"Not quite a decade (and three jobs) later, she is an extremely successful event planner working for a global ad agency in New York City, loving her career and her life, and earning an astonishing paycheck. Event planning turned out to be something she was really good at, that the world also needed. "
This to me is where cc-ers seem to lose their common sense. Of course an organized person with a great sense of style could be a fabulous event planner and of course could make a nice living. Of course one could make a lot of money (if that’s the goal) doing a lot of things, many of which don’t require a fancy degree. I think it’s the mark of a limited person to think that only STEM majors, computer sci people, or WS financiers make any money. It just screams - I have no sense of reality.
It wasn’t active approval…but the absence of the type of “must major in something practical which leads directly to a job” mentality.
Part of this was due to the fact some older relatives who were engineers…including licensed ones experienced periods of unemployment due to cyclical downturns in their respective fields or knew friends/colleagues/former engineering school classmates who ended up becoming involuntary SAHP, driving taxis, waiting tables, working retail, etc to make ends meet. They knew very well being in a “practical” STEM major wasn’t a guaranteed meal ticket.
I got to see a similar phenomenon back in 2001 when the dot-com industry crashed and with it, the employment prospects of most CS/computer engineering/IT majors in that period. There were a few years when many of them similarly ended up being involuntary SAHP, driving taxis, waiting tables, serving coffee, working retail, or spending long periods unemployed living in their parents’ basement.
In fact, in 2011, I chatted up one customer service rep of a major car retailer chain who was a former CS major who recounted graduated right into the dotcom crash. He recounted that crash caused him a long period of unemployment after college due to the downturn in the computer tech industry of the period and factored into his never entering the computer technology field.
The point, cobrat, is that it’s weird that your relatives had any say or input at all in what you chose to major in / do for a living. Or that their mentality and priorities should have mattered to you.
What would happen if one of your older relatives “disapproved” of a certain school, major, or career path? Nothing. Not a thing. It’s not their concern. It’s like “disapproving” that my neighbor next door paints her living room yellow. It’s simply not my concern
Most of them didn’t and you did miss the point which was MOST didn’t have the mentality of forcing their kids/us to consider “practical majors” which are perceived to lead directly to jobs.
If anything…most of them would be horrified by that idea not only because they don’t feel that’s what a college education’s purpose is…but also because several of them have experienced firsthand/found even graduates of “practical majors” can go through periods of long unemployment…or even lead to graduates staying in their parents’ basement.
And as an aside, during the crashes (the dot com and the 2008 recession) LOTS of people in all sorts of careers lost their jobs. These financial messes affect lots of industries, directly and indirectly.
True. but the 2001 disproportionally affected folks who were CS/CE/IT majors as the jobs they assumed their majors would lead them to disappeared for the vast majority of them in the wake of the dotcom crash. Once the dot-com crash occurred, it not only affected the closed startups, but also prompted mass layoffs and severe reduction in the hiring of fresh CS/CE/IT graduates.
Do people actually have these discussions with extended family?
Our friend is Chairman of physics dept at a large university. One daughter is getting her PHD in art at UVA (undergrad art major at NYU) and the other is graduating this year from Carnegie Mellon with a degree in Art. Obviously their STEM parent doesn’t think the only worthwhile degree is in a STEM subject.
Although an individual could make a major hard or soft depending on how s/he studies in the major, it is very likely some majors could be “easier” for someone who is not willing to do extra work or not well prepared (e.g., having been “screwed up” by sub-standard secondary education in many of our school systems) to do the work, I think.
When I was a college student in another country, some students who did not grew up there had a “separate” route to get into the same school and even the same major. (don’t we also have the similar thing in the US but the reason for having the “separate” route is different here?!) With a very high probability, such a student would take a much more years before he could graduate and often switch to some other major that enables him to graduate. The school (backed by the government I guess) often would go far and beyond to help these students to “succeed” (which often means "just graduate from whichever major they can graduate, and often in much more than 4 years.) Most of such students had very low ego and were reluctant to interact with students who were admitted on the regular track. Most “normal” students rarely mingled with them either and so it goes both ways. They almost always went back to the country they came from after graduation because of their extremely low possibility of landing a job. The race issue is less a concern there because of the lack of “imported” slaves in their history – did have the history of being colonized by the other “advanced and greedy” country though.) Every society could have some “funny” things going on, so maybe we are not alone.
Just read something like following, not sure whether to what extent we have such a phenomenon even at an elite college. (I once met an intern from BYU. He told us that quite a many students in some “lesser” (i.e., “easier to graduate” with less work or less academic rigor) majors, especially those who do not have further education or career aspiration or plan, do have a similar ego problem.)
“students at elite colleges who are there only because of AA and are being coddled in light-weight majors recognize that they are not perceived as being equal to the regular students and that their prospects upon graduation are not all that promising. Hence, the hostility toward the institution and the more successful students.”
This exists for colleges in the ROC(Taiwan) as experienced by a HS classmate who later admitted there’s no way he’d have been admitted to NTU for engineering with his scores if he didn’t receive a “boost” from being considered an international student/overseas Chinese.
That’s not to say he wasn’t capable or academically prepared…just that if he was a Native-born ROC citizen who spent K-12 on the academic track, his college entrance exam scores would have meant he’d be studying engineering at a lower ranked university…not the #1 university in that society.
Incidentally, he did graduate in 4 years and has been working as an engineer in East Asia and the US since. He did experience some ribbing from native-born ROC students over his "easier admission route, but it went away when he demonstrated his academic acumen in engineering classes/group projects and showed he was just as/more capable than they were.
^ Indeed some (but not many) of such students did prove themselves and competed successfully against the top students there (arguably the top 110 students in the engineering field because that major in NTU took in only 110 students each year.) But by and large, such students (especially from a “better” area like HK) could not get into their college (say, in HK) and then took advantage of the peculiar “political environment” at that time and often got into the best major and best college in another country. I think the government put them all in the best or better college so that the government could concentrate their efforts to help them and also it was easier to recruit them if the government could offer the “best opportunity” to such students who by and large are not the “above the average” students from where they came from. It is understandable that some native students won’t be happy about this “government policy.” (Many of such these seemingly “good for the country” policies became a liability for this ruling party in later years for every election there – Look at a bright side: People do have more voting power now and I heard some people across the strait are actually envious of them in this aspect of their system.) But this was in the long past history and it could be very different now.
My Dad was an engineer (retired). His kid (me) was a humanities major. He protested- and lost. His grandkids (my kid) is an arts major. He protested - and lost. Extended family have opinions. It depends on the student as to how seriously those opinions are taken.
Very interesting considering several decades ago, Hong Kong universities were considered so poorly academically in comparison to ROC(Taiwan) universities that they were commonly used as “safeties” by students from wealthy ROC families who failed to gain admission to any of the domestic universities and didn’t want the stigma and 10+ year service obligation of attending one of the military academies in a period when the society was under martial law.
It is likely that most colleges have easy gut majors, but they are not necessarily the same everywhere. Also, the same major at the same school can be a gut major for some, but a rigorous major for others, depending on in-major choices.
“Do people actually have these discussions with extended family?”
Of course not. Normal American culture is that the aunts, uncles, cousins, and cousin’s dog groomer’s hairstylist’s spouse’s camp roommate’s doctor say “how nice for you! good luck!” and move on.
^^^In ethnic families like mine (my parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe) everything is up for discussion. I am sure when I graduated from hs my relatives made comments about my college plans and didnt just say how nice. This group had opinions and had no trouble telling anyone who would listen!! I always did my own thing so it didnt matter to me.