Majors you take seriously

mathboy98
Sat, 01 Aug 2009 16:02:40 +0000

To Alix – I think graduate school in a lot of the lab sciences and engineering is largely about showing promise at research. Unfortunately, in my own major, one cannot really do research until much later (sure, there are mini research opportunities, but the scope is often limited to a huge degree for lacking advanced machinery), and even in graduate school the transition is considerable, as some great professors have said. So in my major, an important thing is developing a very mature perspective on mathematics, and showing promise at being able to handle the complexity of the “real stuff,” which exceeds that of any course by a huge margin. This means that classes (particularly advanced ones) do matter more than they would in a less theoretical field.

Nevertheless, our courses are not GPA rat-races, they’re about handling complex stuff well. Might be very similar with theoretical physics.

But luckily I don’t hear of many physicists or math majors whine! Surprisingly, pure engineers do it a lot more.