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On February 09 2012 22:53 Gheed wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2012 22:48 Chef wrote:
Because he thinks English is only for pedantic nerds and that you can be just as good with no training at all? You can read and write in your spare time if you want, but that's not all there is to English. The critical thinking aspect, a skill that has to be learned but which most people are offended to think isn't inherent in them, is a huge part of English. So in other words, he's an idiot because he's rejecting something he doesn't understand. The skills you learn as an English major (researching, thinking about a piece of work, making connections, drawing conclusions and writing those conclusions as a coherent point etc.) are skills that every field uses. Unless you just adore literature, there is no particular reason to be an English major over anything else. I'm not shitting on English majors, I'm just saying that unless that's all you want, there are better options.
Perhaps, but in my (computer science) degree I didn't learn nearly as much of those skills as my sister did in her liberal arts (sociology/media studies) degree. She's much better at structuring an essay, reasoning, articulating, etc, etc, than me. She's got much more transferable skills, which is both a good and a bad point. Bad because her chosen field (PR) has a much wider range of suitable candidates for each job, good because she can switch to any industry or whatever relatively easily. I'm much more tied down working in computer science at least until I start to get up to management, I feel.
To OP, don't fret too much. I didn't know what I wanted to do at uni until after I arrived (when I was 17 wanted to do economics, took a course joint honours compsci + business, five weeks in I changed to pure computer science). Do what you want at the moment, at colllege, at university. Play it by ear, do things on a whim, and don't worry about the future, shit always sorts itself out in the end.
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Oh well if you didn't get perfect grades in English you should just give up while you're never ahead. You're done for man. It's over.
Or you could just work on it (with different perspectives/methods) anyways if you're that much into Literature/English. Nobody said you had to be perfect in high school, and nobody gives a flying fuck about performance levels in high school on your records in the future (aside from university applications).
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you could always go into a professional school after your BA, so it's not like you have 0 options. also you might want to consider business, which is another pretty good option aside from sciences/engineering
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Russian Federation142 Posts
If you want a well-paying job that requires lots of writing and science, become an engineer. You'll write tons of technical papers.
On February 09 2012 22:35 HaruRH wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2012 22:30 Azera wrote:On February 09 2012 22:27 Roe wrote:
Well I think the answer is obvious, and you state it in the tl;dr. Just depends on how much weight money has on your life's choice. Remember your previous blog where you were talking about inspiration: will your inspiration come from the desire to make money, or from the passion of your work? Well maybe it comes from a mixture of both the desire of wealth and passion. It just seems that there isn't much place for English graduates in the world today... Neither are there places for Science graduates. I graduated with Applied chemistry degree from NUS, but have been playing Starcraft 2 at home for 2 years.
I know chemical engineers like to joke about chemists being their slaves, working for minumum wage and all. I think physicists are in a similar situation.
I think it's fair to say that a science degree is good for your employment prospects only if you're incredibly good at your science.
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On February 10 2012 00:27 serge wrote:If you want a well-paying job that requires lots of writing and science, become an engineer. You'll write tons of technical papers. Show nested quote +On February 09 2012 22:35 HaruRH wrote:On February 09 2012 22:30 Azera wrote:On February 09 2012 22:27 Roe wrote:
Well I think the answer is obvious, and you state it in the tl;dr. Just depends on how much weight money has on your life's choice. Remember your previous blog where you were talking about inspiration: will your inspiration come from the desire to make money, or from the passion of your work? Well maybe it comes from a mixture of both the desire of wealth and passion. It just seems that there isn't much place for English graduates in the world today... Neither are there places for Science graduates. I graduated with Applied chemistry degree from NUS, but have been playing Starcraft 2 at home for 2 years. I know chemical engineers like to joke about chemists being their slaves, working for minumum wage and all. I think physicists are in a similar situation. I think it's fair to say that a science degree is good for your employment prospects only if you're incredibly good at your science.
Well, where I live you'll get a job in management after your PhD in chemistry and last year 96% of graduates had a job within 2 months.
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Just wanted to say that science is a LOT of work, to be successful you have to be extremely passionate about it. That said, it's also extremely rewarding. Even if only a handful of people ever really see the fruits of your labor, you're always left with a better understanding of some small facet of the universe at large, and once you start doing research, you get the added bonus of knowing that you might be the ONLY person to know about the things you're working on.
I can't speak much on English / arts. I would suppose that to be successful you may well have to be equally passionate and probably spend similar amounts of time on your work as you would in the field of science.
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I have a university degree in English. Honestly, I can't say i would take it back. I enjoyed my time. I tried teaching a little after graduating, and that I really didn't like it. Maybe teaching English in a country other than the US would be more interesting/rewarding, idk. I thought about moving to a place like LA or New York City and start a writing career, then I realized I wanted to get married and start a family soon. I couldn't afford to be poor. Honestly though I could n't have predicted that when I was in university let alone highschool. I ended up switching fields into nuclear technology. So in other words I think science and technology are much more financially stable and rewarding fields.
So my honest recommendation, is to not choose one or the other. You seem like you have good work ethic, you can dual major. Or major in engineering, math or physics and minor in English. At US universities at least this is not only possible but the structure of required classes encourages it. Not everything has to be one or the other.
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Two things:
1) science > english always
2) Your camera has too many pixels. You either A) need to scale down your photos, or B) need a lens with a larger focal length. I'm learning in quantum physics that if your focal length isn't long enough, then the light at two nearby spots can't be differentiated because of angular resolution. I can clearly tell that your camera doesn't have a good enough lens, so you should scale your pictures down so you can get just as good of a picure in less data.
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On February 10 2012 00:44 Meta wrote:
Just wanted to say that science is a LOT of work, to be successful you have to be extremely passionate about it. That said, it's also extremely rewarding. Even if only a handful of people ever really see the fruits of your labor, you're always left with a better understanding of some small facet of the universe at large, and once you start doing research, you get the added bonus of knowing that you might be the ONLY person to know about the things you're working on.
I can't speak much on English // arts. I would suppose that to be successful you may well have to be equally passionate and probably spend similar amounts of time on your work as you would in the field of science.
The difference is for me, that in the end, as a scientist I did something that helps humanity understand the world. It may or may not have a big impact on science, but I for one achieved the goal of evolution ( advancement; besides the reproduction, which does not depend on me studying a science). On the other hand, what could you possibly achieve with studying English
(German for me)? Well, you know how to think critical. But what can you do, thinking critical? Unless you go into politics, there is no other option. Law? Media? Literature? You are better of studying those fields then.
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Russian Federation142 Posts
On February 10 2012 00:50 jrkirby wrote:Two things: 1) science > english always 2) Your camera has too many pixels. You either A) need to scale down your photos, or B) need a lens with a larger focal length. I'm learning in quantum physics that if your focal length isn't long enough, then the light at two nearby spots can't be differentiated because of angular resolution. I can clearly tell that your camera doesn't have a good enough lens, so you should scale your pictures down so you can get just as good of a picure in less data.
Here's a bad ass article on topic#2: (doesn't take a degree in physics to understand)
http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/MultiMegaPixel.HTM
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I have a master's degree in English. The studies involve a great deal of grammar and unless you want to become a professor there aren't too many high-paid jobs. Translation and interpreting used to be lucrative professions but technology is making it possible for people with little knowledge to compete with experts.
English is a good course if you sincerely love poetry or prose and want to marvel at the amazing sensibility of great spirits.
If you want to discover new things and dissect them take science instead.
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Hey Neil deGrasse came to my school...before i was enrolled fml.
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i really think you should explore both options and go for whatever makes you happy, if you want to go to grad school and get a PhD, either option is fine for the job market, dont listen to people who just got a BS in liberal arts and complain about not having a job. getting a PhD in English will net you a decent job at worst, and a tenure-track professorship at best. getting a PhD in science only makes that professorship a bit easier to find and slightly higher paying. So I would just go with what you love. If you want to get a PhD and be a professor then you gotta LOVE what you do, for that kind of profession its more important than just an office job or trade where you can just be like 'well i do this to make money'; being a professor means you actually extend human knowledge of a topic and you really have to LOVE what you do.
if a circle represents the current knowledge of a field/discipline, a PhD is when you go to a point on the circumference and push it out a tiny tiny bit with your contribution to the discipline/thesis/research.
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Having not have read any of the responses yet:
My informed opinion is that you shouldn't think about this until you get into uni and actually take some classes in the subjects, because university's a whole 'nother sort of beast across all disciplines, IMO.
My uninformed opinion is to not major in English. It teaches you no valuable skills that you can't get from other majors (which in addition to teaching you those skills, teach you something else), and it teaches you nothing you can't learn yourself if you really have the passion and drive for it. I'm not saying this as a snobby hard science major or anything. (I'm not a hard science major, for one thing.) It is just, as someone who has considered majoring in English because of a.) a love for literary analysis and b.) a love for writing, I reasoned that it is something that I can and have done on my own free time. You can find shit tons of academic papers floating around the web to give your brain stuff to gnaw on, and if you truly love writing and expressing yourself, you'll do it without having a professor hovering over your work.
The same can be said of most subjects, of course -- if you really like it, you'll be able to self-study -- but it's much easier to self-study something like English over self-studying something like physics, and I find that having a professor benefits aspiring scientists/mathematicians/engineers/archaeologists/philosophers/anthropologists (throwing in the last few to show that I don't mean "just scientists") more than they do English majors, unless you're specializing in an area that's very, very specific and very, very niche.
Anyways, my two cents.
(Also, linguistics is the study of language, not the study of English (though it does go into that depending on your area). I haven't found many English majors who like linguistics though ... more philosophers, computer scientists, mathematicians, and language people who are interested in the structures of the language they speak are more suited towards linguistics majors.)
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The job market can go fuck itself. The problem with our world is that not enough people know how to think. Major in English.
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Why must you choose whether to be a "English" or "science" person? I understand schooling aligns you with very narrow categorization with majors and focuses and that the people under the system also see it that way.
I am a physics, math, and computer science major at my university. Guess where my research relies? Business theory. Why? Because of the skill sets I am studying are bleeding into my overall underlying interest on studying behavior and decision making with solving problems efficiently. So I make experiments with psychologists and businesses and apply my statistical understanding of data to apply to very human optimization projects. (rather than furthering any of the three theoretical fields).
It isn't quite the same, but I am very interested in psychology and "mathy" problem solving areas but I found what works best as both, producing quantitative algorithms for behavior.
I also have several friends in physics and English departments simultaneously, and their career paths are very open, and their most obvious roles in careers are PR professionals, who take the science to those who are funding but not all understanding. (ala SC2 teams who keep code B players who make huge fan bases for exposure, they're still KR GM and similar level to code A minus tourney success but make ALL their money in streaming and making the team image stronger for sponsors.)
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Don't study English unless you really, really, really want to teach, because it's not of a whole lot of use otherwise these days. Very limited field, lots of people who got the degrees without knowing what they were doing. You're pretty much going to be a Professional Unemployed Drunk if you study english and do something other than teach. Shit, that's probably still the most likely route even if you wanted to teach
On February 09 2012 22:53 Gheed wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2012 22:48 Chef wrote:
Because he thinks English is only for pedantic nerds and that you can be just as good with no training at all? You can read and write in your spare time if you want, but that's not all there is to English. The critical thinking aspect, a skill that has to be learned but which most people are offended to think isn't inherent in them, is a huge part of English. So in other words, he's an idiot because he's rejecting something he doesn't understand. The skills you learn as an English major (researching, thinking about a piece of work, making connections, drawing conclusions and writing those conclusions as a coherent point etc.) are skills that every field uses. Unless you just adore literature, there is no particular reason to be an English major over anything else. I'm not shitting on English majors, I'm just saying that unless that's all you want, there are better options.
This is fairly true. An english major will be much, much more refined at those things than other people not studying it, but those other people will also have studied a field that probably leads to more job opporunties. You can be a damn good critical thinker, writer and all that without having studied—my one friend is a programmer is absolutely crushes me on all those aspects—but the training does help. It's just a matter if that training is worth it, and it really isn't. Teaching and professor jobs don't pay well, there's a glut of unemployed or underemployed (so many are adjunct professors and get paid dick), and even if you wanted to try getting in another field sayyyyy business, it's doable, but much easier studying something that has a more direct application.
Science, I don't know that much about that field, but I am sure there are some people here who do.
Also, you're 15. Unless your country (china or singapore? I forget) has a different system than the US 1-12 grades then college, you still got a while. I changed my mind about six times between 15-18 alone. And even then, you don't have to declare til the end of your second year of college. Those first two years, take a bunch of electives in fields you enjoy, actually do the research as far as what the degree entails, job opportunies and such and think about it for a couple years.
I think the best advice I can give at 26 yo is to say that real happiness lies somewhere between doing what you enjoy and doing something that will get you a gooddamn decent paying job. Some people are weird and are totally happy getting paid $12/hr to travel the country with some theater group and having nothing to show for it. You gotta know yourself, and think long term—will I still like this in 20 years even if I don't have much money or I work 12hr/day—than the short term. Getting paid $150k a year isn't so cool if you can't see your spouse because you're working 75hr weeks, and doing something you love isn't so great if you're scrambling to pay bills.
Thankfully, you've got plenty of time to get to know yourself and study your options. Good luck!
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On February 10 2012 04:10 mmp wrote:
Do both.
It would be a stressful but cool experience and you'd learn a lot. But it's about the furthest you can get from being fiscally prudent
Waaay too many people approach college as a way of pursing things they enjoy rather than a huge ass investment in their future.
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On February 10 2012 04:13 Hawk wrote:
Waaay too many people approach college as a way of pursing things they enjoy rather than a huge ass investment in their future.
College is a way to pursue things they enjoy and invest a huge ass amount of time and effort into it.
?
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EPT
