Not sure if chemistry-specific job prospects are that good these days. Even MIT chemistry graduates did not seem to do so well, according to https://gecd.mit.edu/resources/survey-data .
It is hard to find a management training type program where you are NOT married to the job. I know a bunch of kids working at Deloitte- the consulting side, not the audit side, all of whom have either traditional liberal arts degrees or business degrees from places like Maryland, Binghamton, Rutgers, etc. and they are ALL married to the job (for now). That’s what happens when you are based in NJ but your main client for the next year is in Fort Worth or Charlotte.
Is this a bad thing?
My young Bain friend is now in med school. My comment about hospitality is the years of 24/7, even living on site.
But, yes, nothing like the first years of hard work in a career, the satisfaction.
I have to admit I’m a little surprised Blossom is throwing out so many ideas and some still miss the sort of thinking she advocates. Just because you majored in bio doesn’t mean you only go for jobs that mimic that college work. Just because you majored in phil doesn’t mean you need a “philosophy” career. Or ever had that intent.
Your college (academic) work can be training in thinking and action, as well as how to present. Not just bench skills. Not just history, who did what, when, and why. It surprises me how often it’s cited that there are few jobs “in” bio or “in” chem. Or that grad or professional school is the only avenue for humanities.
In the case of bio/chem, there are many options for those who learned to think along scientific lines, analyze, test their notions, endure the frustration of long timelines and possible failure, retooling. Most kids in the sciences learn some use of software. Many then use their backgrounds in more people oriented ways- I’ll just throw out public health, product evaluation, govt oversight, environmental orgs.
But first, you have to be able to think.
I really wonder if the divide here in seeing it as Blossom, lookingforward and others have described is based on how we, as adults, have had our own education and career paths unfold. In the field I worked in, and did quite well in, there are plenty of people who majored in all kinds of things in college that had little direct correlation to the field. What they did have in spades was intelligence, good analytical, communication, and critical reasoning skills. I do know some people who majored in pre-professional type areas or who learned a trade and who still practice those areas as adults but they are not a majority. I’m thinking that those who take a vary narrow view of major being connected to career options, fall into the category of folks who they themselves are working in a career based on major studied like engineers, nursing or accounting. Even going to med school, law school, or getting an MBA does not require a certain major in undergrad.
However, medical and law school are very specific pre-professional majors, that (in the US) have been moved to post-bachelor’s degree professional schools.
It also seems that many high school seniors have the erroneous impression that they need to major in biology to do pre-med, or major in political science or English to do pre-law.
Doschicos- even the nurses I know no longer do jobs we associate with nursing. Whether it’s working in analytics at an HMO, recruiting patients for clinical trials at a pharma company, or selling large software packages to state governments to track Medicaid/Medicare payments- they aren’t doing bedside nursing (or surgical nursing).
Even the vocational tracks don’t quite prepare young people for life long employment. The nurse I know who moved into sales got downsized when her hospital merged with another one… they kept the young nurses, they downsized the more expensive nurses. It’s not her clinical skills which make her good at sales- it’s decades of listening, being a creative problem-solver, and doing more with less.
I think it’s a mistake to pretend to your kids that there is such a thing as a golden ticket. You can be downsized, you can find your company in bankruptcy, you can find your job moved to Mumbai (my radiologist is in India- how weird is that?)
My relative who majored in history is a podiatrist, as she planned. She can’t wait to see Hamilton, as she’s memorized the soundtrack and received tickets in SF for a wedding gift.
That’s why, IMO, it’s important to play the long game. Study history, math, government, English, or any academic discipline. Liberal arts (which includes science and math) is the little black dress of life.
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This is partly it, but not all. Just about all the engineering graduates I know ended up in some STEM related job, even if it wasn’t exactly what they studied in undergrad.
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Sometimes, you’ll see a poster who buys into a fallacy, where they think anecdotes and personal experiences are adequate substitutes for data, stats, and studies.
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As with all internet message boards, people are often imprecise with what claims they’re making or what claims they’re trying to refute. Often, people end up talking past each other.
@roethlisburger has come up with perhaps the perfect post-modern post, in which every line embodies the error it criticizes.
What claims are you making? What are you trying to refute?
Well said - I love that!
We’ve had a lot of HS interns. They are generally speaking not mature enough or self-assured enough at that point.
The difference for the college grads we hire might be less college and more simply maturing, but it does seem the young people with the skills we value go to college, so that is where we find them.
And if you are good at sales and willing to kill to eat you can always find a job.
@1or2Musicians I recently read a study that attributed a large measure of financial success to moving away from where you grow up. Which would seem counterintuitive since you would lessen your network, but the results seems well reasoned. I’ll see if I can dig it up. It was basically “if you will get up and go where the work is, you’ll do x% better” Can’t recall the exact number.
In talk of presitge, my parents are both recruiters, one technical and the other administrative. They could care less about where you get your degree and so can their clients. In fact, one of my mom’s clients has a strict no-Ivy league policy. They’ve hired 6 grads from Ivy League schools and all 6 came off very arrogant and were let go very soon, so now they try to avoid them at all costs. Ironic since a degree from a prestigious school is supposed to open doors not close them :))
I think your major is even less relevant than where you went to school. My mom, like many others, switched majors a few times and took almost 7 years to graduate. Started in biology, switched to Spanish, then finished in home economics/fashion merchandizing because she wanted the manager position at the GAP she was working at to pay for school. 30 years later, she is the CEO of a successful business. That home-ec degree sure took her far.
It depends. Your mother did/does work that is major-agnostic. Many jobs are that way.
However, a nurse or an engineer needs the specific education to prepare for the job. A computer software developer will have a large head start after studying computer science in college, compared to one who has to self educate the needed foundational concepts of computer science to learn how to do the job.
Or it could be that the traits that predispose someone to leave their home comfort zone zone are the same traits that predispose that person to financial success.
Yes, correlation doesn’t equal causation.
@ucbalumnus I agree for nursing and engineering. And to add onto that, most medical professions and lawyers need their specific degrees as well.
I agree somewhat on the CS software engineer. You will probably be held back a little in the beginning, but you’ll also have 4 years of job progression which could essentially balance eachother out. My dad does tech recruiting, and while it’s less common for degreeless folks, he sees people in their upper 20s and low 30s passing the 200k mark.
This thread is straying off topic and morphing into a parallel to the Mark Cuban thread about liberal arts. While I agree that major could matter less than many think in that some employers want to see certain specific skills and don’t care by what path the student acquired them. For example, if you know how to use certain programs like statistical software you can get a research job in a variety of fields. But how likely is it that a Latin major would learn that software in the course of his studies? It’s not natural or always easy for average people (not the genius children of some CCers) to learn skills and techniques in one domain while dedicating one’s time to studying another. Even low level internships that are essentially jobs anyone with a brain could do, seem to want to see demonstrated interest in their business. So while a history major could certainly make a slide deck, clean a lab, phone suppliers, and even fill test tubes just as well as a chemistry major, a chemical company is still probably going to hire the chem major for their first level internship. That student can then get a higher level position the following year and really use the chemistry he’s learning. Similarly, my D has done some low level work in her prospective field. Anyone who doesn’t mind dirt could have done it. All the same, they wanted people with a demonstrated interest in the subject area. In other words, the brilliant philosophy major wouldn’t have been selected over my non-brilliant D.
The moving-elsewhere thing seems simple to me. One of the main reasons people move is for better economic opportunities. And people who move for that reason are almost by definition more ambitious than people who don’t move, at least on average. People who are born in a place with great opportunities will tend to stay, and they won’t suffer, but there are far more places where staying will hurt you. So, on average, people who move will do better than people who stay, because that’s why they moved.
Also, the more skills people have, the easier it is for them to move. The people who move are systematically the people who would have outperformed the average if they had stayed. Not that everyone with the best skills moves, but more like almost everyone with no skills doesn’t move.
The Great Migrations of the 20th Century in America all favored the movers. The Okies etc. who moved from the Dust Bowl to California. The movement of African-Americans from desperate rural poverty in the South to less desperate poverty, and in many cases solid working class lives in Northern and and Southern cities. The draining of the agricultural heartland and Rust Belt into New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Miami. Immigration from Eastern Europe and Asia. Of course people who move do better than people who stay.
My great-grandparents all moved, from the Pale to the United States. They did a lot better; their relatives who stayed have no descendants. My grandparents all stayed where they were born, and benefited a lot from the enormous growth of the northeastern U.S. during the 20th Century. My mother stayed – and was probably hurt as her native city declined – and my father moved, and stepped up in class in part thanks to my mother’s connections. I moved, because the place where I was born was dying, and I’ve done a lot better for that. And you could tell the same story on my wife’s side of the family, except pushed forward a generation.
As an addendum to my post above, one concern related to the prestige topic has to do with an interdisciplinary philosophy. It seems to me that the higher ranked schools have a greater interest in cross discipline study. Maybe that’s because many of them are relatively smaller schools and therefore that collaboration is easier to accomplish. So I can say that if my D were to study Latin at her small LAC, she could in fact quite easily work with a statistical program they’ve used to track the frequency of certain words in ancient texts, and I’ve already instructed her to take advantage of every chance she gets to engage in digital humanities projects like that one. No doubt the same is true of lower-ranked institutions as well, but those opportunities were not highlighted in their departmental literature on their websites, so it’s possible one would have to aggressively investigate and seek out such learning opportunities across disciplines. Not a problem for the bright CC kid perhaps…