Pick me a Major Please

Russian is the best option. You'll learn something you can actually use and in doing so you'll also learn fundamentals about the history, culture, etcetera plus you'll be able to read things without the middleman translating for you.

Russian offers, IMO:

1. Wider, better options for graduate and overseas programs should you choose to pursue that. Anthropology/comparative literature/classics not so much, or quite frankly not at all.

2. Something much more fulfilling than any of the others in that knowing a foreign language is an actual SKILL which you can go and practice, not merely a collection of trivia which most liberal arts programs boil down to outside of their intended context.

3. a wider range of jobs than the others. You can get all the same jobs with Russian as you can with the other 3 but having a degree in Russian you can now also take jobs suited specifically to that.

4. Greater respect from certain employers who will see a degree in a foreign language (especially one that is off the beaten track and considered 'tough' by many english speakers) as meaning you are sharper than the average college graduate as far as picking up new things and adapting.

5. A cool conversation starter, which the other three are definitely not (once again my personal opinion but based on my experience of telling people "I'm majoring in anthro" for 3 years and then switching to "i'm learning Korean" for the next 2 I'd say foreign languages totally win)

Ned - honestly I have no idea what to do after college. I'd sort of like to work in a cool museum, like one that has exhibits on "this is what it was actually like to live in a [Viking sod house, whaling ship, etc.]" so I convinced myself last year that I should be a history major but actually I'm very frustrated with the history program here and don't want to do it. I don't want to do a job that's not really useful though, and I don't want to go to law school or be a doctor.

Having a degree will make you fit for all kinds of things unrelated to the subject.

(I think you're right about the possibility of hating Russia. It's a scary, faraway place. Study Trinidadian)

Slightly off topic: The PHB in Dilbert is a liberal arts grad.

Russian sounds fascinating, but as a course of study without a goal seems a bit daunting. If you don't want to go into international business or teach Russian, what would you do with it?

DO RUSSIAN

DO RUSSIAN, for all the reasons TOMBOT said.

(NB ambrose now doing an MSc in Transport planning)

Out of your choices I'd go with Russian.

This is just stupid. I was an English major and now I have a really fulfilling writing job, and I didn't become some useless grad-school academic. An English major (whether a concentration in literature, rhetoric, creative writing, etc.) is great because it opens your mind to different philosophies of looking at the world, spurs your creative juices, and helps you learn how to learn, which are all relevant skills for any field. Any major can be a "blowoff" major if you act that way. It's what you make of it. And as for future job prospects, I know more engineering majors, business majors, and other people who went for a more specialized major who are unemployed or underemployed or employed and miserable than the English majors I know, who have gone on to really diverse fields and careers. Employers like people who are well rounded and know how to think, and can apply themselves to different situations. And if you are that kind of person, you're way more adaptable, career-wise.

As opposed to all the other majors in which you learn how to jack off.

xpost Martin is correct.

This is just stupid. I was an English major and now I am a useless grad-school academic. And I'm very happy about it.

The point being, that by Maria's own claim of her preferred choices being "completely useless," I would go so far as to say she's a bit undecided in what she wants to do afterwards and ergo should go for the major she likes with the widest possible application. That major is not generally found in the English department. Whoops!

nabisco, are you taking advantage of the Election Day holiday? Do you guys even get that off? Or are you stuck doing grad school bullshit?

Like engineering.

Anyways, you obviously know best, so I'll leave you to your opinion, however ill-informed and absolutist it is.

But so seriously, for Maria's purposes I'm not sure grad prospects or careering are really the point (and if they were, I suspect we'd have seen a rather different set of options up there). I'm trying to think of which of these options blankets best over the interests of all of them, so I feel like I might as well ask: what's the attraction to classics? Which side of it appeals -- the historical element (which verges more toward anthro, right) or the literary one (which verges more toward comp lit)?

Umm, Ally, I'm out at work in Queens!

Also RUSSIAN btw.

Also, Brian, the grammatical structures in your posts have both been atrocious. I say this as a former English major who is now in the "real skill field" of the History department.

What is always funny to me, no offense to nabisco, who is a talented writer and a delightful person, is people who point out that their English major gave them a "fulfilling career in writing." It's funny to me because most of the writers I know, some of them very successful, weren't English majors! It's funny to me how people can learn to write well without majoring in English, and sometimes without even going to college at all!

Please do point out my specific grammatical atrocities, professor. I insist.

No one is suggesting that you can't be a great writer without majoring in English. Your "box of roses" comment sure does suggest a bitter, cynical person who begrudges others for their choices, though, especially the ones that don't mesh with your educational worldview.

Have a great day.

um, xp

I was informed by a woman working in our museum on campus at UTK that 1. museum work is hard to get into, there's not exactly a labor shortage there 2. she just got lucky, anthropology had nothing to do with how she ended up in her position.

Also, our professor for the emerging topics class (which is basically "what do you want to focus on for grad school" class) asked on the first day "What do you really want to do for the next seven to nine years of your life?" because his opinion was that if you weren't sure it was anthropological grad school work then you were in the wrong major. While there have been small inroads made into convincing the private sector that anthropological study can be handy w/r/t the doing of business, marketing, policy, etc - it's still a field where 90% of the work is done in the academic arena and a great deal of that is commissioned by the government.

The other 10% is Indiana Jones and CSI.

None of that is to say that English is particularly less useless than a lot of the other humanities one could major in. But I can't at all imagine why it would be singled out as particularly worse.

I already called you out for starting a sentence with 'And' you glorious spamming fucktard. Your job is a crime against humanity, you herbally supplemented fish gut.

x-post: Is everyone already mad at Brian from something else?

Boo!

Also, the English thing surprises me (is this an Atlantic difference?) I've always found people have pretty high regard for English graduates in this country - it's reall only 'cosmetic' degrees, and us philosophers who get a hard time. All the engineers I knew are unemployed, and all the scientists I knew are doing PHDs, but I don't think anybody's experiences like that mean anything.

We also called them "concentrations" but we were/are pretentious like that.

(xpost I am mad at Brian because it's Tuesday.)

Unlike the assholes on here.

Applied = "Bibble"
Engineering = "Bubble"
Information = "Information"
Management = "Bloop"
School = "Burble"
Sciences "Bobble"
Security = "Noodle"
Systems = "Nubble"

Burble of Bubble and Bibble Bobble Bubble Bloop and Nubble Bubble Information Noodle Bloop!

The thing that makes lit major look easy: you spend a lot of time sitting around and reading novels, some of them novels that you might have read anyway, just for your personal enjoyment. That's fairly nice.

The thing that makes lit majors annoying, sometimes: after a while you wind up spending a decent amount of time in seminars listening to other students talk about the reading. Which is useful, in its way, but at some point you start to wonder why you're paying money to hear your friends tell you about a book they just read.

The thing that makes lit majors weird: this is one of those subjects where having just done a bachelor's doesn't even scratch the surface of the topic, and doesn't leave you with very much more knowledge of it than a person who happens to read a lot. (Except for a bit of critical theory and jargon along the way.) And yet, funnily, unlike anthro or sociology or something, it's kind of rare that people go back and do full post-grad programs in it, for all the obvious reasons: no one wants to learn Middle English; it's not like you stopped reading stuff when you graduated; . . . and most importantly, as said above, it's a major whose graduates tend to slip without too much friction into any number of entry-level jobs. Copywriting, publishing, public relations, marketing, consulting -- any number of things. I don't know whether this is a plus or a minus, in the long run.

I'm happy with my lit/writing major and forthcoming grad degree because: (a) I care about writing fiction, and both of these things have made it way more plausible for me to work on developing that skill and theoretically making something of it, however small; plus (b) I actually do feel like I have a "real skill" that I can always depend on -- I can walk around confident that I can write pretty much any crap that anyone wants to pay me to write, and have it come out better than if they'd gone about producing it any other way. And I haven't yet detected any horrible shortage of people who need stuff written. And yes, this all applies to the "writing" side of the thing way more than the "literature" side of the thing.

Oh, and back to the original topic: I'm surprised everyone's pushing for Russian! I think the suggestions to minor in Russian were predicated on the fact that most schools kind of design their curricula around foreign languages as minors. That and it seemed like an easy way to cut down on the decision-making and both eat/have the cake.

Which is another thing: I'm not sure how much anyone needs to have a clear idea of "what they want to do with their life" at that point -- in part because it's somewhat rare that someone with a bachelor's degree can just stipulate what they want to do and then start doing it. You work your way through it. You acquire certain knowledge and tools in school; you try the best job you can land; you pick up more tools and more knowledge there. Move along like that, and with luck you'll wind up somewhere that's satisfying. I mean, I hate to sound drippy here, but "what you want to do" is more of a life-journey type thing than a matter of just deciding and then immediately setting about doing it. (It seems to me, in fact, that the people I know who have done the whole deciding-and-grasping thing have turned out that much more likely to have moments of great doubt and confusion as to whether they really wanted to do that after all.) (Except for those I knew who studied 3-D animation, they've never looked back.)

The focal point of that antired strange antiquark Maxwell law electromagnetic Fermi function was .05 GeV. Our results in the lab were 5*10^-14 eV. The error is probably because of the flux of the feild in the lab was disrupted by the computers running Microsoft. So we tried to run Linux, but got our fingers stuck up our nose. The TA is gay!

By the way, majoring in English is the best, suckers.

One thing that should be noted about majoring in something like Russian: It won't automatically open doors. To gain emloyment based on language you usually need to be fairly fluent, so that would require more than one semester abroad most likely.

Classics: I would suggest this if you want to study Greek or Latin in depth. So maybe decide where you want to invest your energy, in Greek or Latin, or in Russian. You can always change your major, and minor in your secondary interest, so don't worry too much. And realize that everyone here is talking from their own biases and that no one really knows what is best for YOU.

Maria, if you think you would like to work in a museum, have you thought about art history? Or are you more interested in cultural-type museums? Why not look at the background of the staff at the museum you would like to work out, and find out what type of things they studied.

Things like internships can be helpful at gaining musuem work, no matter what your major, and if seeing if this is indeed something that you would like to pursue.

History is a very good all-purpose type major: Are you sure you couldn't circumvent your distate for the program by finding a few good professors/classes. Sometimes that's all it takes. And then maybe minor in a language?

My general biased thoughts about things like anthropology and sociology is that they tend to be very text-book-y at the undergrad level, whereas majors like history and English actually have you reading primary texts, which I think is more fulfilling.

Why not Triple Major? I hear it's all the rage at "dinky liberal arts colleges" like Williams.

null subject = "Bibble"
null subject = "Bubble"
null subject = "Information"
particle = "Bloop"
School = "Burble"
Sciences "Bobble"
some other weird word = "Noodle"
and a little circle = "Nubble"

I'm putting that on all my future resumes and CVs.