In others words, you want a major where you don’t have to expend much effort, and you’ll make a lot of money.
It sounds like a combination Philosophy + Science&Society would be best for you. Philosophy with a CS minor may also work.
All in all, you’ll have to memorize stuff. You can’t reinvent the wheel if it’ll take you weeks and you need to get somewhere by Saturday.
Are you on financial aid? Do your parents have a budget for college?
You’re limited to a certain number of semesters of financial aid, so you can’t spend too much time deciding or changing your mind. And if your parents have a budget, it’s likely for 4 years.
If so, you may want to take a year off, attend school outside of the US where college is free. You could take philosophy classes in places the language of which you speak and figure out what you want with your life - if you speak French, you could just enroll in La Sorbonne, which for some reason has a ridiculously high reputation in the US. Same thing at University of Heidelberg, or at University of Santiago de Compostella or Lisbon…
Ah well, then it was indeed a major misconception of mine. I can see how any college major most probably develops the kind of skills you mentioned, regardless of their specific field. I guess I was looking at it from the point of view of the hard sciences, where it looks as if the only useful skill is to know all that information a scientist’s supposed to know.
Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to write all this! I might go for philosophy to see if I enjoy it then, and maybe either minor or major in it. I’ll see.
Uhmm, when did I ever say that? I want to make the effort to learn, I just want to have the right environment for that.
Gosh but it’s a dreadful thing to memorize stuff. Or better said, it’s a dreadful thing to memorize stuff you don’t completely understand. I don’t mind “memorizing” (true learning should never be about that, but of course sometimes it can’t be helped as you say) as long as I know how we know that or the flaws of the argument.
I’m not in a US college, so I guess I’m safe from that. Still, the cost of going to college is there even if you don’t pay a cent… For the opportunity cost I mean, or the money you don’t get for occupying your time with a non-working activity.
I don’t think English majors have a lot of memorization. I wrote a lot of papers in my high level Englush classes. But I did have to take a foreign language if I stayed in that major – and that would have been a lot of memorization.
So would you say English Literature is a viable option? I enjoy reading, but my high school experience with it left me a bad taste in my mouth. Most of the time, I was forced to read classic texts that where way out of my league, and in the end I just had to stick with the teacher’s interpretation of the writing piece, something that totally takes the fun out of reading in my opinion.
I like languages in general, though probably not enough to make them my career (as they indeed imply a lot of memorization and mostly, practice).
math, physics, statistics, computer science, engineering, English, or philosophy.
On the other hand foreign language, history, and chemistry require a lot of memorization.
Well, if literature analysis isn’t your forte (and it sounds like it isn’t), then English Literature isn’t going to be viable for you. For some people who read a lot, they can pick out their own interpretation and support it well (even things profs don’t normally teach about them). I am good at it, and so are my kids, although none of us ended up going down the English major path. So although it requires little memorization, it doesn’t sound like a good fit. But you did ask. 
Math, physics, statistics, computer science and engineering all require a lot of memorization. There’s less as you advance and start getting into more theoretical stuff, but the first two years of those majors are going to be heavier on memorization.
In an English major you’ll get a lot of the former - reading classic texts - but very little of the latter, at least at a school with good professors. You’ll be encouraged to analyze the text and come up with your own interpretation.
I agree with you that history, languages and chem require a great degree of memorization, though I would say in my experience (like juillet also said) statistics, math and especially engineering are not that different from the first group of subjects we mentioned.
Physics might be a different case, as every mathematical result is applied to concrete phenomena (although I have no experience with quantum mechanics, and that’s probably the occasion where math gets ahead of the real world description). I don’t know enough about CS to comment on it, if any of you guys have had any experience with it, I’d love your insights.
I do read a lot, so I’m not too sure analysis isn’t my forte. Thing is, I don’t usually enjoy reading classical works of the like of The Iliad or Don Quixote, and I honestly doubt anyone could really understand them without some guidance on the context, vocabulary and themes.
So it might be I’m asking for the impossible: I don’t think you can ever be prepared to tackle a classical work if you haven’t had any experience with it, no matter how many other books you read before or how well read you are on, say, the russian nineteenth century writers.
Like I said to sattut above, I agree that most of those imply memorization, but I don’t know much about CS or Physics to truly state that myself. Do you think they’re that similar to the other disciplines?
And do you think it’s really possible for me to interpret a classical work on my own? I think some classical writers like Dostoyevsky are quite appeasing, but then reading the likes of Cervantes, Chaucer and even Joyce is a whole different thing.
Does college level history really take a lot of memorization? I only took one history class in college, but it was papers and essay exams.
Yes, you can interpret classical works on your own if you have the knack. My rule was always reading without cliff notes or other aids, figuring out what I think on my own. Taking a few notes the first time through, then rereading with an eye toward analysis and supporting my ideas. But honestly – not wanting to memorize is a terrible reason to pick a major.
It does in my experience. It’s not that they ask you to specifically remember dates and facts actually, but in most traditional exams you’re asked to explain the whole chain of events of a certain period. And even if that includes mentioning the causes that might underlie those processes, it’s almost impossible not to memorize when you’re basically going over a event-cause-event algorithm when studying. Sure, you can see how it all links together, but you’re still memorizing. A side-effect of that is how little one remembers from the history classes they’ve had (both in school and college), except for the key events whose stories have stuck through repetition over the years.
I don’t think it’s got to do with the learning method in this particular case; it has to do with the subject. I’m not saying it’s not important, but it’s not as conceptual or theoretical (depends on how much your professors emphasize the vast array of causes that explain the phenomena at hand) as other areas of study in my opinion.
Thanks, I will keep that recommendation in mind, not only for college but also for the next time I decide to read a classic in my free time, heh.
Why do you say not wanting to memorize is a terrible reason to pick a field of study though? It’s definitely what fits my personality and method of learning, and honestly, it’s a better way to choose a major than what most students do (many study whatever helps them make the most money).
If you’re practical and like to make things, engineering (and CS) could be fun. I was bad at memorizing, and with engineering I mostly had to “get it.” Pays relatively well, too!
Well, similarity isn’t really the question. The question is whether or not they require memorization, and they do, especially at the introductory level. Physics has a lot of formulae and laws to memorize and CS has code and other aspects.
All scientific fields involve applying some level of memorization to concrete phenomena. Physics does, but so does statistics (the formulae you memorized are applied to actual things that are actually happening in actual life, particularly in applied statistics) and engineering (you’ll be memorizing a lot of formulae and rules but then applying it to building bridges and buildings and prosthetics and cars or whatever else you do). Memorization is different from applications; they’re orthogonal. You can be in an applied field that still requires a lot of memorization (like engineering), or in a theoretical field that does not (like philosophy).
The problem here is that it seems you are looking for a field that does not require any memorization and that field does not exist. Memorization IS a form of learning. Even if you have a statistics professors who teaches you the calculus underpinnings of every single statistical formula you learn in class, you will STILL have to memorize the formulae themselves (and the assumptions underlying statistical testing). You can use the physics in real-world situations, but you will still have to memorize the formulae.
The other thing to remember is that the point is not to find a major that perfectly aligns with the way you like to learn in every way. Every field (just like very career) will have things you love and things you hate. Your job is to minimize the things you hate while maximizing and prioritizing the things you love.
Sure they can. That is the point of an English major - to teach you how to comprehend and analyze texts on your own, using your own research and without someone telling you what to do. You don’t know how to yet because you are still in high school, which is completely normal! An English major doesn’t just feed to you the already-completed analyses of other scholars into specific works; it teaches you how to read and analyze those works on your own.
And on a larger scale, that’s really what a liberal arts and sciences major (to include biology, physics, chemistry, math, and computer science) is - a way of thinking. You learn few hard skills that you can take into the workplace. What you learn is how to think and how to absorb certain types of information really well. Physics majors are used to thinking quantitatively; they don’t know finance, but a finance firm will hire them because they believe they can quickly learn what they need to do their jobs. Political science majors may only know the basics of international human rights law, but a human rights NGO will hire them because they have been trained to think in a certain way and have the basics of analysis in this field and can pick up the rest fairly quickly. That’s what a LA&S major gives you: a head start in a certain area of inquiry.
Also, in my experience college history doesn’t require a lot of memorization - mostly analysis, reading, discussion, papers.
Yes, you are correct. Most fields involve a certain degree of memorization. But when you delve into the theoretical underpinnings (as you said) of a discipline, that memorization is minimized (at least in my experience). For example, I could probably write down the kinematic equations right here and now, without having to resort to any source. Why? Not because I memorized them, but because I have some intuition about what’s going on. Sure, I would agree with you that we don’t necessarily understand everything we remember (does the fact that I know Newton’s third law “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” mean that I get what it says? Not really), but some things come easier than others to some of us.
So in that sense, for me it’s evident that not all majors provide the same level of conceptual understanding. I had already ruled out subjects like History, Law, Biology, Chemistry when I first made the thread. You guys have helped me consider other suitable options, but I can’t quite decide among the rest. It might be there’s not much difference between them, I don’t know. The task is probably up to me.
Heh, I’m not in high school actually 
I’m a junior college student already. I might enroll to a few literature classes to see what they’re like… Maybe I’m just completely mistaken about english majors!
Well, for me there’s a difference between “a way of thinking” and “learning how to think”. If I went to a chemistry class at my school, they would definitely teach me a way of thinking: these are the chemical elements; they are constituted by protons, electrons, and neutrons; they can bond sharing electrons etc. But are they teaching me how to think? I would say no: for example, after the course, I’d surely be just as clueless as the chemists that thought phlogiston was an actual substance a few centuries ago, as there’s no history whatsoever on how we found out lots of the stuff we study in chemistry about the elements.
Would you mind if I ask what you majored in?
Well, it’s not that the memorization is minimized; it’s just that you find things easier to memorize when you understand the theory behind them. Many people do. I suppose that there are some fields (like physics) where you learn the theory before, or concurrently with, the formulae themselves. With math and statistics, there’s some of that as well (especially if you are majoring in statistics in a math or statistics department, and are learning calculus and linear algebra along with it). Some fields are simply less theoretical - engineering majors are not going to spend a lot of time teaching you the theory behind the math/science, for example, because you need to learn too much applied stuff. Finance is another example - you won’t spend a lot of time learning the complex math behind the financial equations and what makes them work. You’ll spend some, for sure, because it helps, but most of the time will be spent learning simply the math itself.
I disagree. Memorizing specific chemical elements and such isn’t a way of thinking; those are just facts. A way of thinking is how to think, and teaching someone a way of thinking is teaching them how to think about something in a different/new way. (Thinking about the connections between chemical elements and features of the universe, for example, can be a way of thinking.)
Here’s an example. Most chemistry classes come with a laboratory component, especially in your early years; you do various laboratory experiments to illustrate certain concepts in the course. That’s a way of thinking: the scientific method! You learn how to keep a lab notebook, how to make measurements and observations from a chemists’ perspective, learn the processes necessary to combine various elements and substances and such in the lab. That’s a specific way of thinking about chemical processes…but also something that can be generalized writ large: taking an empirical view of things, making precise measurements/observations, testing and restesting assumptions. That’s going to be a different way of thinking they might teach you in an English class (approaches to analyzing texts in a much more qualitative, narrative way) or in anthropology (listening closely to the observations around you and learning from people’s behaviors and the artifacts they leave behind).
I see it in my day to day work: as a psychologist, I have a different way of thinking and a different approach to problems than the software developers at my job. Those manifest themselves in specific skills (I know how to write a valid survey, and they don’t; they know how to write code to make a game character run around and I don’t) but also in more general things (for example, when deciding how to design a new feature of the game, an artist is thinking about how to make it beautiful and attractive; a software developer is thinking about how to add some cool functional feature or make it state of the art; and I’m thinking about whether it’s actually usable by people or not. None of us is wrong; all of us are right, but all three features need to be in there to make the thing work).
Psychology. I took a few history classes in college because I was going to minor in it, and then decided not to.
Yes, you’re spot on about this. It really depends on the field, and that’s why I’m looking for one that suits my interests the best. In my experience with Statistics though, they don’t teach you much about the formulas. Maybe it just happened to be like that at my school, I don’t know. As it’s an applied branch of math, while everything you learn has an application, sometimes that formula/procedure isn’t perfectly intuitive: think about the harmonic mean, for example. It’s not easy to know what to expect from it before doing the calculation, or what are its advantages and limitations. There might be a way to reason that out, or maybe we just use it because it gives us a measure of central tendency we can work with, as there need not be any kind of specific advantage to justify its development.
I didn’t just refer to memorizing the names of the elements. Most of what you do in chemistry implies accepting a specific framework before. Like, why is water H2O? How do we know that “connection” is true? How come that electrons are “shared” when elements interact? How do we even know that atoms have different shells of electrons (2, 8, etc.)?
Most chemistry courses leave all of these questions unanswered. Sure enough, you still have to think about many issues and problems of the subject, but that thinking is completely determined by the framework you’re supposed to take as a given beforehand.
I disagree, based on what I explained above. I’m not saying chemistry isn’t scientific (that would be a dumb thing to say). But the application of that scientific method, in modern chemistry education, completely depends on taking a lot of stuff on faith. Yes, maybe as you progress in the field (and if you’re particularly curious) some pieces of the puzzle will start to fall into place, and you’ll be able to consider under a new light the basic stuff you once faithfully learned. I’m not sure when or if that ever happens though. Hopefully a chemist major jumps in and enlightens us on this.
Well, yeah, but there we’re talking about applying different skills to a real-world task. I’m more concerned with theoretical thinking. As an example, the programmes at your job might know very well how to code, but maybe they have absolutely no idea why the coding language works or how the commands are interpreted as binary numbers by the computer (I’m not very knowledgeable about this stuff anyway). The first kind of knowledge is not as interesting as the second kind, at least for me.
Maybe you can also see it in psychology. I guess you could say there’s a difference between a psychologist who was superficially introduced to the Freudian theory of psychosexual development from another one who read exactly what Freud based this theory on (my understanding is that he had a few patients from whom he could trace this stage of development) and takes it with a pinch of salt (especially the parts of the Oedipus complex and penis envy are very controversial), don’t you think?
Psychology always seemed interesting to me, but I’m sure I would feel similarly to how I do in Economics: most of the time I have to take in knowledge that I’m not quite convinced of, and that I don’t even know how to criticize (because in the social sciences, you are supposed to be aware of the coexistence of different paradigms). What do you think of this?
I guess my bottom-line point is that every field will require you to accept a baseline framework. We can’t spend our working lives retreading and reproving all of the theoretical knowledge we already have; frankly, that would be a waste of our time and our brain talent. When you get to higher-level chemistry, some of those theoretical concepts will be explained, but the courses won’t explain in depth the process that chemists used to prove that material.
Because someone else already did the work for us, and they published it in the scientific literature. You can look up the relevant papers any time that you want to; it’s all cataloged. But we don’t need to re-prove that water is made of two hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecule every year - you can go back into the scientific literature and read how it was done if you want to. But that’s how science works; the modern work and all future work rests on centuries of previous work others have done, and at some point we reach a consensus that the model works and we move onto finding new stuff.
Well, it doesn’t. The scientific model is the opposite of that. Nearly everything we know about the natural/physical world is documented in decades, centuries even, of scientific discoveries through books, monographs, and journal articles. Want to look up Newton’s work on calculus? You can read his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica and see the work.
That’s the difference between applied and theoretical knowledge. I’m quite sure that you’re right and that the majority of software developers at my job don’t understand the theoretical underpinnings of how computer languages work, not fully, anyway. But they really don’t need to know that stuff to do their job, and most of them probably don’t care. Moreover, the time (years) they would take rediscovering or learning the theoretical mechanisms behind computer languages and command interpretation would prevent them from actually writing the code to make things work, which is what they want to do.
There’s nothing wrong with preferring theoretical stuff, though, and it’s the theoreticians that make our applied work possible. It sounds like you have a strong preference for theory.
Well, that may not be the greatest example, because most introductory psychology classes cover ‘what Freud based his theory [of psychosexual development] on.’ They also teach you to take Freud’s stages of development with a pinch of salt. In fact, most introductory psychology classes tell you about the classic experiments that make up the foundational theories in our field, like the bystander effect (the research done by Darley and Latane in the wake of Kitty Genovese); the fundamental attribution error (Jones & Harris, 1967), that people will listen to authority even when it hurts other people (Milgram experiments and Zimbardo prison experiment*), and that people conform to the majority even when they know the majority is wrong (Asch conformity experiments).
The thing is, in scientific fields - including the social sciences - you are encouraged to be skeptical, to question findings, to wonder “why?” and to require convincing to believe. The ‘convincing’ is in the scientific literature and the studies that have been designed to provide evidence for those findings. Once you take a research methods class, you can at least make ask some rudimentary questions about the way the science was structured (and even before that, you can read the articles and ask. Your professors will probably be delighted by your curiosity as long as you come across as genuinely open-minded and not just someone who criticizes/ask questions for the sake of doing so.)
But I’m also concerned at starting off the study of a field with being concerned that you don’t know how to criticize it yet. You have to learn the basics of something before you can criticize it.
I understand it would be impractical to go back to studying the issues already settled by the scientific community. As we’ve already gone over in this thread, our economies wouldn’t be able to keep up the pace of technological innovations if colleges were so inefficient and slow to form new scientists.
Yet this is something of a contradiction of the principle science is based on, which is not believing something unless you are presented the evidence to do so. And as I said, if a professor told me that the phlogiston theory is true, and the textbook says so too, then I would have no other option but to accept it, as I have no real knowledge to contradict such a theory. I know one’s supposed to trust the rest of the scientific community, but actually, it’s people who went against the established knowledge of the time (Einstein, for example) who have helped the most to advance science.
Science is, ultimately, a creative process, and colleges don’t seem to see it that way. And in my opinion, that’s not only a bad thing for the reasons I just went through, but also because it takes the fun out of science (and most likely, puts off a lot of students - like me - from it).
Well, try to read it on your own as a physics freshman and see if it really helps you to understand Newtonian mechanics better. You just can’t expect students to do that, especially without any guidance from a professor. If there was somebody to sort of guide me through the reading, then I guess I could get something out of Newton’s Principia. I think it would be feasible to have a subject devoted to the history of the science you’re studying in your first or second college year. As we’ve said though, it’s a waste of money for the system.
Indeed, I have a strong preference for theory, I always get an N in MBTI tests (I know, they’re not a very reliable -or valid- psychological test, but I think it does accurately reflect how I feel about the world).
It sounds like you had a great education in psychology! But to be honest, I don’t think all schools are like this: the few psychologists I spoke with act as if they know the one true answer that explains the way I behave (somehow it always relates to a childhood event that shaped who you are).
Anyway, it must be an extremely interesting field if you can get to the root of it. Is there any book you might recommend to a complete beginner? I’d love to learn a little bit of it in my free time (so that I can face up to the psychologists I come around hahaha).
That’s not how it’s been in my experience. They never taught me to be skeptical in Economics or in Physics. They all act as if they were imparting the holy scriptures of science. And when I ask those kinds of questions to my professors, they basically tell me not to bother with it (or just don’t even understand what I’m asking for).
Maybe I’ve been going to the wrong classes, or the wrong professors, or it might just be my school sucks.
It’s not quite like that. You told me you were presented Freud’s theory of psychosexual development along with the reasons he based his theory on. That already gives you the opportunity to criticize it, either in the moment or in the long run after thinking more about it (and maybe once you find out more about the methodological issues of psychoanalysis).
And that’s sort of what I want. I’m unsure Psychology would present these characteristics at my school, so I’m thinking of trying my luck with the Humanities (like Philosophy or English, as we discussed already)
Why do you think you wouldn’t like math? It is difficult to understand, and one way that people try to cope with that is by memorizing without complete understanding. This is because learning math and developing a good intuition for it is difficult and takes a lot of hard work, which some people don’t want to do or don’t have time to do.
Of course, if you study math, you don’t have to take anything on faith. All the results are proved right in front of you. You can write the proofs too and reproduce famous breakthroughs exactly. You see how everything works, beginning from the foundations, and how it all fits together. Yes, you have to memorize some things. You can’t reinvent math from the ground up every time you take an exam - you need to memorize definitions and theorems. But you do have the solace of knowing that any time you want, you can go back and see how everything has been constructed. And these things that you memorize become second nature after a while.
Yeah… as a math major, I mostly read and write proofs. It becomes really abstract, but I don’t mind because I can see how everything has been developed and I don’t have to accept anything without understanding. It is definitely not about regurgitating proofs. (And you could always go into applied math if you get sick of the pure math/lack of emphasis on applications.)
I’m not trying to say you should definitely be a math major, but I’ve had similar thoughts about science, and I’m happily doing math now, so what worked for me could work for you.
I suppose I’m just not entirely sure what you’re looking for…in all honesty, I am very curious as to why you wouldn’t want to accept the words of your professor and the textbook (at least initially) as true for a theory, and why your inclination would be to challenge or contradict it. There are many different ways to provide evidence. One is by actual straight-up empirical research yourself - e.g., redoing the experiments. The second-best is to read primary sources - e.g., the scientific journal article published by the author themselves, which as you acknowledged can be difficult to understand without background knowledge.
But reading secondary sources (such as the textbook, which is based upon the primary sources and designed to distill the information down to a digestible format) and listening to secondary sources (i.e. your professor, who has many years of learning and experience gained specifically to instruct you in a way you can understand) are not invalid ways of absorbing information and learning, either. Those are forms of evidence, too - somewhat inferior in some ways to the zero-level and primary sources, for sure, but superior in others (e.g., they teach you what you need to know in stages so you understand it).
Have you encountered very many situations in which you were skeptical about what your professors and/or textbook was teaching you? I’m genuinely trying to understand why you seem to struggle with accepting what your professors/textbooks say without being able to criticize it right off the bat.
Science is definitely a creative process, and I’m glad you understand that! Many undergrads don’t. The flip side to that, though, is that you can only partake in the creative process if you have a base level understanding of the creativity that’s already been implemented. So you have to listen and learn first, and then create.
Oh, I wasn’t trying to suggest that you should! In fact, I think the paradox of this is that you have to know some basics of physics before you can actually read the empirical literature providing evidence for those basics That goes back to my point earlier, which is that textboks are no less valid ways of taking in evidence. They’re basically just collections of primary literature that have been put together and presented in a format specially designed for someone with little to no knowledge.
You’re speaking with some crack psychologists, lol It sounds like you’re speaking with clinicians, and specifically clinicians who have a pretty Freudian/psychoanalytic approach to their therapy. It’s a valid approach, but not the only one. I’m not a clinician (I’m a researcher), so there’s that, but I also don’t buy into a psychoanalytic approach where everything is a result of some childhood event. I mean, a lot of things are, but not everything! Most good psychologists realize that there are multiple explanations for most of the ways in which humans behave.
I unfortunately don’t have one popular book that I recommend. Honestly, the best way to get a broad overview of psychological science is to read a textbok 
because psychology textbooks are based on the psychological research literature. The one I used in undergrad was very good but I would have no idea how to find it; that was over 12 years ago.
If you are interested in speciifc areas of psychology, I would recommend reading books written by specialists in the specific area. Some psychologists are prolific writers and write a lot of good stuff for the general public. For example, Maria Konnikova writes a lot of general interest psychology articles in big newspapesr (The New York Times, Boston Globe) and magazines (Slate, the Atlantic, The WSJ) and also has two books - *The Confidence Game/i and *Mastermind/i. She also has a PhD in psychology - we were actually in the same PhD cohort at Columbia 
- and does research in these areas. Walter Mischel, a famous psychologist in the area of self-regulation, wrote a book called The Marshmallow Test about how self-control can contribute to success. Grit is Angela Duckworth’s book about how persistence is more important than innate/natural talent; she has years and years and years of research in this area. Claude Steele wrote a book called Whistling Vivaldi, which is about how stereotypes and identity affect every day life in the U.S. - and has decades of research experience in this area.