Reply to Why Are Most Employable Majors Seemingly the Least Popular?

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Why Are Most Employable Majors Seemingly the Least Popular?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I went to a SLAC and studied biochemistry.  My best friend went to MIT and studied computer science.  She actually had more distribution requirements in the humanities than I did; American schools are big on having a well rounded education and I think in many cases the math/science nerd who never needed to write an essay is a myth--at least at top schools.  I think that people have this myth that going to an engineering school means you don't take any humanities classes--not true in the US.  Since I went to such a small school, I had plenty of writing assignments for my science courses--mainly weeding through the primary literature and writing papers about it, and I had to write up my own original research for a senior thesis, so not all STEM educations are alike.

I will have to say, though, that ON AVERAGE, for most people math, science, and engineering are more difficult.  Sure you can have a rigorous history or English program, and hard working people come in all majors.  My dad is a brilliant, hard working guy with a great law career, and he majored in English.  However, as a science major, I had lab courses for up to 4 hours a day, typically 2 or 3 of them in a semester.  This means I had basically double the class time as my humanities majoring friends, even if I had the same amount of credits.  I had just as much, if not more homework with less unscheduled time to do it.  It is also harder to blow of a graded problem set than it is to blow off reading for a discussion course.  It is also well documented that exam based majors (i.e. engineering, the hard sciences) tend to have less grade inflation than humanities courses where the grade is more based on discussion participation and graded papers.  All of these things made studying the hard sciences less appealing to several of my peers in college.[/quote]

I get sort of tired of this debate about which major is more difficult.  It depends on a person's skills.  I started out as a math major, and I found my higher level math courses easier than some of my liberal arts classes because they were pretty direct.  It was straightforward what information you had to learn and what you would be tested on.  The same with biology.  My roommate was a bio major, and most of her courses (even through junior and senior year) were kill and drill type courses.  There was a lot of memorization and regurgitation.  Whereas, in some of the liberal arts majors (it varies), there is an enormous amount of reading and writing, and there is very little direction, meaning that you have to generate ideas for papers on your own.  It isn't about understanding a set of problems and then demonstrating that.

I'm not saying STEM majors are easy, but I'm tired of the suggestion that liberal arts majors are.  I would also add that I know a few computer science majors, and they all say their coursework was very easy.  They also all insist that most of the stuff they learn in the program (and I'm talking about a well respected program) is sort of outdated, that if you really want to excel in that field, you should be pretty far ahead of what is being taught at university computer science programs.

I'll also add that I know a lot of people who majored in liberal arts majors (even art) and work in IT and make a lot of money.  They insist that you don't have to major in computer science in a university setting to gather those skills, especially if it is something you are interested in and are active in online computers (I'm talking specifically about programming).  [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics