taxguy

I often feel that too many people get lost in the goal of undergraduate education: development of strong reading, writing, and critical thinking skills.Philosophy is a fabulous choice for a major in that it hones intellectual and writing skills better than almost any other liberal arts major. If you go to a top school or achieve a great GPA, firms will hire you.You don't need a second major per se!

If not, you will have to go to some grad school such as law, MBA etc, MS in accounting etc. Grad school can always help greatly with your job prospects if you pick a program with a good career path. However, I guess it won't hurt you to double major in philosophy and a major that has a vocationally oriented career path such as accounting IF you don't plan on obtaining any graduate degree.

student14x

How much of a role does GPA play relative to all the fact mentioned above?

afruff23

@student14x

Depends on the job. For engineering jobs straight out of college, a low GPA is good (not too low to show that you're incompetent). The reason for this is you won't feel overqualified and thus stay at the job longer than if you had a 3.7 GPA.

mercymom

I may have posted this before on an earlier thread of this nature, but my H's neurosurgeon (H had a discectomy) has his ug degree in philosophy. The doc knew he wanted med school but he liked philosophy so he majored in that and just took the bio/chem/math classes he needed to apply to med school as electives. I'm not sure he even bothered to declare himself premed.

Our orthodontist's S is going to UT Austin next year as premed with a major in studio art. He'll do the same as the neuro guy and just take his bio/chem stuff as electives. Frankly, I think the kid wants to just do the art and his parents are making him take the premed classes as a "backup", but he is really good at math and science, just his passion is art.

Mr Payne

Yep, that's kind of like the same reason Math majors do well on the GRE (even on the reading side!).

No. I want to see them try to design a microchip using their stellar intellectual skills despite having taken no course work.

It's the reality of the US employment market. Employers want skills that allow people to do their job the first day in the door.

tetrishead

LR and AR scores on the LSAT correspond directly to courses in logic, which is the first recommendation any LSAT prep/advisory program makes. It also corresponds to the GRE and the MCAT, because most questions have a syntax that can immediately disqualify one or more answers. I don't really care to argue about this, because it's a circular argument, but if you think it's solely because philosophy majors are intelligent (fyi, like "most" people in any field, they are completely average) you are amazingly ignorant. One logic course, for students who are scoring in the 25th-75th percentiles, is pretty much a guaranteed +10-15 points on the LSAT.

Also, there are almost no undergraduate programs in the United States that teach students skills to do their job "the first day in the door." Every industry has on the job training.

All these moronic debates inevitably come back to one thing: it's a large issue, and there are a multitude of factors that play a role in everything in life, and undergraduate years--if your interest is long term wealth creation--should be spent developing skill sets regardless of the major chosen or courses taken.

Mr Payne

Up to a certain point, I agree.

Fair enough. I was wrong. For the bottom 75% philosophy can help them get better scores.

On another note, the median student in Mathematics is certainly much smarter than the median student in Education. Not all fields of study are the same.


And some majors require less training than others. This is not simply a yes/no situation. It's a continuum.

And some majors leave students with better skill sets than others (the point of this thread).

tetrishead

I disagree, but only because of the language. The median is the wrong choice, but I know what you're saying.
For the bottom 75% of philosophy majors and for 100% of other majors that have not taken a course in logic, basically. With the exception of actually taking LSAT pretests, one course in logic for someone who has never studied it it seems to be the only other thing that increases the average LSAT score near 100% of the time.
Most people forget what they've learned several years out of college. I think the best thing college as a whole teaches you is how to research and analyze something, which is arguably the only skill that is applicable to all industries but service, and is the only skill that will stay with you. That's really the reason to take a "difficult" major, the independent research you do that you don't get credit for

afruff23

@mercymom

Regarding that philoso-physician, do you happen to know what medical school he went to? What kind of extracurriculars did he do in his undergrad college with a philosophy major?

<(^o^)/

What are your examples of "difficult" majors?

tetrishead

You know, it's pretty much impossible to say. I've seen (amazingly) easy physics programs, mostly because almost all courses were graded on a curve and the student body was not... all that bright, if you catch my drift. I won't say what school it is, but I live in Southeast Florida and it's within 40 mintues of me, so you can probably take some guesses.

I shouldn't have said difficult majors. I should have said difficult programs, and students that are willing to do independent study. Any major can be difficult depending on the school, with the exception of communications which I refuse to believe is ever difficult anywhere.

It's not so much that the work-load should be arbitrarily tedious (although a lot of this certainly helps you learn how to multitask), but rather that the course work in general is difficult--and by difficult I mean poorly sourced (not to the point of absurdity) or theoretical. It's a fine line, because you don't want everything you do to be difficult just for difficulties' sake, and often it is program + student that is going to make something difficult in a good way.

Obviously most hard science type programs are going to have a minimum level of substance at even bad schools, because there's a technical barrier there. That barrier isn't guaranteed to exist in other programs, and being able to get past barriers like those (laborous topics, hard to find information, repetitive) is an amazing skill to have in the "professional" world, which is why hard science majors are so highly regarded. But still, it comes down to the program, and it comes down to how much study a student is willing to do on his own. If you can go the extra mile when you're already studying 40 hours a week and working 20 hours a week then you'll be able to study on the side when you're working 60-70 hours a week, which is how you'll get ahead of your colleagues. It's much better to train yourself to do that in college.

padfoot

This thread isn't really supporting a notion of the usefulness of philosophy, when it comes to careers (apart from those sure they will attend grad school). What type of jobs, does a 100%, honest, unadulterated philosophy major get?

Roger_Dooley

>> What type of jobs, does a 100%, honest, unadulterated philosophy major get?

Probably the same kinds of jobs any bachelors-level humanities major gets: entry-level positions that don't require highly specific skills like engineering or accounting, but do require literacy and communication ability.

(I looked in my local classifieds, and all of the "Philosopher" openings required advanced degrees or at least ten years of philosophizing experience. )

afruff23

@Roger_Dooley

I don't know much about accounting, but engineering does require highly specific skills like high level calculus and some background in the job. A philosophy major hardly ever qualifies for that.

Roger_Dooley

Exactly... some undergrad majors equip their grads with specific skills that are useful for employment, like engineering, accounting, etc.

Humanities majors come equipped primarily with general skills like literacy, written communication, cultural awareness, and critical thinking. We hope they do, at least. They won't be considered for positions requiring skill sets like engineering, but may be considered for sales, communication, writing/content/editorial, management trainee, etc.