JHS, the popular concept of a psych major is someone interested in a career in counseling or social work. Typically, the curriculum is “psych lite”- a lot of theory. At a place like MIT (and I could give you a long list of other schools) psych majors are studying Cognitive Science/Neuro, i.e. how the brain functions.
I’ve hired a lot of psych majors for roles in market research, Big Data analysis, behavioral economics, etc. and can assure you that it is not unusual for psych majors to have fantastic analytical and quantitative/math skills.
Not at the directional state U near me- where the psych majors are mostly heading off to become guidance counselors or substance abuse facilitators. But at a research U? Not unusual at all. Especially psych majors working in interdisciplinary fields at the intersection of chemistry, neuro, genetics and behavior.
Each study has caveats and critics. None is a perfect snapshot. Next, what? This is about MIT caliber. The point isn’t kids who sleepwalk through college.
My observations are similar to blossom’s. In my professional world, lots of psych majors (and sociology majors too) with plenty of quant skills. Indeed, it’s rather a sweet spot for success in that field. The people who are merely quant jocks rise to a certain level and never go beyond, because they don’t have the insight into what makes people tick or the capability to conceptualize such learning beyond whatever a cluster analysis tells them.
I do think there is a world of difference between the psych majors heading off to major corporations or consulting firms to do the kinds of things blossom mentions, and the psych majors who are moving towards healing / helping people 1:1 and don’t require much math beyond whatever it takes to manage their calendars.
But I think there is also a tendency among some STEM types to think that psych major only means the latter, and to be rather ignorant of the former.
I am pasting in the thumbnail bio of my favorite MIT Psychology professor, since it is somewhat relevant (in an “antidotal” kind of way) to the recent bent of this discussion:
[quote]
John Gabrieli is the director of the Athinoula A. Martinos Imaging Center at the McGovern Institute. He is an Investigator at the Institute, with faculty appointments in the [MIT] Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, where is holds the Grover Hermann Professorship and is the Associate Director of the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, MGH/MIT, located at Massachusetts General Hospital. Prior joining MIT, he spent 14 years at Stanford University in the Department of Psychology and Neurosciences Program. Since 1990, he has served as Visiting Professor, Department of Neurological Sciences, Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Hospital and Rush Medical College. He received a Ph.D. in Behavioral Neuroscience in the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 1987 and a B.A. in English from Yale University in 1978./quote
The other assumption is that everyone just so WANTS to be STEM / engineering / yada yada but they regretfully and sadly “drop down” to (say) psychology because they just can’t hack it.
No, maybe they are inspired by something they learn in a class and they happily change because they find something more interesting.
The arrogance of believing everyone wants to be just like you – well, that’s kind of part of the reason why some engineers without people skills plateau pretty darn quickly in the work world and scratch their heads wondering why that is.
The entire field of epigenetics- and the idea that something (environmental? dietary? excessive hormone exposure or smoking?) can trigger a disease which was latent but “hard wired” due to genetic makeup – is going to be populated by Psych majors with a strong grounding in genetics.
As someone mentioned earlier, it’s right in the name. Institute of Technology. Same with Georgia Tech. Their administration never refers to itself as a college or university. It’s an institute of technology. That’s why people go there. I suspect a good number of those majoring in humanities and non-stem are actually double majors with stem.
As for calculus, with top engineering schools, it’s basically an unwritten requirement for admission. Of this year’s freshman class at Georgia Tech, 98% took calc in high school.
I personally think behavioral economics is a great field to go into as well. To take one possible set of applications, think about the employment possibilities linked to how you best incent people to exercise, lose weight, stop smoking, etc … Lots of possibilities there in both public and private sectors. And intersecting with technology (Fitbits, apps, etc.). Of course, the same thing applies for how you incent people to pay the max towards their 401Ks when the benefits are too future-focused, so lots of HR-type applications as well.
It seems to me it is just looking at the world through our own bubble. I always believed smart people get jobs. Then I read Paying for the Party on a CC book thread and realized how my particular bubble colored my world view. I was taking a whole lot for granted.
Now I understand smart kids, from the most competitive schools, and from a certain type of family background almost always get jobs. However, that is not mainstream America.
My impression is Canuckguy is always concerned about employability. I never doubted my kids would be gainfully employed. It’s pretty lucky to be in such a position.
Wouldn’t the latter benefit from increased intellectual development just as well as the former? Of course, the former type of jobs are probably few in number, and if the employers in question are school-elitist, most psychology majors (i.e. at non-elite schools) will find it even more difficult to be hired into them, even if they take additional courses to prepare for such jobs.
I’m trying to think about Canuckguy’s argument when considering less competitive schools. One of my nephews was a National Merit Finalist and Valedictorian. He went to the state flagship with the intention of majoring in engineering. He dropped that major almost immediately because he didn’t want to work that hard. He majored in fraternity with a very high GPA and then went to law school. He makes at least as much money as if he had been an engineer. He is not the sort of lawyer who clerked for someone famous. He works at a small family firm (not his family) and pretty regular hours as far as I can tell. There is a good chance he goes into local politics. If the goal was money, he didn’t miss out. And I think he has pretty good quality of life.
I think there are plenty of psych majors who neither work corporate nor in a people-helping position, kids who take it because, at some schools, it’s an easier major. On the other hand, we can cite stem majors who never get anywhere, despite their quant skills. Intellectual development is, maybe alh would agree, something of a privilege we encourage in our kids. Just doing the work isn’t “it.”
It’s just wrong to evaluate intelligence based on math skills. Or the contribution people make based on a job category. It’s head in the sand. Or whether changing majors is an indication of failure. We aren’t talking trade school, where maybe someone shifts from complex occupational training to data entry.
But as ever, CC wants to think hierarchically. To me, that’s limited thinking.
On the one hand- agree with Lookingforward, it is limited thinking. On the other hand, the number of professional careers where a self-limiting level of math won’t hurt you is increasingly small.
I work in HR- which used to be the backwater of corporate life where the “high on feelings, low on analytics” folks used to cluster. Well- the core HR issues of contemporary corporate life- why are our medical costs increasing when headcount is down? What will the impact of an increase in the minimum wage in the following states be on profitability? If we spend $100 million dollars on new technology for payroll, onboarding, and benefit tracking, what does the payout look like vs. outsourcing assuming a few scenarios on the rate of inflation and assuming various scenarios on global headcount, expansion into emerging markets, etc? If retention increases by 3% in the following five functions, what does that do to our recruiting targets over the next five years? We’ve added domestic partner coverage in North America- how does that impact gross margins assuming that the average age of our employees stays constant?
I could do this same exercise for marketing, advertising, facilities, investor relations, corporate communications, etc. One of our senior speechwriters is in very high demand, because he can take a deck from the Fed and turn it into poetry. How? He is a terrific writer- no question- in several languages. He is well read so knows the difference between Karl Marx and Groucho Marx (and can deploy both when relevant). But he can also understand GDP, work his way through a dense table of production and industrial output projections, and is something of a subject matter expert on the tax code.
This is how you become a rock star in the “Executive Communications” function- by knowing math AND being a creative and versatile and nuanced writer. I don’t evaluate intelligence based on math skills (I sure don’t have them) but I wouldn’t encourage a math phobic kid in college to avoid anything having to do with quantitative analysis.
My company just added an ad agency to our roster. Their analytics blew the team away when they pitched. Anybody can debate whether the blue in the logo is Pantone X or Y (and we have computers which now generate a lot of what a graphic designer used to have to produce). But to look at consumption data and come up with a better theory of what’s going on? THAT’s worth paying for.
Blossom - my sister is a VP of HR at a major company - psych BA, all-but-dissertation in experimental psychology - and the kinds of things she does are almost exactly word for word what you described above. I suspect her job is much like yours. Except for the last part (evaluating ad campaigns via analytics). That overlaps with stuff I used to do
UCB - no, I’m really not convinced it’s all that important for the guy who wants to be a substance abuse counselor to get all quant-y, beyond what might be needed to evaluate the latest research in the field. There are a lot of empathic skills that are more critical there. An understanding of the human condition. Not found in any calc textbook.
“Of course, the former type of jobs are probably few in number, and if the employers in question are school-elitist, most psychology majors (i.e. at non-elite schools) will find it even more difficult to be hired into them, even if they take additional courses to prepare for such jobs.”
These employers will be a mix of school elitist and not school elitist, of course. But you don’t “prepare” for such jobs the way you prepare to become a mechanical engineer. These jobs and techniques and ways of thinking are being invented everyday when a sharp HR person says - hey, what if we measured the metrics of our training program the way we measure our ad campaigns. Or the CEO says - I read some new theory on compensation, tell me the pros and cons of doing something this way.
There are soooo many fields where people do cool new things, and on CC it gets reduced to STEM, STEM, STEM.
Quanty may not be necessary for some jobs. However, to the extent it helps the individual understand the world, it may be useful in ways impossible to predict. I saw this from the opposite side when quanty kids I knew applied for jobs. The edge they had was what Blossom describes and these weren’t skills they had acquired in an effort to make themselves more employable. They just wanted to be educated human beings and coincidentally ended up with extremely marketable skill sets.
I know several young people doing jobs it would have been impossible to train for because those jobs didn’t exist until very recently. But as lookingforward suggests, this is a privileged approach to education.
"Then I read Paying for the Party on a CC book thread and realized how my particular bubble colored my world view. I was taking a whole lot for granted.
Now I understand smart kids, from the most competitive schools, and from a certain type of family background almost always get jobs. However, that is not mainstream America."
You’re from the south, and from how you have described your social circles, “who your family is” has great import on connections. It seems that what was described in Indiana is pretty much the same thing … People with connections can help their kids get jobs. It’s just that the connections are predicated on things other than your ancestors or how long you’ve lived in the area, that’s all.
Sadly I am connection-less so I had no presumption I could “get my kids jobs.”
