7 ms·

I wasted four years of my life – don't make the same mistake

46 points by andrelaszlo 13y ago

aet 13y ago
I really look forward to a world filled with only engineering majors -- sounds exciting.
- gfodor 13y ago
  I am guessing this is sarcasm but the mind boggles at how much progress could be made if more people went into science and engineering majors. Not just due to their increased direct contributions, but also the effect it would have on political discourse and culture. We could do a lot worse.
  - FN0rdique 13y ago
    It's difficult to overstate how misguided this is. Engineering types are already seen as the ones who picked the right major, so we're seeing a flood of people heading into those fields. The result thus far has been that we have more ways than ever before to target advertisements and share stupid pictures of ourselves and offer interpretations of rap lyrics. Has this improved western culture, as far as you're concerned?
    - kazagistar 13y ago
      Science and engineering has influenced culture far more then traditional literature in the past half century. You might not like the direction our culture has taken, but you are far more likely to be able to change it with technology then with prose.
  - alanctgardner2 13y ago
    Why do people assume that making more engineering majors = making more people analytical and reasonable? A whole bunch of things: - doing engineering isn't magically going to change your thought process. Some people don't think the same way as others - they probably wouldn't enjoy engineering if they did it (I don't doubt they could apply themselves to get a degree). You think if Obama did a BEng the world would immediately be black and white and he could just make the "right" decisions? - engineers aren't the only people who contribute to society, by a long shot. Besides a world with movies, graphic art or music, an all-engineer world would lack all the scholarly products of the modern world. "Guns, Germs and Steel" is an awesome book which is very accessible, and engineers seem to love it. But it was written by a biologist, on the backs of 100s of academics who did the original research he cites. A work like that couldn't exist without "the arts"
    - tcdowney 13y ago
      I'm pretty sure biology falls within the S in STEM. "Guns, Germs, and Steel" is a pop-science book, surely you could have used a more literary example to represent "the arts."
      - alanctgardner2 13y ago
        I chose that book because: engineers love it. Engineers don't necessarily love Marlow's Faust, or the Ring Cycle, or any other great achievements of the arts. Also, there's a significant anthropological and sociological component to GGS. OP's sort of engineer hates "soft sciences" like these. "The arts" was probably a bad choice of words, because few people are brazen enough to say art isn't good. Instead they'll say art is a good hobby, surely you can program by day and still write some little operas or something at night. Of course, this completely understates the dedication and focus required to produce a work. I really wanted to defend the soft sciences: psychology, socioligy , anthro, and other things people on HN don't see the need for.
- praptak 13y ago
  I really look forward to a world filled only with people who chose their major looking at own talents instead of stereotypes. By the way, I think this is the real point of the article, not "more engineering majors."
dbough 13y ago
I'd have to agree on the gender role issue. I'm a father of two daughters and want them to be whatever they want to be. I don't agree with the statement that everyone needs to learn how to code, or the fact that language and art are a waste of time. If everyone knew and did the same things, the world would kinda suck (and finding a good paying job would be impossible.)
- magmadiver 13y ago
  > I don't agree with the statement that[...]language and art are a waste of time I agree with you, they're excellent hobbies.
  - FN0rdique 13y ago
    I'd go with "foundational parts of the human experience," but feel free to dismiss them as "hobbies," I guess.
    - clusterfoo 13y ago
      > I'd go with "foundational parts of the human experience" But not necessarily professions. The notion of "professional artist" is fairly recent. Most of the great artists, pre-20th century, had day jobs: from Chaucer (diplomat, astronomer) to Lewis Carroll (Mathematician). And, if anything, I'd think that art not being a profession only made their art better. I mean, how much can someone who all he does is write all day can possibly have to say? Take Asimov, for example. I wonder how interesting his science fiction would have turned out had he not been, first and foremost, an actual scientist?
nekgrim 13y ago
"I'm hoping that my daughter will embrace her inner geek and want to change the world." And what if she don't have an inner geek...? You didn't waste time. You lived. And now you are judging the younger yourself, and saying "I made mistakes", but you can't know what life would have been if you studied maths. Maybe this article would have the same title, and end with "Don't make mistakes like I do, follow your heart and study art". But we love to have girls in IT. Welcome.
- James_Duval 13y ago
  I agree with this comment, although it might not appear that I do from the other remark I made in this thread. Spending four years supporting myself playing poker for just-under-minimum-wage on average was a waste of time in terms of career/hard skills, but gave me an instinctive grasp of game theory, excellent budgeting skills, improved my self-confidence and was generally a lot of fun. I don't know if I'd be where I am now without those four wasted years. EDIT: Oh! I remember the salient point I was going to make - I doubt she'd be earning around £250+ from a Guardian article without that liberal arts degree!
- AznHisoka 13y ago
  Also, embracing your inner geek doesn't necessarily mean changing the world. A lot of very smart people are in the business of making people click on ads more, or buy virtual cow and candies.
timje1 13y ago
My friend has this exact same degree (spanish and french), she wandered off to get a masters in International Development and then went on to create various programs around north-east Africa and Central America. Who says it's a worthless degree? It just sounds like this author didn't manage to do anything with it. Also good writing (taught by these 'useless' BA degrees) is a damned handy thing to have. I know people that have gone into marketing, tendering, publicity, reporting, technical writing ... the list goes on... it's possibly longer than the one for STEM degrees, which can pin your skills to one sector or role. edit: quoting her response: "That is an absolutely preposterous article!! If I hadn't studied Spanish and French I couldn't have worked abroad and I wouldn't have the job I have now. Language skills are vital! If she had written this about a history degree then maybe..."
- bobbbinsIII 13y ago
  Your friend's career path is not that usual. in practice, most people with this sort of degree will not get the opportunity to make much use of it in the future. None of your listed jobs specifically require a humanities degree, nor is it true that you need to study such a degree to develop good writing skills.
  - timje1 13y ago
    You don't need to study CS to get good technical skills either. I didn't say a humanities degree is the only way to get good writing skills, only that a humanities degree develops your writing skills. I propose that gaining good reading, comprehension and written communication skills would come in handy in a wide variety of careers, including software development.
    - bobbbinsIII 13y ago
      it's much more likely that a technical student has developed good communication skills than the other way round. in the real world, people are not required to write in depth literary analysis: most people have all the core reading and written communications skills they need after high school. it's also important to point out that your friend's example is a special case. when looking at the value of a particular degree, it's important to consider the full distribution of outcomes.
wads 13y ago
" I saw myself as an accomplished novelist or an interpreter for the EU." Yes, following your dream is, most of the time, waste of time. On serious note "My teachers recommended that I study economics and statistics as my A-level subjects" she were given choice and good advice. She chose to pursue what seemed best to her, and now she is saying "choices still heavily gender stereotyped". IF she was about to go to engineering and someone would have forced her to choose linguistics THEN it would be "gender stereotypes"/oppression problem. Now it's her inability to think ahead that got her waste 4 years, and it's her inability to accept her own mistake that leads her to cursing "gender stereotypes". I am amazed word "patriarchy" wasn't used in article. "I'm hoping that my daughter will embrace her inner geek and want to change the world." Suggestion: Instead of pushing to one direction let child explore and choose. Hellban in: 5... 4..
eksith 13y ago
There's a huge difference between what you may fall in love with and what pays the bills, but to categorize what she fell in love with as a waste is... well, a waste. I don't know how hard it would be to pursue literature and technology (I don't imagine there are many places that would cater to this since they're seen as disparate), but there are ways to accomplish this. I also don't think it's a good idea to push technology as a general field on anyone, gender be damned, if their heart isn't in it. It's good to try your hand to see if that's something you want to follow, but goals without passion fizzle quickly and that may not be enough to support yourself. There are also cases where people have pursued technology only to feel deeply unfulfilled and/or unchallenged and move on to something else. Just because tech is everywhere, doesn't mean it's the only thing around.
jpswade 13y ago
In his 2005 Stanford commencement lecture, Apple Computer founder and college dropout Steve Jobs credited a Reed College calligraphy class for his focus on choosing quality typefaces for the Macintosh. He seems to do alright.
- dublinclontarf 13y ago
  > He seems to do alright. Did, RIP Jobs. Also he was Steve Jobs, who created multiple multi-billion dollar companies, he would have been a success had he taken a burger flipping class. There was only one Steve Jobs.
  - jpswade 13y ago
    That was a typo, however, as his legacy continues the typo remains. Also I disagree with your burger flipper comment, his beliefs were really what made him, him.
- chad_oliver 13y ago
  Those facts are indeed correlated, but there's no evidence of causation.
- James_Duval 13y ago
  He might indeed be doing alright if he had taken a little more interest in science. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8841347/Steve-Jobs-regretted-trying-to-beat-cancer-with-alternative-medicine-for-so-long.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8841347/Steve-Jo... I wonder how many years of his life that wasted?
  - run2xs 13y ago
    Likely, none. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81xnvgOlHaY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81xnvgOlHaY
    - James_Duval 13y ago
angersock 13y ago
The liberal arts are invaluable as a means of cultivating the potential within oneself. That said, you need food to feed a garden while it is being cultivated, and nothing puts bread on the table quite as robustly as engineering degrees.
- anuragramdasan 13y ago
  Perfectly put. I do love liberal arts a great deal. I try my best to be able to learn about those whenever I happen to get some free time, but even if I had to do it all over again, I might not chose it as my degree and stick to engineering.
- matwood 13y ago
  I received my CS degree from a liberal arts school[1] and think it was one of the best accidental/forced choices I made. I say forced because at the time I didn't have the money to go anywhere else. [1] http://www.cofc.edu/about/ http://www.cofc.edu/about/
- morgante 13y ago
  This author completely misses the value in the liberal arts, which I'm saying as a computer science major. Definitely my best decision was to study CS as part of a liberal arts curriculum (where 1/2 of my courses have nothing to do with CS). This is really how it should be done. Sadly, the liberal arts are dying out (or, in the case of the UK, don't exist at the university level). In such a system, I'd actually encourage people to study the arts, not engineering. It's easy enough to simultaneously learn to code and put bread on the table from that. (Most useful technical skills are learned outside the classroom.) Until the non-classroom resources for learning the liberal arts rival those for learning CS, in an either-or situation (like the author's) one should definitely study the arts.
  - angersock 13y ago
    "Until the non-classroom resources for learning the liberal arts rival those for learning CS, in an either-or situation (like the author's) one should definitely study the arts." There are millenia of materials and practice in the liberal arts available for consumption; there is only perhaps half a century of resources for CS. I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that self-schooling liberal arts is possible. One does wonder why the teaching of liberal arts is dying out--there may well be some systemic issue that is causing worse teaching or relevance. The issue may well lie with the current practice of liberal arts.
ajiang 13y ago
Everyone, successful or not (however you choose to define that), walks a different path in life to get where they are. Our experiences in total shape the persons that we are, the way we approach problems, the way we create, and the way we interact with others. The author, with the benefit of knowing where she is, is reflecting on the other roads - some perhaps shorter, faster - she could have taken to get there. What I take away from her post is that if you are ambitious in your career (like she seems to be), it is important to understand the realities of your major / concentration. For those that have passions in humanities and other non-"hard" majors, pursue your dream as long as you can accept the statistical likelihoods for your career post-graduation.
cafard 13y ago
" Last week's A-Level results show only 245 girls took A-Level computing this year, compared with 5,153 who took Spanish. This is a decline of 1.3% from last year, despite the fact that the few girls who took A-Level computing outperformed boys." A 1.3% decline means that three fewer girls took A-Level computing this year, doesn't it? The liberal arts are very much worth doing. I was a liberal arts major, and have three regrets: I should have studied math further (bailed out after multi-variable calculus and differential equations; I should have studied more foreign languages; and I should have realized that computing did not begin and end with Fortran IV entered onto punch cards. (Yes, this was all a while ago.)
adekok 13y ago
FTA: > My teachers recommended that I study economics and statistics as my A-level subjects, but I had my mind set on a life fulfilled by the arts. And in the next paragraph: > Without realising it, I was a victim of a gender stereotype reinforced since birth, that men do science and maths and women do arts or languages. Society was encouraging her to go into the sciences. Or was it that she was trapped by a "gender stereotype"? She doesn't see the contradiction between the two statements. She could have accepted personal responsibility, and said "I screwed up. I didn't look into the job prospects, or the salaries. I just had a romantic notion and went with it, against the advice of people who knew better." > Now I have a five-year-old daughter. I don't want her to blindly follow gender roles the way I did. Is she an adult, or an automaton with no free will? > I want her to embrace the fact that a science or technical degree will not limit her creativity but expand it and broaden her horizons far more than my arts background could i.e. "I was bigoted against STEM degress, but now I realize that they're useful, too". This article is interesting. Not for it's promotion of STEM degrees. But for it's shameless bigotry, and total denial of personal responsibility.
- JonnieCache 13y ago
  A 5 minute interview with the careers advisor is definitely not where society's gender stereotypes stem from or play themselves out, especially at 16. Part of their role, at least now, is actually to offset preconceptions. >"I just had a romantic notion" This is just where the socialisation manifests itself. Social conditioning is just that, undetectable (by definition) changes in your own perceptions, rather than coercion from authority.
- sampo 13y ago
  She also wrote: "Computer science, technology and physics just did not figure in my teenage world view. Nobody popular in my school chose to study those subjects." She gave more weight to the peer pressure from other teenage girls, especially from the popular girls, than she gave to the word of her teacher. Not very uncommon. Peer pressure on what is considered "cool" vs. "lame" is a strong force in teenagers. I don't know if it's fair to say that every teenager who is not immune to that is not accepting personal responsibility.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
codva 13y ago
As the parent of a sophomore history major, this is something that I think about a lot. However, my son has a deep, deep passion for history. Advising him to get a CS degree just for job purposes seemed stupid, and considering how much help he needed from his high school sister to get through his Python class last year.... Although I am happy that his liberal arts college requires everybody to take 2 CS classes, I am also mystified why non-CS majors take one python and one C++ class. Wouldn't continuing with Python make more sense? However, if you are going to major in history, or English, or something like that you really do need to have a plan from freshman year about how you are going to turn it into a job when you graduate.
- JonnieCache 13y ago
  Maybe watch this with him, it's George Dyson (Freeman's son) recounting the story of the development of the computer at the IAS. It links CS to that fulcrum of the 20th century, the invention of the nuclear bomb. It's also highly entertaining, a very story told through coffee and ink stained punch cards. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg5gJxXBh8s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg5gJxXBh8s Thinking about it perhaps your son is more into knights, emperors and prophecies than cold war paranoia. It's a great video anyway.
  - codva 13y ago
    Actually, he is a pretty big fan of cold war paranoia :) Military history is his passion. He is hoping to turn into a job as a historian with the National Park Service or something like that. I'm definitely going to watch that video though.
- acdha 13y ago
  I would advise your son to look into some of the digital humanities programs – people are doing very interesting things using CS techniques (e.g. text or image processing, large-scale data mining, visualization, etc.). It doesn't pay as well as working at Facebook but it would probably be far more interesting for someone like your son. One of my favorite examples was someone I ran into at the NIPS conference years back who was using machine learning to classify the handwriting for manuscripts in the Oxford library collections in an attempt to identify the copyist when that information had been lost over the centuries. Someone phrased it beautifully that they preferred having CS being their superpower in a different field. I think that's a great plan.
mathattack 13y ago
There's a gender bias question here, and a value of language learning question. My take on the languages side - they are enormously valuable if you bring something else to the table. If all you can do is speak 4 languages, it's novel but doesn't open doors. If you can program Python, price a derivative, or design a bridge - then the language becomes invaluable. Who should we send to talk to the client in Spain? Jane speaks Spanish. Who should set up the support team in Prague? Bill is good with that language and culture stuff. As for the gender issue, it's much tougher. It's easy to say, "Let's encourage our kids" and a lot starts there. It's hard to change society, but you can always start with the local schools.
kaidajekri 13y ago
Being able to communicate information is often as important as knowing the information in the first place. Otherwise the knowledge would die out with the person who discovered it. A civilisation dies if it has no culture, nothing is created. We'd become Borg-esque.
nraynaud 13y ago
"My degree in French and Spanish – despite being a decent grade from a good university – is not worth the paper it's written on." we're probably talking about a few dozen thousand dollars piece of paper anyways, nothing cheap.
peterwwillis 13y ago
> Anybody can learn to code and these days it's as important as reading and writing. So, assuming like 1 million Americans can code (....might be a bit exaggerated), approximately 99.68% of Americans are illiterate? Holy shit, we're doomed! As of 2012, 16% of the American population lived in poverty, including 20% of children. Learning to code is difficult enough, and even more so if you are struggling to make enough to eat and keep a roof over your head. > I was wrong as a young woman to presume that technology was not a creative subject – that's sadly a presumption still shared by a third of school-age girls today. Many young men also presume technology is not a creative subject. In her case, she was just a regular human being that wasn't interested in computers. This has nothing to do with gender. You also don't have to be a genius to realize a degree in literature or language isn't going to have a huge job market. There is a market for translators, and being bilingual helps a lot in a variety of fields, but just speaking spanish or french is not a career path. Gender stereotype did not determine she had to pick that degree.
bane 13y ago
Go to school for your job, study what you love for a lifetime. Get that degree that will pay the bills, but then once you start work, make it your hobby to study music or 17th century French Lit or whatever. If you like the group study dynamic, join a book club or audit some classes at the local community college or state school. Most of the higher level lit classes have very few students anyways and they'll welcome another voice in the discussion. Better yet start a book club, or a lit discussion group. Put that tech degree to work and make an online version of this group. If it gets big try and monetize it!
- ImprovedSilence 13y ago
  I couldn't agree more. I studied engineering because I had no idea how you could make money unless you were making things... (I grew up kinda isolated from/ignorant of business degree types and the financial world..) But I still managed to study art and language (I even spent a semester in Italy), read up all the classics, made discussion with English majors to seek out books worth reading, get involved in philanthropic activities, and kept myself immersed in culture. All this on top of spending way to much time in the library studying 7 days a week.
- rsanders 13y ago
  That's great if you only want it to be a hobby. How many people here would think it a good idea to take a lucrative job in waste management or accounting and do a little hacking on the side?
  - albeec13 13y ago
    You'd be surprised :P
- jamesrcole 13y ago
  Ok.. but why? As far as I can see, you're just saying what people should do without giving any explanation of why.
izztmzzt 13y ago
Do what you love, not what you think is going to get you the big salary. If you love languages or art, there are certainly ways to support yourself and do them. I think it's pretty outrageous to say anyone not studying STEM is wasting their time. Sure, STEM enables our modern infrastructure, but the arts provide the things that just make life better -- movies, stories, music, etc... World would be pretty boring without.
- izztmzzt 13y ago
  I'm reminded of HN's own Paul Graham and his essay "How to do what you love" http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html
- bobbbinsIII 13y ago
  the vast majority of people studying humanities degrees do not LOVE the subject. they just choose a certain path after high school that seems interesting. the production of culture has very little to do with what people study at university...
  - Iterated 13y ago
    Yup. "Math is hard, I'm going to study psychology! Weeeee!"
- Yhippa 13y ago
  Do What You Love and Starve? http://www.martynemko.com/articles/do-what-you-love-and-starve_id1380 http://www.martynemko.com/articles/do-what-you-love-and-star...

46 points by andrelaszlo 13y ago

aet 13y ago

I really look forward to a world filled with only engineering majors -- sounds exciting.

gfodor 13y ago
I am guessing this is sarcasm but the mind boggles at how much progress could be made if more people went into science and engineering majors. Not just due to their increased direct contributions, but also the effect it would have on political discourse and culture. We could do a lot worse.
- FN0rdique 13y ago
  It's difficult to overstate how misguided this is. Engineering types are already seen as the ones who picked the right major, so we're seeing a flood of people heading into those fields. The result thus far has been that we have more ways than ever before to target advertisements and share stupid pictures of ourselves and offer interpretations of rap lyrics. Has this improved western culture, as far as you're concerned?
  - kazagistar 13y ago
    Science and engineering has influenced culture far more then traditional literature in the past half century. You might not like the direction our culture has taken, but you are far more likely to be able to change it with technology then with prose.
- alanctgardner2 13y ago
  Why do people assume that making more engineering majors = making more people analytical and reasonable? A whole bunch of things: - doing engineering isn't magically going to change your thought process. Some people don't think the same way as others - they probably wouldn't enjoy engineering if they did it (I don't doubt they could apply themselves to get a degree). You think if Obama did a BEng the world would immediately be black and white and he could just make the "right" decisions? - engineers aren't the only people who contribute to society, by a long shot. Besides a world with movies, graphic art or music, an all-engineer world would lack all the scholarly products of the modern world. "Guns, Germs and Steel" is an awesome book which is very accessible, and engineers seem to love it. But it was written by a biologist, on the backs of 100s of academics who did the original research he cites. A work like that couldn't exist without "the arts"
  - tcdowney 13y ago
    I'm pretty sure biology falls within the S in STEM. "Guns, Germs, and Steel" is a pop-science book, surely you could have used a more literary example to represent "the arts."
    - alanctgardner2 13y ago
      I chose that book because: engineers love it. Engineers don't necessarily love Marlow's Faust, or the Ring Cycle, or any other great achievements of the arts. Also, there's a significant anthropological and sociological component to GGS. OP's sort of engineer hates "soft sciences" like these. "The arts" was probably a bad choice of words, because few people are brazen enough to say art isn't good. Instead they'll say art is a good hobby, surely you can program by day and still write some little operas or something at night. Of course, this completely understates the dedication and focus required to produce a work. I really wanted to defend the soft sciences: psychology, socioligy , anthro, and other things people on HN don't see the need for.
praptak 13y ago
I really look forward to a world filled only with people who chose their major looking at own talents instead of stereotypes. By the way, I think this is the real point of the article, not "more engineering majors."

dbough 13y ago

I'd have to agree on the gender role issue. I'm a father of two daughters and want them to be whatever they want to be. I don't agree with the statement that everyone needs to learn how to code, or the fact that language and art are a waste of time. If everyone knew and did the same things, the world would kinda suck (and finding a good paying job would be impossible.)

magmadiver 13y ago
> I don't agree with the statement that[...]language and art are a waste of time I agree with you, they're excellent hobbies.
- FN0rdique 13y ago
  I'd go with "foundational parts of the human experience," but feel free to dismiss them as "hobbies," I guess.
  - clusterfoo 13y ago
    > I'd go with "foundational parts of the human experience" But not necessarily professions. The notion of "professional artist" is fairly recent. Most of the great artists, pre-20th century, had day jobs: from Chaucer (diplomat, astronomer) to Lewis Carroll (Mathematician). And, if anything, I'd think that art not being a profession only made their art better. I mean, how much can someone who all he does is write all day can possibly have to say? Take Asimov, for example. I wonder how interesting his science fiction would have turned out had he not been, first and foremost, an actual scientist?

nekgrim 13y ago

"I'm hoping that my daughter will embrace her inner geek and want to change the world." And what if she don't have an inner geek...? You didn't waste time. You lived. And now you are judging the younger yourself, and saying "I made mistakes", but you can't know what life would have been if you studied maths. Maybe this article would have the same title, and end with "Don't make mistakes like I do, follow your heart and study art". But we love to have girls in IT. Welcome.

James_Duval 13y ago
I agree with this comment, although it might not appear that I do from the other remark I made in this thread. Spending four years supporting myself playing poker for just-under-minimum-wage on average was a waste of time in terms of career/hard skills, but gave me an instinctive grasp of game theory, excellent budgeting skills, improved my self-confidence and was generally a lot of fun. I don't know if I'd be where I am now without those four wasted years. EDIT: Oh! I remember the salient point I was going to make - I doubt she'd be earning around £250+ from a Guardian article without that liberal arts degree!
AznHisoka 13y ago
Also, embracing your inner geek doesn't necessarily mean changing the world. A lot of very smart people are in the business of making people click on ads more, or buy virtual cow and candies.

timje1 13y ago

My friend has this exact same degree (spanish and french), she wandered off to get a masters in International Development and then went on to create various programs around north-east Africa and Central America. Who says it's a worthless degree? It just sounds like this author didn't manage to do anything with it. Also good writing (taught by these 'useless' BA degrees) is a damned handy thing to have. I know people that have gone into marketing, tendering, publicity, reporting, technical writing ... the list goes on... it's possibly longer than the one for STEM degrees, which can pin your skills to one sector or role. edit: quoting her response: "That is an absolutely preposterous article!! If I hadn't studied Spanish and French I couldn't have worked abroad and I wouldn't have the job I have now. Language skills are vital! If she had written this about a history degree then maybe..."

bobbbinsIII 13y ago
Your friend's career path is not that usual. in practice, most people with this sort of degree will not get the opportunity to make much use of it in the future. None of your listed jobs specifically require a humanities degree, nor is it true that you need to study such a degree to develop good writing skills.
- timje1 13y ago
  You don't need to study CS to get good technical skills either. I didn't say a humanities degree is the only way to get good writing skills, only that a humanities degree develops your writing skills. I propose that gaining good reading, comprehension and written communication skills would come in handy in a wide variety of careers, including software development.
  - bobbbinsIII 13y ago
    it's much more likely that a technical student has developed good communication skills than the other way round. in the real world, people are not required to write in depth literary analysis: most people have all the core reading and written communications skills they need after high school. it's also important to point out that your friend's example is a special case. when looking at the value of a particular degree, it's important to consider the full distribution of outcomes.

wads 13y ago

" I saw myself as an accomplished novelist or an interpreter for the EU." Yes, following your dream is, most of the time, waste of time. On serious note "My teachers recommended that I study economics and statistics as my A-level subjects" she were given choice and good advice. She chose to pursue what seemed best to her, and now she is saying "choices still heavily gender stereotyped". IF she was about to go to engineering and someone would have forced her to choose linguistics THEN it would be "gender stereotypes"/oppression problem. Now it's her inability to think ahead that got her waste 4 years, and it's her inability to accept her own mistake that leads her to cursing "gender stereotypes". I am amazed word "patriarchy" wasn't used in article. "I'm hoping that my daughter will embrace her inner geek and want to change the world." Suggestion: Instead of pushing to one direction let child explore and choose. Hellban in: 5... 4..

eksith 13y ago

There's a huge difference between what you may fall in love with and what pays the bills, but to categorize what she fell in love with as a waste is... well, a waste. I don't know how hard it would be to pursue literature and technology (I don't imagine there are many places that would cater to this since they're seen as disparate), but there are ways to accomplish this. I also don't think it's a good idea to push technology as a general field on anyone, gender be damned, if their heart isn't in it. It's good to try your hand to see if that's something you want to follow, but goals without passion fizzle quickly and that may not be enough to support yourself. There are also cases where people have pursued technology only to feel deeply unfulfilled and/or unchallenged and move on to something else. Just because tech is everywhere, doesn't mean it's the only thing around.

jpswade 13y ago

In his 2005 Stanford commencement lecture, Apple Computer founder and college dropout Steve Jobs credited a Reed College calligraphy class for his focus on choosing quality typefaces for the Macintosh. He seems to do alright.

dublinclontarf 13y ago
> He seems to do alright. Did, RIP Jobs. Also he was Steve Jobs, who created multiple multi-billion dollar companies, he would have been a success had he taken a burger flipping class. There was only one Steve Jobs.
- jpswade 13y ago
  That was a typo, however, as his legacy continues the typo remains. Also I disagree with your burger flipper comment, his beliefs were really what made him, him.
chad_oliver 13y ago
Those facts are indeed correlated, but there's no evidence of causation.
James_Duval 13y ago
He might indeed be doing alright if he had taken a little more interest in science. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8841347/Steve-Jobs-regretted-trying-to-beat-cancer-with-alternative-medicine-for-so-long.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8841347/Steve-Jo... I wonder how many years of his life that wasted?
- run2xs 13y ago
  Likely, none. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81xnvgOlHaY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81xnvgOlHaY
  - James_Duval 13y ago

angersock 13y ago

The liberal arts are invaluable as a means of cultivating the potential within oneself. That said, you need food to feed a garden while it is being cultivated, and nothing puts bread on the table quite as robustly as engineering degrees.

anuragramdasan 13y ago
Perfectly put. I do love liberal arts a great deal. I try my best to be able to learn about those whenever I happen to get some free time, but even if I had to do it all over again, I might not chose it as my degree and stick to engineering.
matwood 13y ago
I received my CS degree from a liberal arts school[1] and think it was one of the best accidental/forced choices I made. I say forced because at the time I didn't have the money to go anywhere else. [1] http://www.cofc.edu/about/ http://www.cofc.edu/about/
morgante 13y ago
This author completely misses the value in the liberal arts, which I'm saying as a computer science major. Definitely my best decision was to study CS as part of a liberal arts curriculum (where 1/2 of my courses have nothing to do with CS). This is really how it should be done. Sadly, the liberal arts are dying out (or, in the case of the UK, don't exist at the university level). In such a system, I'd actually encourage people to study the arts, not engineering. It's easy enough to simultaneously learn to code and put bread on the table from that. (Most useful technical skills are learned outside the classroom.) Until the non-classroom resources for learning the liberal arts rival those for learning CS, in an either-or situation (like the author's) one should definitely study the arts.
- angersock 13y ago
  "Until the non-classroom resources for learning the liberal arts rival those for learning CS, in an either-or situation (like the author's) one should definitely study the arts." There are millenia of materials and practice in the liberal arts available for consumption; there is only perhaps half a century of resources for CS. I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that self-schooling liberal arts is possible. One does wonder why the teaching of liberal arts is dying out--there may well be some systemic issue that is causing worse teaching or relevance. The issue may well lie with the current practice of liberal arts.

ajiang 13y ago

Everyone, successful or not (however you choose to define that), walks a different path in life to get where they are. Our experiences in total shape the persons that we are, the way we approach problems, the way we create, and the way we interact with others. The author, with the benefit of knowing where she is, is reflecting on the other roads - some perhaps shorter, faster - she could have taken to get there. What I take away from her post is that if you are ambitious in your career (like she seems to be), it is important to understand the realities of your major / concentration. For those that have passions in humanities and other non-"hard" majors, pursue your dream as long as you can accept the statistical likelihoods for your career post-graduation.

cafard 13y ago

" Last week's A-Level results show only 245 girls took A-Level computing this year, compared with 5,153 who took Spanish. This is a decline of 1.3% from last year, despite the fact that the few girls who took A-Level computing outperformed boys." A 1.3% decline means that three fewer girls took A-Level computing this year, doesn't it? The liberal arts are very much worth doing. I was a liberal arts major, and have three regrets: I should have studied math further (bailed out after multi-variable calculus and differential equations; I should have studied more foreign languages; and I should have realized that computing did not begin and end with Fortran IV entered onto punch cards. (Yes, this was all a while ago.)

adekok 13y ago

FTA: > My teachers recommended that I study economics and statistics as my A-level subjects, but I had my mind set on a life fulfilled by the arts. And in the next paragraph: > Without realising it, I was a victim of a gender stereotype reinforced since birth, that men do science and maths and women do arts or languages. Society was encouraging her to go into the sciences. Or was it that she was trapped by a "gender stereotype"? She doesn't see the contradiction between the two statements. She could have accepted personal responsibility, and said "I screwed up. I didn't look into the job prospects, or the salaries. I just had a romantic notion and went with it, against the advice of people who knew better." > Now I have a five-year-old daughter. I don't want her to blindly follow gender roles the way I did. Is she an adult, or an automaton with no free will? > I want her to embrace the fact that a science or technical degree will not limit her creativity but expand it and broaden her horizons far more than my arts background could i.e. "I was bigoted against STEM degress, but now I realize that they're useful, too". This article is interesting. Not for it's promotion of STEM degrees. But for it's shameless bigotry, and total denial of personal responsibility.

JonnieCache 13y ago
A 5 minute interview with the careers advisor is definitely not where society's gender stereotypes stem from or play themselves out, especially at 16. Part of their role, at least now, is actually to offset preconceptions. >"I just had a romantic notion" This is just where the socialisation manifests itself. Social conditioning is just that, undetectable (by definition) changes in your own perceptions, rather than coercion from authority.
sampo 13y ago
She also wrote: "Computer science, technology and physics just did not figure in my teenage world view. Nobody popular in my school chose to study those subjects." She gave more weight to the peer pressure from other teenage girls, especially from the popular girls, than she gave to the word of her teacher. Not very uncommon. Peer pressure on what is considered "cool" vs. "lame" is a strong force in teenagers. I don't know if it's fair to say that every teenager who is not immune to that is not accepting personal responsibility.

deleted 13y ago

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codva 13y ago

As the parent of a sophomore history major, this is something that I think about a lot. However, my son has a deep, deep passion for history. Advising him to get a CS degree just for job purposes seemed stupid, and considering how much help he needed from his high school sister to get through his Python class last year.... Although I am happy that his liberal arts college requires everybody to take 2 CS classes, I am also mystified why non-CS majors take one python and one C++ class. Wouldn't continuing with Python make more sense? However, if you are going to major in history, or English, or something like that you really do need to have a plan from freshman year about how you are going to turn it into a job when you graduate.

JonnieCache 13y ago
Maybe watch this with him, it's George Dyson (Freeman's son) recounting the story of the development of the computer at the IAS. It links CS to that fulcrum of the 20th century, the invention of the nuclear bomb. It's also highly entertaining, a very story told through coffee and ink stained punch cards. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg5gJxXBh8s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg5gJxXBh8s Thinking about it perhaps your son is more into knights, emperors and prophecies than cold war paranoia. It's a great video anyway.
- codva 13y ago
  Actually, he is a pretty big fan of cold war paranoia :) Military history is his passion. He is hoping to turn into a job as a historian with the National Park Service or something like that. I'm definitely going to watch that video though.
acdha 13y ago
I would advise your son to look into some of the digital humanities programs – people are doing very interesting things using CS techniques (e.g. text or image processing, large-scale data mining, visualization, etc.). It doesn't pay as well as working at Facebook but it would probably be far more interesting for someone like your son. One of my favorite examples was someone I ran into at the NIPS conference years back who was using machine learning to classify the handwriting for manuscripts in the Oxford library collections in an attempt to identify the copyist when that information had been lost over the centuries. Someone phrased it beautifully that they preferred having CS being their superpower in a different field. I think that's a great plan.

mathattack 13y ago

There's a gender bias question here, and a value of language learning question. My take on the languages side - they are enormously valuable if you bring something else to the table. If all you can do is speak 4 languages, it's novel but doesn't open doors. If you can program Python, price a derivative, or design a bridge - then the language becomes invaluable. Who should we send to talk to the client in Spain? Jane speaks Spanish. Who should set up the support team in Prague? Bill is good with that language and culture stuff. As for the gender issue, it's much tougher. It's easy to say, "Let's encourage our kids" and a lot starts there. It's hard to change society, but you can always start with the local schools.

kaidajekri 13y ago

Being able to communicate information is often as important as knowing the information in the first place. Otherwise the knowledge would die out with the person who discovered it. A civilisation dies if it has no culture, nothing is created. We'd become Borg-esque.

nraynaud 13y ago

"My degree in French and Spanish – despite being a decent grade from a good university – is not worth the paper it's written on." we're probably talking about a few dozen thousand dollars piece of paper anyways, nothing cheap.

peterwwillis 13y ago

> Anybody can learn to code and these days it's as important as reading and writing. So, assuming like 1 million Americans can code (....might be a bit exaggerated), approximately 99.68% of Americans are illiterate? Holy shit, we're doomed! As of 2012, 16% of the American population lived in poverty, including 20% of children. Learning to code is difficult enough, and even more so if you are struggling to make enough to eat and keep a roof over your head. > I was wrong as a young woman to presume that technology was not a creative subject – that's sadly a presumption still shared by a third of school-age girls today. Many young men also presume technology is not a creative subject. In her case, she was just a regular human being that wasn't interested in computers. This has nothing to do with gender. You also don't have to be a genius to realize a degree in literature or language isn't going to have a huge job market. There is a market for translators, and being bilingual helps a lot in a variety of fields, but just speaking spanish or french is not a career path. Gender stereotype did not determine she had to pick that degree.

bane 13y ago

Go to school for your job, study what you love for a lifetime. Get that degree that will pay the bills, but then once you start work, make it your hobby to study music or 17th century French Lit or whatever. If you like the group study dynamic, join a book club or audit some classes at the local community college or state school. Most of the higher level lit classes have very few students anyways and they'll welcome another voice in the discussion. Better yet start a book club, or a lit discussion group. Put that tech degree to work and make an online version of this group. If it gets big try and monetize it!

ImprovedSilence 13y ago
I couldn't agree more. I studied engineering because I had no idea how you could make money unless you were making things... (I grew up kinda isolated from/ignorant of business degree types and the financial world..) But I still managed to study art and language (I even spent a semester in Italy), read up all the classics, made discussion with English majors to seek out books worth reading, get involved in philanthropic activities, and kept myself immersed in culture. All this on top of spending way to much time in the library studying 7 days a week.
rsanders 13y ago
That's great if you only want it to be a hobby. How many people here would think it a good idea to take a lucrative job in waste management or accounting and do a little hacking on the side?
- albeec13 13y ago
  You'd be surprised :P
jamesrcole 13y ago
Ok.. but why? As far as I can see, you're just saying what people should do without giving any explanation of why.

izztmzzt 13y ago

Do what you love, not what you think is going to get you the big salary. If you love languages or art, there are certainly ways to support yourself and do them. I think it's pretty outrageous to say anyone not studying STEM is wasting their time. Sure, STEM enables our modern infrastructure, but the arts provide the things that just make life better -- movies, stories, music, etc... World would be pretty boring without.

izztmzzt 13y ago
I'm reminded of HN's own Paul Graham and his essay "How to do what you love" http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html
bobbbinsIII 13y ago
the vast majority of people studying humanities degrees do not LOVE the subject. they just choose a certain path after high school that seems interesting. the production of culture has very little to do with what people study at university...
- Iterated 13y ago
  Yup. "Math is hard, I'm going to study psychology! Weeeee!"
Yhippa 13y ago
Do What You Love and Starve? http://www.martynemko.com/articles/do-what-you-love-and-starve_id1380 http://www.martynemko.com/articles/do-what-you-love-and-star...