lucifer_sam

It might sound like I'm being a dick, but I'll say it anyways...

If you don't know what you want to do with your life, get out of school while you still can. Wasting your and your parents' money in an effort to pursue a meaningless piece of paper is hardly a credit to yourself. It's fine not knowing what you want to do with your life, it's not fine wasting an education going in the wrong direction. By my estimate some 60% of the kids in college shouldn't be where they are, mostly because they have ulterior motives in attending.

Unlike some progressive European countries, Americans do not have the luxury of attending school for as long as they can stay productive -- the last thing you want to do is tack a $40,000+ school loan on top of the expenses you'll incur as an entry-level professional. The notion that a Bachelor's degree is essential in today's world is absurd and overkill, especially considering most people pursue careers far outside their field of study.

I'm sure it's a great experience for you if you're really enjoying what you're doing now, but unless there's some sort of prospective financial reward, college becomes a superfluous and hindering 4+ years in terms of your professional development. Until tuition becomes more affordable, college will always be a recreational reservation for the upper class and an enormous financial hole for everyone else. The key is understanding whether or not that hole is worth the prospective investment towards your life.

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duga

I completely disagree with this. The notion that you have to pursue a career in the same field of study as your degree is absurd, but not the notion that you need one. You definitely need one, unless you hope to work a pay by the hour job the rest of your life. The only way I see around it is if you have massive networking skills, or you just have a friend that gets you a job (even then they will tell you to get a degree most of the time). A degree these days is little more than showing you are willing to work hard enough to get one, but it is still basically an essential.

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Janszoon

Exactly. Unless you have a trade or happen to be a genius entrepreneur, getting a bachelors in literally anything is better than having no degree at all. With a BA you can always get office-type jobs. Over the years I've worked with tons of editors, account managers, sales people, etc. who had degrees in everything from comparative religion to animation to, yes, English. And I think the great thing about an English degree in particular is it actually gives you a bit of an edge in the business world, where good writing skills are frequently very important.

That's true of engineering majors as well, sorry to say.

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lucifer_sam

How so?

I'm not saying I'm necessarily disagreeing with you but I think we may be at odds as to what each other means by it.

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Janszoon

I'm saying, as far as I can tell based on being married to an engineer, it's an industry where if you want to switch companies, you're more than likely going to have to relocate because there don't seem to be a lot of different organizations in any given place who hire engineers. Contrast this with having an English degree. No offense to your cousin or whoever it was but most people with English degrees who have their act together wind up becoming things like editors, copywriters, proposal writers, etc. While it's true that they'll probably make less than engineers, there are generally more local jobs available to them, so they don't have pack up and move to another state if they switch employers.

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A Night in the Life of the Invisible Man

Time & Place

25 Albums You Should Hear Before the Moon Crashes into the Earth and We All Die

last.fm

lucifer_sam

I was on tenterhooks about posting this before because it might sound like I'm trying to brag (which I'm not) but it sounds like you have a VERY wrong idea of what and where technical majors are in demand. Across a company? Yeah, you'll have to relocate, but if you're just looking for a job you won't need to look very far.

Here's a few of the engineering jobs I'm actually qualified for right now. If you notice the industries which they represent you'll see they range from communications, electronics, waste management, transportation, civil contractors, government work, etc etc etc. Not only that they're (mostly) within a few hundred miles' radius making it easy to relocate to find a job. (One is within walking distance of my apartment!) Most of these aren't small companies either, the ones which actively recruit through sites like this are generally the bigger firms.

Personally this summer I'll be working for an engineering firm that's five miles from my house. And within that area there's at least four or five more well-paying jobs within my field at my disposal. The only thing that sucks is the manufacturing industry's gone down the shitter in the past few years, making it difficult to find places looking for new hires.

I'd love to see what this would look like if I was a liberal arts major. A much shorter list, I expect.

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mr dave

^absolutely agreed.

what's on your piece of paper doesn't matter. the fact that you can put up with the bureaucratic BS necessary to obtain that piece of paper DOES.

on its own, i agree, a Bachelor's degree is worthless, it's a great starting point though if you've got a clear focus and are able to lay out a worthwhile path to follow.

as for the comment about sticking to an English major if you have no other plans... what is that actually worth on its own? how is it not just another 4 years of high school? it's like the guy i work with who has a degree in French and Spanish who now works in a call center and uses absolutely none of that education. i asked him once if he had a plan to do something more with his degree like maybe a Master's in Communication (international translator would be a pretty kickass career i think) or maybe a Master's in Education and be one of the highly qualified teachers on the higher end of the payscale (in Canada teachers are, or at least, used to be, paid based on their overall level of education).

YES YES YES ABSOLUTELY YES!

it's not until you decide 'oh, geez! i should have gone to college', but rather, alright enough of this cubicle hell, i'm going to do this instead. get an actual honest idea of what working for a living is like and you'll find that your interests and world views will change. plus you'll also be able to qualify as a 'mature' student. also, don't start a family if you plan on going back within the next few years. i dropped out of college the first time, went back to a lovely part time grocery store job on the ass end of nowhere before going back (twice) and decimating class after class once i had a clear focus of what i wanted to do (including 8 perfect grades during that 2nd program).

i run into so MANY people (and was one myself years ago) who act like because they have that fancy piece of paper and nice grades that they're somehow entitled to a better station in life. that's not the case at all anymore, at least not for the vast majority of people. like they'll somehow never have to change jobs once they land that first one with their degree and their genius will be recognized and they'll just be auto-promoted to a job specifically tailored just for them. those 8 hundreds i got? - padding from my dept. head to insure himself into a cushy job out of school based on our performance (it blew up in his face).

i think colleges and universities are directly responsible for this type of propaganda being accepted as common knowledge. likely why there's an obscene demand for plumbers and other people who are willing to touch actual sh1t. also i've never worked in a call center that paid less than $10 an hour and required more than a high school education, hardly knee wrecking or back breaking. sure it might suck for 8 hours a day but that still leaves 16 for yourself.


also, even though i use personal examples nothing of this discussion is meant to be taken personally by anyone. no one should drop out of school based on a freaking thread on the internet. no one is attacking anyone's choices, simply pointing out varying perspectives that most people don't notice until they're well out of the doors of Academia.

and everything Pete said is gold.

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gogojessicat

Though I agree with you on some points -- I have to say -- education is never a waste. and today a bachelors degree is pretty darn important.

my advice would be get a degree that is useful for a career and that way you can at least be making money after graduation while you try to figure out what it is you want to do. I know there is a lot of pressure to pick the right major, but it doesn't matter that much. I think the internships you do are more important because a) you figure out a little more about what careers you do and don't like and b) you build up that resume. don't worry so much about the major -- but i'd say stick to English - its one of the most versatile majors.. but my opinion is biased 'cause I'm an English major


this is so poetic. and tragic.

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Freebase Dali

Barely anything you said makes any logical sense at all.

If you get a degree that is useful for a career, that's great... but if you're only using it as an interim job until you "figure out what you want to do", then you've successfully wasted all the time you spent on the degree for that job. Simply having "experience" isn't just work experience. It's job experience that counts towards jobs that are actually related.. not just some arbitrary factoid of having been working on "stuff" for X amount of time.

Majors do kinda matter. I guess if your parents are paying for it all, you probably don't place as much importance on it because you're not actually feeling the monetary hit... most kids I know are the same way. Those are the kids who get bad grades because they didn't have to work for the chance to even get a higher education.. I know you can change your major and internships are good for feeling out the field, but you should actually keep your major in your major career field. College isn't a 4-year-taste-test. Decide, at least generally, what you want to do for the rest of your life before you commit time and money to something you don't even have an inkling of doing.

But keeping things general at first does NOT mean to major in English. lol.. that's rather absurd.

lucifer_sam

What do you do with a BA in English?

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