apply for grad school at hku and generally do the 'pack up and go places cause i feel like it' young adult thing cause if i don't do it now then when

raad

I have heard over and over the statistic that 70% of people don't have a job in the field that was their undergrad major- anybody know if there's a way to check whether or not this is true- what it suggests to me is not that all college degrees are "useless" but that it is better to pick a flexible degree than a hardcore specialized one because you're not all that likely to hop straight into whatever that degree is even about . . .

unfortunately saving money necessitates that a lot of the big dreams of STEENDRIVING AMERICA--A Hoos Hits the Road are necessarily falling by the wayside :/

dude u r going to CHINA now

hay how good is hku? i saw an article the other day about asian universities making themselves known as a presence in the top 100 worldwide and started wondering whether i should follow that.

ooh, 24th apparently

what was your idea of what your degree was for when you were degree-ing, by the way? 'cuz (no offence intended here) i kind of doubt you went to class every day going "yup, only two and a bit more years and this effort i am making now in a think i am interested in is going to lead to a job"

I was told going into college (by parents, college counselors, etc.) that a college degree is what you need for a full time, salaried job with benefits, basically, and a liberal arts degree is fine for this because nobody cares about your major. So when I graduated, I didn't expect to get a fantastic job in anthropology (what would that even BE?), but I was surprised that it was so insanely difficult to even get an interview for a full time job, and that I ended up with multiple part-time hourly jobs instead (and not $400/wk like that bartending girl!). This was the case for a lot of people I knew - I don't know to what extent we can blame it on structural issues or luck (the job market kinda sucked last October/November, and still does) and to what extent it's our own fault, but I don't think "useless major" really factored into it at ALL.

This thread is depressing.

I didn't expect to get a fantastic job in anthropology (what would that even BE?)

Management consulting.

what was your idea of what your degree was for when you were degree-ing, by the way? 'cuz (no offence intended here) i kind of doubt you went to class every day going "yup, only two and a bit more years and this effort i am making now in a think i am interested in is going to lead to a job"

― thomp, Sunday, October 11, 2009 8:12 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

that was part of it for me, actually. "i'm gonna teach or i'm gonna get paid to write, even if its soul sucking writing its writing and itll keep those muscles limber."

going to china to teach (& assuming i stick around for a longer term maybe doing marketing work) is a way of getting to teach--which i've wanted to do since about 6th grade when i thought "man i could teach this class better than this clown"--without having to go through the expensive process of texas cert requirements,for which i've neither the money or free time atm due to shit pay job unrelated to degree.

plus obv marketing experience there gets me a decent foot in the door if i come back and want to do it here.

there was a whole weird psychology to my last couple years where i was trying to get it done within a 4 year deadline so my loans would be forgiven under this program, so i just pushed as hard as i could to get it done so i'd be ~finished~ and finally be able to get a job where i could actually use the skills & talents i have that are unrelated to how good i am at being a fry cook in a suit.

"fry cook in a suit" is my current euphemism for my "manager on duty" position in the hospitality industry btw

btw this whole souring thing kinda started this week when i realized that an entry level admin assistant job ("applicants must possess a high school diploma or GED") i applied for with the city has a starting pay higher than i'm making with the ~big raise~ i just got

and this is in austin, which is supposed to be ~insulated~ from the recession

I'd never heard this. Tech and energy (the two biggest industries in Austin, IIRC) are far from immune, and Austin real estate was absurd during the boom.

So when I graduated, I didn't expect to get a fantastic job in anthropology (what would that even BE?), but I was surprised that it was so insanely difficult to even get an interview for a full time job, and that I ended up with multiple part-time hourly jobs instead (and not $400/wk like that bartending girl!).

^yes, this^

I got a psychology degree, and I while I knew I wasn't going to pursue it past a bachelor's, I figured that getting all A's and graduating with honors would at least land me a halfway decent job. Nope. I couldn't get interviews anywhere, not even for a temp agency, and ended up doing data entry for a year while still trying to call temp agencies and still not getting jobs. fuuuuck dude. Then I pulled a proto-Hoos and went to China to teach English, then I went to grad school when I got back. good luck USA

what was your idea of what your degree was for when you were degree-ing, by the way?

i switched into math from mechanical engineering thinking it would be more "useless" (fun) and i could just go to grad school to be a mathematician, and it sort of was but then i ended up not liking it. now i feel like i wish i knew more about machines and energy and stuff but that's just grass-is-greener and i know i'd be miserable in the typical engineering workplace so it's ok.

tbqh, as someone who's never been able to attend full-time, fuck all the bitching about the post-grad world.

I'm feeling conflicted about my Lit degree now - damn I like being able to analyze texts and breaking down arguments/making arguments and stuff but sometimes I wish I did a hard science where there are, you know, real answers that you just can't deconstruct into oblivion

kinda wanna go to lit grad school but I have a vision of a bunch of serious looking dudes in sweaters going "it complicates the text, do you see" over and over

haha yeah. "i think he did a good job problematizing the construction of ethnicity," etc.

always been pretty confused by my fellow english majors who regret or resent their degrees. unless you take for granted or begrudge your uh reasoning or writing skills

I would strongly dissuade anyone from pursuing graduate work in English unless you:

A) couldn't imagine doing anything else but being an English professor &
B) are comfortable moving to wherever the jobs are &
C) get into a program that will cover most or all of the cost &
D) are completely aware of how extremely difficult it is to obtain a tenure-track position &
E) are aware that, even if you do land a TT job, you will most likely be working at a teaching institution, where you have relatively little time to focus on your own research.

If all that's cool with you, go for it. But as far as I know, most people who go this route don't end up with the TT job. Which is almost definitely what you'd want to end up if you're pursuing a PhD in English.

yeah I read this article recently and it's done a pretty good job:

Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go

I'm trying to figure out what kind of grad school besides humanities a lit degree sets you up for; so far it's lol law school

if you like real answers you will *hate* law school

If anyone's considering graduate work in philosophy, you should probably read all of the following:

http://philosophysmoker.blogspot.com/ ( As well as their old archives here: http://philosophyjobmarket.blogspot.com/ )

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/advice_for_academic_job_seekers/
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/issues_in_the_profession/

xxp uh you could pretty much go for anything non math or science related ime if you really wanted to

yeah, I really gotta figure out what else I'm interested in besides humanities stuff.

dyao, I think I had read that article before, but I just re-read it and it seems fairly spot-on to me. Thanks for posting the link.

harbl yeah I can see that but I have to imagine it is a step above lit 'real answers' in terms of realness

not really dude

i mean not that i know

what is real, max

http://caravanofdreams.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/buddha-enlightenment1.jpg
Huuuuuuuuuuuuummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

All English majors know that Lacan is the go-to guy for everything about the Real.

it's not really a step above. more of a lateral move i suppose. anyway it's really annoying what kind of arguments people can make to support whatever shitty conclusion they want. and how this can go on for a full class period. in practice it's a little better because there is a real person involved. but then you read a case where the judge has done the same thing. it sucks. it's not any more based on "reality" than your literature stuff. i like it (maybe because i like uncertainty and games, and thinking about stuff like literature lol) but it's messy.

do law people worry a lot about their writing style or do they just ram their points through in whatever way they see fit

like half the problem I have with writing in lit is that not only do I want to make a good point, I want to do it in style

i worry about my writing style but everyone says it's very good ^_^. a lot of people do not seem to understand what writing is.

People don't misuse outdated theoretical apparatuses like Freudian psychoanalysis and deconstruction to support their conclusions in law school though, I'd assume? Which at least makes your work there slightly more based in reality than a lot of what passes for "cogent argument" in English departments.

All English majors know that Lacan is the go-to guy for everything about the Real.

Man, I wished that the undergrad English classes I took dealt with critical theory in any significant way; I had to take philosophy classes for that (as well as a cultural studies course while on study abroad in the U.K.).

Not that deconstruction is outdated, per se, but the manner in which it is deployed as a critical methodology in certain instances in the context of English departments is terrifying.

jaymc, what did your philosophy classes cover? At my college, all of the post-Heideggerian philosophy, which the exception of Gadamer, was housed in the English department. In philosophy we had the opportunity to study anything between the pre-Socratics and Gadamer, and that was good but lacking. I mean, a lot has happened since Being and Time.

I did a lot of Freudian psychoanalysis in college, death drive and all that; my professor based his career on his reading of The Pleasure Principle

xpost

Thankfully, being an English major, I was able to study Zizek, Derrida, and many others.

Being a philosophy minor, I was lucky enough to obtain more of a firm grounding in the Western philosophical tradition than many of my peers. Even then, though, there was still no opportunity to study, say, Deleuze or any of the thinkers in the Speculative Realist movement. That being said, I'm thankful for what I did get to study.

xxxxxp eh no but imo it's a mistake to be all like these enlightenment principles are grounded in reality and freud isn't. tbh i don't even like to think of stuff as "based in reality" and not based in reality. i don't know. this could go on forever, i can't even explain it to myself.

lol lawyer

see dyao this is what i mean

yeah, i didn't even do that on purpose

you get to create your own reality though, which is really useful

yeah max but lawyers can get paid $$$ to do this

xpost

dyao, was the Freud guy a relatively old professor?

I recently heard an English major talk sadly about how all of the psychology professors only mention Freud in passing. My response to that attitude is to basically fault a lot of continental philosophy and critical theory for not incorporating the insights of empirical psychological research sooner. Many people in English seem to feel like once they read Freud (or Lacan) they have a complete and unfuckwithable grasp of the human psyche.

Which is bullshit.

dude you said you wanted real answers not $$$! xxpost

yeah kshighway, very old, and I'm not even sure he still remembers me (though I took two classes with him)

at least english professors have the decency to be deeply anxious about authenticity

harbl secretly I just want to fund my sardine habit

i know a place called sea world you can get paid in sardines

really what do I have to do

at least english professors have the decency to be deeply anxious about authenticity

― Bobby Wo (max), Monday, October 12, 2009 3:13 AM (46 seconds ago) Bookmark

If they only read some Heidegger!

Reading Derrida without a working knowledge of Heideggerian phenomenology is, at best, an awful idea.

language is a bunch of bullshit anyway, I eagerly await the day where humanity evolves into a big interconnected hive mind so meaning is always clear

i say, get a nursing degree

I've thought about it, parents would laugh at me

i think its important to base life decisions on what your parents would think

language is a bunch of bullshit anyway, I eagerly await the day where humanity evolves into a big interconnected hive mind so meaning is always clear

― dyao, Monday, October 12, 2009 3:16 AM (22 seconds ago) Bookmark

But is meaning EVERY REALLY CLEAR dyao?!?!!!

nursing would be cool imo!

my friend is at nursing school and shes been employed the entire time

no kshighway, there's this coin where both sides are worn out you see

I bet ants never worry about authenticity

Then they're immoral little fuckers.

i think they are amoral, like lawyers

dyao, if your point is to say language is not the center of the universe, then you are 100% OTM and the #1 failing of English departments might be the fact that they continue to propagate that notion for obvious, self-interested, and RONG reasons.

my dealings with literature have made me deeply suspicious of anything and everything, which is probably why I don't sleep too well

dyao, if your point is to say language is not the center of the universe, then you are 100% OTM and the #1 failing of English departments might be the fact that they continue to propagate that notion for obvious, self-interested, and RONG reasons.

― kshighway1, Sunday, October 11, 2009 11:22 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

dude

What, max?

i think he thinks ur bombastic

Yeah, that was a tad bombastic.

Still, point holds.

you switched pretty fast from using the phrase heideggerian phenomenology to acting like a weird reactionary physics prof

I've never read a word of Heidegger but Arendt a movie about him once

Well, I just graduated as an English major, so I think I can speak to the failings of English departments, as much as I love mine. And the fact that a lot of theory--postmodern and otherwise--that's flogged in English departments dismisses or ignores empirical research is a failing and saying so does not make me reactionary.

I read an article awhile ago about two philosophy professors in california who were trying to incorporate MRI scans and stuff into philosophy, which sounded pretty cool, although most philosophy departments seemed pretty embarrassed about it

Teaching Freud as if he alone knew how desire and the human mind worked is reactionary.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_philosophy

you see, that seems like something which can give me real answers (and $$$ for sardines)

i moderate a little board called ask dr. freud and i think he alone knows everything

Can he tell dyao how to get money for sardines?

dyao go to nursing school

I probably will after I burn out of some other graduate program first

Well, I just graduated as an English major, so I think I can speak to the failings of English departments, as much as I love mine. And the fact that a lot of theory--postmodern and otherwise--that's flogged in English departments dismisses or ignores empirical research is a failing and saying so does not make me reactionary.

― kshighway1, Sunday, October 11, 2009 11:30 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

dude u r actin like a crazy person with all this talk

I can say though that I'm well on my way to becoming a creepy high school English teacher

How am I wrong max?

wait 'empirical research' huh

Do you think someone like, say, Paul Churchland would take, "But Freud said it!" as a legitimate counterargument to any of his theories?

do you think any english professor would actually say that as a legitimate counterargument to any of his theories??

u are setting up hell of straw men

that's not how any of literary theory works is it? i hope

also empiricism is for nerds and english people so

No, but that wasn't my point. My point is that English professors treat Freud or Lacan as THE authority on everything epistemological. Maybe you had a different experience in college than I did, but as far as I can see it the only "psychology" that's accepted in English classrooms is psychoanalysis.

bro

stop saying "english professors do this"

No.

this is why none of you have jobs

Hahahahhaahaaaa

where did u get ur degree from, bad faith arguing university?

max, you haven't furnished me with any counterargument here. How did *your* professors treat psychoanalysis?

with varying degrees of agreement and skepticism?

OK, so you had a different experience than I did. I should've qualified what I said.

lolololol

ian, what do you think about Freud?

OK, so you had a different experience than I did. I should've qualified what I said.

― kshighway1, Sunday, October 11, 2009 11:50 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

duh

My wife got her BA in English and ended up getting her MA and PhD in Rhetoric and Composition, a field where there are a relatively high number of jobs compared to most english-related ones. Pretty much everyone we know from her school has a tenure track job somewhere and the academic job listings aren't anywhere near as sparse. Downsides include the aforementioned having to move to where the jobs are which kind of blows for me, but alas.

She's in an english department now with large number of lit people compared to the relatively small number of rhet-comp people, and they as a general rule don't really get what she which is seriously frustrating to her. A bunch of faculty were talking to the outgoing grad students about job applications this fall and the lit people were completely dire and depressing about everything, how nobody is going to get a tenure-track job, how you have to start somewhere tiny and work your way up, and how since this isn't Harvard you won't be taken seriously. She was kind of outraged because there are a decent number of rhet comp jobs out there and her department isn't exactly the Harvard equivalent (apparently that might be Purdue) but would probably be in the top ten.

yeah I saw Rhetcomp mentioned in a grad school forum as one of the few bright spots in terms of employment...but tbh I have no idea what it is

king's highway: I think Freud's ideas on human development and the mind are worth considering in some/many circumstances but i don't believe he's any type of Gold Standard OTM dude or anything.

don't see how that's relevant to the overall hilarity of this conversation.

"conversation"

joygoat, I didn't even know Rhetoric and Composition was a field before reading your post, but that's very interesting! I'm glad there's a field in the humanities that still has job openings.

i can hook u up with my ex xxxp

man that came out wrong

I just asked for a short definition of Rhetcomp and apparently that's pretty difficult to do. Basically it's a lot of teaching composition, writing, studying arguments and how language is used in day-to-day rather than literature settings, with some degree of crossover into philosophy.

omg this thread

all u english majors shld be usin yr skills to write sitcoms about barren yung women math majors work in finance until u hav enuff money to quit or your soul dies (worked for me) no1 with any curiosity abt the world doesnt sometimes think a different major wld have been rad ~ of course it wld be learning shit is awesome ~~~ im happy learning science fyi

Lamp OTM

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knowledge

see ya guys, I'm gonna work on my screenplay @ some indie cafe

jaymc, what did your philosophy classes cover?

It was really just a single class in contemporary continental philosophy. But the head of the philosophy department was really into it, and my friends who were philosophy majors were conversant in names like Derrida and Foucault way more than anyone in my English classes was. The approach in most of my English classes was close reading and analysis; occasionally, we'd talk about a feminist interpretation or put a text into historical context, but knowing the names of literary critics would've been seen as pretty high-level stuff. I'm not saying this to complain about my major at all, just amused at the notion that English majors everywhere are knowledgeable about Lacan. In fact, I think that a lot of English grad-school programs offer a crash course in critical theory for first-year students simply because people's undergrad experiences are so varied.

Oh, that's really neat!

Yeah, I made the mistake of universalizing my experience, which consisted of taking a required(!) critical theory course as part of my major, which led to my eventually doing work on Zizek and Derrida in the department.

And that's great that your professors taught Derrida and Foucault in your philosophy department. Anything after Gadamer was more or less absent from mine, but I think that will change in time. It's a small department.

lol this thread devolving into this is how people talk at college

lols to the max when i read kshighway's posts

I should just drop out of college.

i would advise against that tbh

Not a kshighway fan, velko?

Real question: For all of you who got an English degree, what did you end up doing? Did you go to grad school? What (serious) advice would you give to someone who just graduated with an English degree? (Besides, you know, freak out.)

i mean, it has been sort of useless in terms of monetary gain. but:

1) i get much of my food from dumpsters. not lying. i only buy booze, meat on sale, and cheap vegetables (which is admittedly a CA-only phenomena)

2) i know a lot about music, architecture, film and (esp) poetry, which is useful to me in my everyday life. and my job.

3) i have made stupid amounts of connections through my college profs.

4) FRIENDS!!! SEX!!! DRUGS!!! i mean cmon, it isn't a total bummer unless one is looking at it through these 'i must be useful member of droning capitalist society' lenses. and let me tell you, those lenses are fogged, scratched, and in the fuckin dirt, bros.

i got an english degree and now i have a successful career modding I LOVE CRICKET: THE CHINATOWN OF ILX: THE CHINATOWN OF ILX

and tbh:

1) i gots me a lot of money for grad school.

2) i teach and write for magazines.

3) the problem is actually that so many kids today focus on one thing, imho. i'm all for studying contemporary poetry, experimental film, new music, etc., but so many kids i know (everywhere, not just from where i went undergrad) were dead-set on this one discipline. i wasn't, and while most of them work jobs that they hate, i'm like, 'dudes, i told you to take some other interesting classes because duh, everything informs everything else in the liberal arts.''

also i am drunk, editing my thesis and listening to David Lang on a Monday. so whatever. lolcollege.

and i forgot the oxford comma. fuck.

Are you in grad school for English?

nope. Poetry and Visual Criticism. lol.

Real question: For all of you who got an English degree, what did you end up doing? Did you go to grad school? What (serious) advice would you give to someone who just graduated with an English degree? (Besides, you know, freak out.)

in grad school now for library science, doing a job in an unrelated field where i write circles around most ppl and have always gotten what i consider to be a weird amount of praise for essentially being able to express myself clearly.

considered grad school in lit but don't have the love for it that you need to make that a viable path.

my honest advice would be--listen, if u don't want to teach or be an academic just find a job that you don't mind and use your writing, reasoning, and communication skills to SHINE at it. build yr skills, resume, and network. a lot of the good things that happen in life are unplanned.

or if you think you "didn't get anything" out of studying english--go spend some time in a job mostly NOT populated by college grads. think about how and why you are different.

one problem with recent college grads is they think everyone is or was a recent college grad.

I'm teaching right now, though to ESL learners, and while I love my students, the communication barrier can be a total drag. one of the reasons I considered a lit/Eng degree was to improve my employability down the line, should I choose to become a teacher...

my most brilliant professor and friend never finished college. she teaches courses on Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, and conceptual poetic practices now.

in other words, it is all what you make of yourself. some people (like me) need more networking and building in order to slip into their practice. i now know how i work, and what i need to work on, so that's good enough for me. my writing is the best it ever has been.

For all of you who got an English degree, what did you end up doing?

lolretail/sweatshop slave by day. small press publisher by night. guess which one pays better.

tabes is right about the focusing-on-one-thing thing: i didn't really want to go to uni, and the only thing i thought i'd be ok at was english lit, since i love to read. so i only took lit classes (with the exception of one reli class, one media studies class and one print culture class). so i didn't have much of a well-rounded education. but everyone told me i NEEDED a degree, any degree, so i went and struggled through one.

Got a Bachelor Of Arts, double major Middle English/American Studies, then a graduate Diploma in secondary teaching (English/History). Found that I was not cut out for teaching once I got my diploma...think I took it because it felt 'jobbish' and was trying to placate my parents that I wsn't going to become (gasp) 'perpetual student'. Did about 6 months hardknocks at a commercial laundry, then landed 5 years as a copyright permissions editor/photo researcher with an educational publisher...probably the best use of my 'degree' overall. Only got that from a desperate last-ditch letter writing campaign to all the publishers I could find in the phone book, because I madly wanted to get into publishing.

aaaaand then I moved to the US to get married, took the first job I could find and have been doing kind of salesy stuff ever since and freelance writing mostly garbage in my free time. have grown to enjoy the job somewhat, but do still find myself pining for the publishing days.

But I never really felt like my degree was a waste, especially not the arts degree part of it. learned about the world, finally got to wrestle with the art of independent study and somehow manage to enjoy it, learned a lot about critical thinking, and, I dunno, I guess it just made the world seem a lot bigger once I was there, and I liked that. I liked the possibilities. All very arty and airy fairy, I know.

man, you and justin3 need to get together.

or maybe...we could all get together? i live in the east bay! i bike everywhere! it is awesome here.

or if you think you "didn't get anything" out of studying english--go spend some time in a job mostly NOT populated by college grads. think about how and why you are different.

I have had a job like this, and the difference is basically that I lucked out and got to spend 4 years studying random interesting shit, while they didn't get a break from working. I wouldn't say we were very different in terms of our capacities or abilities though, and in terms of cultural literacy, mine is limited in its on ways.

it just made the world seem a lot bigger once I was there

yes yes this is a big deal! being a perpetual student nowadays, i still have "wow anthropology is so cool" moments almost every day for exactly this reason.

Real question: For all of you who got an English degree, what did you end up doing? Did you go to grad school? What (serious) advice would you give to someone who just graduated with an English degree? (Besides, you know, freak out.)

― kshighway1, Monday, October 12, 2009 11:43 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

lol i am in medical school

I did English for undergrad and now I make books. Admittedly, almost nothing of what I learned in the English prog bears any resemblance to what I do. You don't rly have to know shit about books, reading, or the English language to produce the things.

go spend some time in a job mostly NOT populated by college grads. think about how and why you are different.

I'm basically the only person that I work with or see socially on a regular basis who ONLY has a lowly Bachelor's degree - everyone else I know has a PhD or at least a Master's (the art and library people). It also feels strange at times but that might be me projecting a lot.

Real question: For all of you who got an English degree, what did you end up doing? Did you go to grad school? What (serious) advice would you give to someone who just graduated with an English degree? (Besides, you know, freak out.)

I got an English degree. I am a maths teacher, hopefully leaving soon to start own business. The advise I would give is "think about what you really like doing, which someone might conceivably pay you to do, and then build the best possible CV in order to do it" - that sounds totally obvious obv but most ppl don't.

When I started my English degree, I thought I would be a high school teacher. When I finished, I thought I would be a college professor. But somewhere along the line, I had become interested in cultural and media studies and other subjects that English departments were certainly receptive to but not founded upon, and even though I took the GRE Subject Test in English six months after I graduated, I wasn't sure I really wanted to study literature any more. And then, the longer I was out of school, the more insular the academic world seemed to me in general. I slowly began to realize, too, that smart people and interesting work were not confined to the academy, as I naively thought while I was there.

So now I'm a copy editor at an encyclopedia company. When I first started working in publishing, right after college, I was really just looking for a job that my English degree would qualify me for. And for most of my 20s, I approached my job merely as something that paid the bills while I pursued other activities (music, writing, arts management) on the side. But in the last couple of years, I've had some opportunities that have allowed me to feel more invested in my work and see it more as a career. I'm not teaching or analyzing texts, but I am doing research and occasionally writing articles, which I feel like my college education prepared me for.

Btw, I think the reason why people think English degrees are useless is that there are so few jobs that require the specific knowledge gained from the degree. Most likely, you're never going to need to be able to interpret the end of Kate Chopin's The Awakening after college, in the way that doctors or chemists or computer scientists will apply what they learned in school. But there are lots of jobs, from journalism to advertising to development, that require a skill set that the English major possesses: an ability to write well and to think critically.

But there are lots of jobs, from journalism to advertising to development, that require a skill set that the English major possesses: an ability to write well and to think critically.

OTM. this is kind of the whole point of a liberal arts degree - you get a basic set of communication/writing/critical thinking skills. it doesn't really have much to do w/ the content of the degree at all. rather, having a liberal arts degree just communicates to employers that you have a basic competency and set of communications skills that would allow you to do the job

btw i feel like we had almost this exact conversation maybe 6 months to a year ago on ilx?

haha yes:

also, college is not a trade school - sure, a philosophy or whatever degree is 'useless' in the sense that there are no jobs for philosophers w/ just a BA, but that's the same for just about any undergraduate major besides business, etc.

i think a liberal arts/sciences undergraduate degree is useful b/c it basically communicates that you have a basic competency in language, problem-solving, organizational and communication skills. whether or not that you really have those skills might vary, but in the job market that's basically what a BA does.

― mark cl, Monday, April 27, 2009 2:28 PM (5 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is why what you major is often irrelevent - w/ one exception, when i applied for jobs no one cared that my degree was in philosophy or what my knowledge was in that field - all they cared about was that i could demonstrate those basic problem-solving, communication, and quick-learning skills that a liberal arts degree can give you

― mark cl, Monday, April 27, 2009 2:30 PM (5 months ago) Bookmark

seriously dudez fuck college

drew had this really good post:

College is an institution and so are most workplace environments, and in a brutally reductive sense, undergraduate college education is basically just a "can you move more or less capably through an institution?" test. it's a pre-requisite not in the sense that it guarantees the knowledge of discipline x or y (though it is partially that)- it is also meant to just show that this person knows how to schedule themselves, meet demands, jump through hoops, be reasonably informed and articulate, not alienate or wildly infuriate others, not get tossed out for plagiarism or harassment or some other malfeasance, etc.- it is a test of one's capacity to function inside an institution, and it is not surprising that other institutions would want to see that you are already capable of being in one. So, again, it's not "sufficient", but many employers it is still "necessary" because it presumably demonstrates a set of personal qualities (ambition, work ethic, focus). The unfair fact is that lots of preparatory tutoring, smaller-class-size high school education, and lots of money and lots of grade inflation have reduced the value of this signifier, but that hasn't actually meant that it's not still necessary-yet-not-sufficient on the other side.

― Neotropical pygmy squirrel, Monday, April 27, 2009 2:39 PM (5 months ago) Bookmark

yeah except sometimes employers don't care about your skill set, or your capability, in general. they want to see that you've performed EXACTLY that job before, even at the entry level a lot of the time, or they think you're not committed or will require too much training or something.

yea, i think esp w/ undergrad internships being more and more common, there's definitely a degree to which employers expect you to have certain office skills that you wouldn't necessarily get unless you've worked before

i am also pretty cynical about internships though. i had a couple in college and they gave me way more responsibility and interesting work than my post-college jobs, but they didn't really "count" because they were internships, not long-term employment. hell, my part time receptionist job throughout college didn't even qualify me for admin assistant callbacks. but again, maybe this is just an "i/my timing/location sucked" issue, and this is generally not the case.

(sorry for shitting on this thread with "it is impossible to get a job" posts guys. i'll stop now.)

table yr posts bear the wisdom of a great human.

that might be the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me on ilx. thx.

(and yes, maria, it is terribly hard to get jobs. i was fired from one a few months out of college, and so decided to apply to grad school b/c i knew i could get lots of money, and that i would at least get to TA some classes, thus bringing me closer to teaching people...somewhere...)

Just chiming in to say I really appreciate the interesting back and forth we've got going on here. Thanks, guys.

hoosless college drgree

yr welcome. I forget sometimes that I've done more or less what I wanted (though that's sometimes pretty foggy) and its good to see ppl judging themselves on their own terms. Love all my friends doing post grad stuff but am glad to be elsewhere right now, even w/out work.

I just really really regret not having (making?) the time to do any internships or the ability to make it to job fairs because I was busy with my service job or rushing to catch my bus all the time I wasn't in class. I feel like that + recession and shit really fucked me over.

I got an english degree a little more than a year ago, did a bunch of internships while in school, and just lucked out and got a job doing tech writing

english degrees allow you to post on ILX all day and have people say OTM

p much

i got myself an English degree many years ago and i'm about to get another one. i think jaymc was totally otm about the best part about an English degree is not, you know, knowing how to recite the prologue to the Canterbury Tales in Middle English, it's thinking and writing critically. my job requires a lot of reading, but i don't "use" my degree that much, and that doesn't bother me?

i never did interships or anything, but i always write, just about every day, i try to see it more as a hobby than anything else, that way i don't get down about it.

sometimes I get drunk and write wedding vows

sometimes i fall asleep and dream about The Mayor of Casterbridge

w/ my philosophy degree, i thought that i wanted to do phd work in phil and was only planning on taking a year or two off between undergrad & grad. i just looked for random jobs at universities and publishing companies.

i ended up getting a job in an ethics library at georgetown university, where i worked for 2 years (kind of crazy tho that i actually found a job that was interested in the fact that i studied philosophy - this is totally the exception imo), and it was awesome. seriously, university/college jobs are the best imo. usually pretty decent pay, great benefits, really cool work environments.

also, my first job totally helped me figure out at least the start of my long-term career. a couple of library jobs later and i'm now doing a master's in library & info science. it was seriously the best decision i've made to NOT go into a philosophy phd program

i think it's *super* important to take LOTS (like at least 2+ years) of time off between your first college degree and your second

yea absolutely

I did a bunch of internships in publishing places, they were fun but it was weird working w/o pay in a field where it is almost impossible to work into a steadily paying gig

then again I interviewed for a job at a textbook publishing company and they gave me a spelling test that was easy as fuck, but I panicked and spelled everything wrong so maybe I don't deserve that shit I don't know

had i had more luck in job-searching, i might've taken more than 2 years off before starting grad school. but i wound up working for minimum wage with no benefits, with a bottleneck of eager overeducated people waiting for promotions ahead of me, so at that point a stipend, health insurance, and flexible schedule were pretty attractive. even if you just get screwed in the academic job search later, 5 years of guaranteed pay and some level of independence might be worth it, right?

I did an internship at a textbook publisher that may have led to my first job out of college, which was at a textbook development firm, although I think it's probable I would've gotten the job anyway. I did another internship that same summer at Minty Fresh Records, which mostly just served to deromanticize the notion of working in the music industry.

i think it's *super* important to take LOTS (like at least 2+ years) of time off between your first college degree and your second

Depends on your field, though. This would 100% not have worked for me in lolscience unless I had been working directly in lolscience. Like, taking two years off to be a barista would have been a bad plan.

why "lol"science? is it because most people around here have english degrees?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolsci

More lol to me than anyone else really because after studying lolscience I now spend my days in front of a computer lolemailing about nothing scientific.

And then, the longer I was out of school, the more insular the academic world seemed to me in general.

this feels very OTM to me

kinda weird this morning I got an email from some university telling me that I should apply to their complit phd program - and as far as I can tell it's not spam, and I haven't talked about grad school plans anywhere except here. somebody has it out for me

yeah out of the blue yesterday i got a card in the mail from a seminary

i was like lol 5 yrs too late yall

comp. lit. professors are kinda the very definition of self-important challops dropping geeks, though.

― Mad Vigorish (Eisbaer), Monday, January 5, 2009 8:32 PM (9 months ago) Bookmark

sorry dyao :D

haha I agree completely with that statement Eisbaer

which is why I wanna become one

jk complit dudes are chumps WGSS is where it's at

gbx how did you make the transition from english deg to med school? did you need to take any classes to get the science background? MCATs?

bigtime

did a post-baccalaureate program (about 15 months), wherein i took alllll of the prerequisite science classes in one fell swoop

chem, physics, orgo, psych, biochem, bio, w/MCAT prep on the side

it is secretly the easiest way into medical school, btw

all of my non-post bacc classmates were bewildered 20 year olds, tryin to deal with college, and i was over it

man that sounds nice. I always did well in chem/bio in high school.

shit guys, life is hard! :o)

i want to go back to college and take orgo and biochem! maybe someday.

lol, i am doing that right now. don't have a clear motivation for why, but i am anyway.

i don't think it should be legal to let people be english majors like i was

The greatest time of America is the turn of 20th century, when the industrial foundation was being built by great men and industrious labourers, most of those had no college education, and yet still learned to govern well and write well. The arch example is Andrew Carnegie. I strongly recommend you to read his booklet "the Empire of Business." I wish had read it in college so that I would not have wasted five years of my life pursuing a Ph.D. degree.

― Y. Chen, Saturday, November 30, 2002 1:56 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

didn't know thiel used to post here

Two English majors I knew wound up making mad $$$$ (to me, my standards are low) as advertising creatives

You may have noticed by now that all those claims made about a college degree being the key to a good job and increased lifetime earnings are never made by the actual institutions of higher learning, for this might be construed as a promise to provide one with that outcome. Their course materials only promise to provide a reading list and so many hours of classroom instruction, lectures, seminars, or labs. Which they deliver. Along with a hefty bill.

I think my English major was extremely useful, just overpriced.

my second-in-command was an English major and is doing just fine as far as I can tell

a friend of mine is a teacher and said she had students coming to her wanting to go to community colleges or local state colleges to avoid the 20-40k of debt and that she told them "Screw the debt, it's a priceless education, the benefits you get from it will offset the debt" or something like that.

I don't know if I have a frame of reference for whether that's good advice anymore, I assume it would depend on what your degree would be in. I have a bachelor's in psych and I do nothing with it but it did get me into the company I started at 11.5 years ago which (at the time) I wouldn't have gotten in without. but i can imagine someone not that lucky might be struggling with those debt payments/credit score/etc.

also depends if you're getting the education purely for career purposes or not I guess

I know we'll never do anything that Europe does first because GALLONS INCHES FAHRENHEIT MOTHERFUCKER but the 3-year degree concept seems like it could be pretty handy dandy especially if we want to make baccalaureates affordable (and accessible?) to everyone

a friend of mine is a teacher and said she had students coming to her wanting to go to community colleges or local state colleges to avoid the 20-40k of debt and that she told them "Screw the debt, it's a priceless education, the benefits you get from it will offset the debt" or something like that.

the world is a complicated place full of variables and i am an expert neither in education in general nor in these kids' cases in particular but fwiw the emotion this induced in me was blinding rage

In my own case, I loved my liberal arts education. I find academic subjects fascinating and I continue to pursue a loosely academic, but wholly autodidactic, education even into my seventh decade. But in a way this was my birthright. My family has a strong streak of academics and the liberal arts running through it.

I hate the idea of people mortgaging their futures to get a mediocre education in subjects they have no natural affinity with and scant appreciation for. It's a shame and a waste and leads to no good for anyone involved.

A friend of mine went six figures into student loan debt for a Masters in Library Science.

Today, she works at a library.

feel very blessed that my totally useless 4 year ba in history and spanish and latin american studies cost me < $7000 US, i only paid say $3000 of it, and my no longer paying it has no impact on anything including my credit rating #albagubrath

I guess some poignancy re: "forget the debt, embrace your college years" is tied up in nostalgia for a liberal arts college lifestyle overly represented in fiction that's unavailable to all but a few privileged kids... but if there was a moment when that wasn't true it was a very small moment anyway so fuck it.

the world is a complicated place full of variables and i am an expert neither in education in general nor in these kids' cases in particular but fwiw the emotion this induced in me was blinding rage

― le Histoire du Edgy Miley (difficult listening hour), Friday, August 12, 2016 10:22 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tbh I was annoyed by it too simply cos to me it's easy to tell someone else to take on 20k in debt when you ain't the one paying it back. esp when students are likely to listen to you when you're their teacher.

"forget the debt, embrace your college years"

gah, that makes my head explode in rage.

I have very strong opinions on the usefulness of English degrees (as I imagine would anyone who has to read crap foisted on them by a legion of seemingly only semi-literate co-workers).

The thing that aggravates me about Neanderthal's friend's comment is not the "it's a priceless education" aspect - I think people at 17-19 have a pretty good idea of whether they should pursue higher education or not, and assuming they got their HS diploma, aren't without the tools to make a reasonable decision - but the fact that she is pooping on local state colleges and community colleges, which I've come to decide is a fucked up attitude and contributes very much to long-lasting polarizations and disparities which are fucked up and bullshit

yup. we have good ones here too!

I started out as a journalism major. This seemed like a viable idea in 1989. Jobs were available, if not spectacularly remunerative. One could assemble a reasonably prestigious career, even a measure of notoriety.

Life intervened, and I ended up instead with a degree in English (w/ philosophy minor). I was near-certain this would be vocationally useless unless pursued to the PhD level.

Nothing about those initial assumptions turned out to be true. First, print journalism is barely a recognizable career path now. Second, I did fine with an English degree - I got a writing-centric job pretty much immediately and have pretty much done nothing else since. Third, I have done fine with just a BA. Every employer I've had has valued my work experience more highly than they would have valued graduate degrees, so it would have been wasted time and money.

state colleges part was my trigger too -- that people come up w a reasonable plan for their futures that will get them both the necessary credentials for the professional world and what it pleases us to call an education, without even crippling them for decades in penance, and the response is no no the movie has to end w you running through the streets of manhattan laughing in liberated joy as "rebellion (lies)" plays

(i wish i'd stayed at my state college)

this is also a teacher at a school in a very low-income area where many of the students' families are receiving some kind of public assistance.

I really wish I'd gone to like community college for the first two years and finished my Psych degree at a state uni cos I'd have probably half the debt right now for the same degree. there was that pesky year I was a music major at FSU tho that I woulda also needed to get rid of

the vast majority of private colleges in america are no better than your average state school - they're not even more prestigious

lotsa people chase a name

I feel like my residential liberal arts college would have been cool and fun if I went when I was a bit older and more mature. As it was I squandered much of my time, mildly abusing drugs and alcohol, getting deeply involved in a bad relationship, and learning a great deal about both the Western canon and various Marxist, postmodernist, feminist, and deconstructionist approaches to critiquing the Western canon.

state universities are ace, even though they will not (almost) guarantee you a spot in the ruling elite in the same way that a handful of prestige universities will. there's no reason to disrespect US public colleges and universities, except maybe to disrespect them for what they pay their football coaches.

doesn't it depend on what you're majoring in?

I have a philosophy BA from "last-chance U" (an experience which I enjoyed immensely, and hardly cost anything with the scholarship I had) and an MA from a much better-known program (which was $$$ and threw me into a depression). I'm not sure either helped me critical think any better, but it was a good major for me and I'm glad I did it. The BA anyway.

college was a waste for me. I was depressed and unmotivated and basically just attended class enough to get Cs and graduate. often would show up just to take tests. didn't begin to turn my life around until I got a corporate job that finally gave me an opportunity to establish a career and save for my future and I had to grow up fast. best thing that happened to me.

i got a D- in economics because my professor was a libertarian and i was too much of an idiot to spend time around someone with different opinions from me. i was also too lazy to drop out of the course. i just only went once in a while.

does anybody else have recurring dreams that they're in college last semester? been having them non-stop for twelve years

i got Ds and Fs all through high school (constantly doubling back to retake things or to gin up half-real "independent study" courses w sympathetic teachers) and something like Cs in college. the whole epic was pretty grim.

xp ha i def still have You're Failing The Class dreams.

my college transcript is, i think, all A's and A+s with the occasional D-, D or C-. Maybe I got like a B+ in a few English classes freshman year but in my sophomore, junior, and senior years i was a shining star in my english and art history classes. far too much of my identity was tied up in being a "humanities guy." i was a few years into my twenties before i truly understood that there is more to life than having the most refined opinions of all.

were you Donal Logue's character in Tao of Steve?

idk haven't seen that. i just see those years as being drawn deeper into some kind of fantasy, losing perspective, and getting less and less happy the whole while, culminating in something like a nervous breakdown after i graduated. this has much more to do with me than college.

I have two versions
-'they' figure out that I shouldn't have graduated from high school and I'm back taking one class per day for an entire year to my shame and horror; this one ends when I realize I'm <x> years old and at this point it doesn't matter anyway

- it's the last week of the semester and I have a college class (usually biology or a literature class) that I haven't shown up to all semester and I have to go in pretend like I've been there the whole time and figure out how to pass

school nightmares aren't as traumatic as service industry nightmares though

real talk

- it's the last week of the semester and I have a college class (usually biology or a literature class) that I haven't shown up to all semester and I have to go in pretend like I've been there the whole time and figure out how to pass

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Saturday, August 13, 2016 12:33 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hah yes this one!

school nightmares aren't as traumatic as service industry nightmares though

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Saturday, August 13, 2016 12:34 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

weirdly I also have concurrent dreams about still working at the mexican restaurant I did 14 years ago. in one of the dreams recently I was "fired" so I was hoping that was the end but nope....brain did a reboot of the series.

i have a recurring nightmare that i am forced to live in a cockroach infested apartment that is attached to a particularly bad job, so i just go downstairs during the day to the job and upstairs at night to the cockroaches

these aren't normal cockroaches though. they are sort of based on horseshoe crabs.

JOe's Apartment

I don't think humanities degrees are useless, but it really does seem to me that you need to be a sort of life acrobat, very outgoing and confident, in order to magic that kind of degree into a career. The sort of person who can 'network'. Or who may have kinda sorta been born into a few networks in the first place.

I say this after about 10 years of failing to get anywhere in journalism, publishing, or marketing, which was the idea when I went to university. At this point I don't have anything resembling a 'career', as such, only jobs (now and then, with rough stretches in between). Other people have got places though, with roughly the same education as me, and the education has been a key part of getting them there.

A friend of mine shared this on FB today: Four years ago she collected two degrees from UT-Austin. Two weeks ago she interviewed for a server job with four different managers at the same company/restaurant and doesn't hear back.

Even with all the grads who say they can't find work, I feel a lot more precarious as a 30-something with half a degree in fine arts and 2/3 of a degree in history.

Seriously considering starting from almost zero in accounting via a local community college's online program and then transferring. It doesn't have a lot of relevance to my immediate life but at the same time it gives me a parachute in a field that does seem to be producing subsistence level jobs at a decent rate.

Occasionally I'm not super sympathetic with grads in that situation, though - an acquaintance went back and graduated at 32 with a degree in marketing but he's driving Uber and constantly complaining that none of the music marketing jobs he applies for will hire him. Doesn't apply to anything outside of promotion/artist management/etc. jobs.. and the one time he did have a job in the industry it paid so little he was borrowing money to survive from his elderly parents.

school nightmares aren't as traumatic as service industry nightmares though

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Saturday, August 13, 2016 4:34 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

stay in school nightmares, kids

xxp that's funny, milo, i was thinking the same thing - while paging through an accounting ethics textbook i'm going to use for a business ethics class i have to teach. then i was wondering if i should conceal my educational background so my imaginary accounting professor wouldn't make fun of me and call me 'doctor'.

the question of whether or not it was worth it for me to go to college, or graduate school, doesn't really make much sense. realistically if i hadn't gone it would have meant trying to work my way into the tech industry in the 90s, following $$$$ at a moment when talent and informal knowledge were enough to get you ahead. but i had half a BS by the time i 'went to college' at 18 and two degrees and most of an MS by the time i was done five years later, and then a phd, all veering toward the most useless fields of study you could want, making me a more and more academic person along the way. it wasn't about the credentials for me, i just believed that what i should be was as educated as possible, most likely to become a professor in something. like cardamon i know lots of people in my circles who have gotten somewhere with roughly the same, or less, but aside from networking or background connections it seems like they've mostly just been fortunate to be counted useful. say from specializing in the things that are in demand, from having the experience to teach that one class, from having the attitude to fit in with a certain group. mostly just thanks to the incredible standardization/functionalization of our labor market.

i've never been entrepreneurial and i've never been any kind of joiner. unfortunately i also never really concentrated on making myself useful to others; it has happened that i was useful sometimes. mostly i pursued my education with reference to myself, and not even to what would be most useful for me. i think that in terms of 'uselessness' the trick with college is probably finding a way to make sure you're useful to others, if nothing else, because lacking those other sources of... whatever, that gets you places and keeps you going... you will remain dependent upon others finding you useful somehow, for most of your life.

very otm

Treesh, I'm sorry to hear that your college memories are so unhappy, but what you describe sounds pretty standard for me and most of my social circle: drugs, alcohol, doomed relationships, despair, self-doubt, retreat into fantasy, one or more psychological rough patches, way too much lit crit.

On some level I half-suspect that is more or less how college is supposed to go, and that going through those things was as indispensable a part of the learning process as anything I heard from a professor in a classroom. Good judgement comes from experience; experience comes from poor judgement.

My B.A.'s usefulness was limited to getting me over the minimum requirements for getting into a graduate program. My M.S. has definitely been worth actual money in the bank. And I got the company to pay for it. I've been an incredibly fortunate son of a bitch.

Not as fortunate as someone born in europe tbf

them's fightin words

thats a more localised birthright tbh

Srsly tho

Didnt get into first choice (law) by a matter of a few points, took a year off for family reasons, did a business degree at the local technical institite to enable me to stay in town, got me into the public sector and took me 8 years to get back to get an IT degree. Cant imagine having managed any of it under a debt system.

i went to college for free and was paid to work thru grad school (per usual in the states), with a bit of loan debt to make the latter more doable. i don't know what i would have chosen to do if i were paying for college, probably gotten a computer science degree. : /

xp my memories are not as bad as that makes them sound. but those years do seem kind of arbitrary in hindsight.. i think it wasn't the right time for me to be pursuing higher education. i guess everyone is different but at 18-22 i was quite young and had very little grasp of the world

i believe in the gap year. and also in pursuing humanistic learning throughout one's life rather than as an undergraduate focus.

in denmark i remember going to a party at this weird residential school that was like, in between high school and undergrad. at one point all this amazing food appeared but i didn't see any kitchen facilities or staff. they seemed to have dance parties every night at this place.

looked it up -- it was called a Folkehøjskole. i'm probably explaining it wrong, but i remember they didn't have grades and it was in the middle of the woods basically, deep in the copenhagen suburbs

or the suburbs of cph rather

pursuing humanistic learning throughout one's life rather than as an undergraduate focus.

― Treeship

iirc u either get a degree or u gain credit by sharing the correct blogs on message boards

not blogs, anecdotes

With 50 year working lives approaching soon, it wont be an issue of either/or (life-learning vs undergrad).

An undergraduate degree, or masters, in your early 20s isn't going to last 40 to 45 years, so you can get to have at least one more go at it, if not two. You might need to choose which student debts you want to pass on to your heirs.

Meet the parents who won’t let their children study literature

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/09/02/meet-the-parents-who-wont-let-their-children-study-literature/?hpid=hp_regional-hp-cards_rhp-card-posteverything%3Ahomepage%2Fcard&utm_term=.f5ebc1131368

"at George Mason University"

stopped reading there

But seriously you should look at GMU's list of the world-changing titans who studied English! I mean, Howard Cosell, Tom Clancy, Emma Watson, Clarence Thomas, AND Mark Knopfler!

Who would not wish to be among such company as they begin their career journey. I mean, the list even includes a former EPA head and numerous prominent librarians.