<p>^^^People don’t usually go into engineering for the money.</p>
<p>Yes. The reason to go into a field is because you enjoy it. Which is apparently not obvious to all.</p>
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What fraction of college kids enjoy studying of any subject? Anyone enjoyed going to classes, doing homeworks and exams? </p>
<p>I bet more people choose majors because they hate it less than alternatives, find it easier to handle and do well, or have a good prospect of job fater graduation however misguided that notion may be, etc. etc. Don’t make it sound like so ideal, it’s not an ideal world. More people choose majors for pragmatic reasons, not because ‘they enjoy it’. Anyway, that’s my opinion.</p>
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The early-mid eighties were somewhat similar to today’s economy. Just getting out of the double-digit inflation of the late seventies, it was very hard to find jobs in the eighites. Things were hard then as now.</p>
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Wow. I don’t feel that way at all. Ask many collegebound students what they want to study/major in and they will tell you. Most sound pretty darned excited about it too. Sure many are undecided, but few say “I want to major in the least boring thing I can stand just to get the piece of paper and get a job”. Those kids probably don’t belong in college. Maybe they belong in trade school.</p>
<p>Some kids may grumble about having to take distribution requirements or core courses if their school requires them, but most students, at least those I come across, are enthusiastic about learning and enjoy most of their classes. Some classes may turn out to be clunkers, either due to the topic being different than the description suggested or the professor not being as stimulating as hoped, but that happens. Overall, most students really do like the academic aspect of college.</p>
<p>ucbalumnus and Joblue: I am not anti-community college at all. I made the statement I made because I have seen apples-to-apples studies that support it. I.e., kids from the same schools with the same GPAs and SATs, where one set goes to community college with the intention of ultimately getting a BA and the other goes to third-tier public four-year colleges, and the second set is far more likely to obtain a bachelor’s degree in any time period you pick. That also corresponds to the experience of people I have observed. I have seen kids who are really smart and hardworking go to community college, and some come out the other end and some don’t, getting distracted by jobs, relationships, babies, etc. </p>
<p>I had an admin like this a few years ago. Based on intelligence, drive, work capacity, organization, etc., she was fully qualified to run the world, not just a small law office. But it took her 6 years to get an AA, and although she transferred to a four-year college and registered (on a part-time basis), in the past two years she has only taken a couple of courses, and is not making progress towards a degree.</p>
<p>In a sense, the most talented students may be most in danger taking the community college route. Students who can get good jobs without a college degree, and whose job-performance is good enough to make them indispensable and earn them raises and promotions, may have trouble understanding that they are missing an opportunity to do even better in the future. And they can get dug into their own lives, so to speak.</p>
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<p>My husband went to college on the twelve year plan. The community college got him on the track he needed to be on to finish his ENGINEERING degree. He finished his general ed courses at at local CC and then went on to his four year degree at a school that had an articulation agreement with his CC. His school also had a coop program so he worked every other term as PART of his engineering degree program…giving him experience and money.</p>
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<p>She is NOT like her brother. Period. This seems to be the essence of the discussion here. You seem to want her to be “like her brother” (and parents) and go into engineering. As the wife of an engineer and the parent of a kiddo with a degree in engineering and another with a degree in MUSIC…I have to say…you gotta WANT to major in engineering…it’s not something to be forced into doing because it satisfies others. That not a recipe for success. It never dawned on us to try to force our music major kid into studying engineering (or any other more lucrative field)…it wouldn’t have worked. </p>
<p>We DID however, make it very clear to our kids that we would fund their undergrad educations on the FOUR year plan only. Anything above and beyond that was on THEIR dime (DD did take summer courses on year…and she paid). DS paid for grad school (got good assistantship money for that too).</p>
<p>Both are now college grads and we are not supporting either one. Gotta say…at least the music major is working in the field of music. Can’t say that for the engineering major who has told us that while she has the degree, she does not plan to every work in the field. She will go to grad school…probably in a health related field.</p>
<p>Please, your daughter is not your son, or her parents. She appears to have interests that are NOT in the STEM fields. We need people with all kinds of interests out there in the real world. Please encourage her to attend a school with a good core course requirement…where she can explore different options. She will find a major just like most students do. You never know…it “could” end up being engineering…but I think it really needs to be HER choice.</p>
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<p>No offense to anyone with these ‘“WOW!!!”-ing internships’, but when I see friends get internships at these prestigious companies, both in engineering and in finance, I don’t really think “wow, these people are really smart.” Instead, I think that maybe these companies aren’t so impressive after all, and that I could maybe get an internship there. Your son’s offers are only impressive to you because you think so, and I bet your daughter could get equally impressive offers once you let go of the notion that ‘“WOW!!!”-ing internships’ only exist for engineering majors.</p>
<p>Not only are there some pretty “wow” internships in other fields (finance, international relations/politics etc) but there are some pretty surprisingly good internship opprtunities offered through many schools office of disability services. Keep your mind open, not closed.</p>
<p>OP, I met with similar resistance when I announced I wanted to major in English, decades ago. It was the Watergate era and I was one of tons of kids enamored with journalism. TONS of competition for jobs in that field. Guess what, I got my English degree and within 2 months of graduation, was in a boffo entry level editorial-side job at a national magazine. I’ve worked in my field ever since. Never had trouble getting a job. And, I LIKE my work. Your daughter has earned the privilege of choosing her own path, and doing what interests HER.</p>
<p>@engineer- My internship is unpaid. The paid internship that I was offered had hours I couldn’t work.</p>
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<p>Yes, there are undoubtedly unintellectually-engaged students who choose a major because they hate it less than the alternatives. But so what? That doesn’t describe the young lady here. She has interest areas - they just aren’t the ones her mother would prefer.</p>
<p>And yes, there are undoubtedly students whose financial status is so precarious that they have no choice but to treat higher education as purely vocational training. That doesn’t apply to this student, who is the daughter of a presumably upper-middle class family (with 2 engineer parents).</p>
<p>I find your viewpoint profoundly depressing. And I’ve worked entirely too hard precisely so my kids CAN have whatever opportunities they desire – not the set of opportunities that interest ME the most. I had my turn already.</p>
<p>allgussiedup -</p>
<p>In the game of life, each of us is dealt our own hand. Clearly you, your husband, and your son hold hands with similar cards. Your daughter’s hand appears to be very different - she may hold cards in suits that the other three of you have never even known existed. Once all of you accept that, and she recognizes the possibilities of the cards that she holds, there will be nothing that can stop her. As I see it, your role is not to insist that she plays this card now or that card later, but rather to encourage her to look long and hard at her cards and think about the strategy she will use in order to beat everyone else at her table.</p>
<p>Wow, that was great, happymom!</p>
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<p>While you may be correct for the majority of students, most of whom attend moderately or less selective schools where obviously pre-professional majors like business and nursing (though often less commonly engineering, perhaps due to the perceived difficulty of the subject) are the most popular, this probably does not apply to the student in question as described in this thread.</p>
<p>Also, even the most pre-professionally oriented student will not major in something that s/he despises and/or is poor at, since that would obviously be a recipe for failure both in school and on the job if s/he does manage to get through school and get a job.</p>
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<p>I maintain that while college is not vocational training it should be more than a four year quest to “better oneself” or “get an education.” Ask any person on the street why you should go to college and he will say “because it opens the doors to more opportunities.” (=jobs). Most people hold this belief even if they refuse to admit it because it’s not P/C and we should not kao-tao to people who say we do not see the forest for the trees. It’s more than a family thing too - United States has a “SERIOUS” lack of people studying STEM disciplines and too many studying impractical disciplines (which =more unemployed college grads devaluing the worth of a degree and increasing entitlement spending and keeping a cap on economic development). It is almost ones social responsibility to be pursuing a degree that either has a) intrinsic wide reaching benefits to society (engineering, the natural sciences, and you could add some more) or b) wow-ing job prospects (engineering also, economics, most of the natural sciences, computer science, and so on) or preferably both. Now this isn’t so much about my daughter who I’ve come to realize would NOT do well as an engineer, I just wanted to address what is being said now. This is my theory and I guess in some way it is influencing how we look at daug’s situation. </p>
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Could you please elaborate on this - I don’t understand. Do you mean that skill/knowledge is not needed in order to work as an engineer or in finance? My point is not so much that they are great internships because of the intelligence of the invidual students, I mean that they are impressive because they are at really well know companies like for example Intel.</p>
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You mean cow-tow (or kow tow, alternative spelling). Guess one question is answered.</p>
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And what question would that be might I ask - what does my spelling of a word that isn’t even English in the first place have to do with our discussion?</p>
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<p>This is not true for all STEM disciplines. In particular, there is a huge surplus of biology majors relative to the small number of good (and larger but still not very large number of not so good) jobs where that major is specifically applicable. Biology is probably the most popular STEM major by far.</p>
<p>The situation in chemistry jobs is not very good either. Physics majors tend to do better, but many are not in pure physics jobs (finance, computer software, and engineering take many of the “surplus” physics graduates).</p>
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<p>Widespread knowledge of both math and science subjects and humanities and social studies subjects would have “intrinsic wide reaching benefits to society”.</p>
<p>But most of the natural sciences do not have “wow-ing job prospects”, and even those subjects that are good on average for job prospects can have poor job prospects of you graduate at the wrong time (e.g. civil engineering from 2009 to now).</p>
<p>Man I wouldn’t want to be at the ops dinner table where if you ain’t a scientist engineer or in finance younapparently don’t matter.</p>
<p>Hey, OP. I work at a photography company. My boss has her undergrad degree in biology and her masters degree in some kind of molecular biology. OMG- a STEM major has a very successful job in an ARTS field. The majority of people don’t end up getting a job in their field anyway (yes, even a lot of engineering majors don’t go on to be engineers). What if your son decides that he hates engineering after getting an engineering job and then decides to go and do something completely outside of any STEM jobs. Would you consider his degree useless?</p>