I heard it has something to do with the brain. However, the lab is on the college’s affiliated med school side (which is just a few blocks away from college’s campus) but it is still a bench research, not a clinical one. I also heard it has something to do with fruit flies – a lot of them. (It smells, as I heard, when there are so many flies.) I really do not know much about it. The other research is actually more “scary” – it deals with bacteria. If the researcher got infected, there is really no cure as of today. I heard the lab often hires many post-docs. So the UG students are usually not assigned with more challenging task, like doing the “surgery” on the tiny brain of the flies.
DS was really not into research in the first half of his UG years. Even though he had an opportunity in doing research starting from his freshman year, he chose not to. Not sure about being a science major at the beginning either but being graduated with a science major in the end. (their college allows the students to select the major at the end of sophomore.)
Interesting. I guess if they’re just doing basic Research Assistant type tasks in a Bio lab, it wouldn’t require a science major, but it seems a little strange to me.
I guess if a kid is considering Bio or just wants to broaden their horizons, it makes sense.
There must be something about Purchasing that I don’t know about. They seem to be scooping up some serious candidates I’m not kidding. This girl I mentioned was one of the smartest people I went to school with.
Looking back at those numbers @ucbalumnus posted, I can’t get over the numbers for Philosophy. I wonder if they’re skewed by the people who study Philosophy and then go on to Law school. Does anyone know if those Payscale numbers are for people with just a Bachelors, or for everyone?
Actually non-science major premed may take quite a many science courses, the same courses taken by science majors. Some “premed-type” non-science majors could do better in science classes than science majors.
This is because all “prereq” science courses had to be courses taken and recognized by the science major. They can not be those “science appreciation” courses taken by non-science majors to fulfill their “science” core course requirement.
No, they have the science courses, and they declare a non-science major.
The only difference is that they do not have to take the upper division science courses which are required to be graduated from a science major. They could still take them if they have the time slots but usually they only take a few of these upper division courses and they could take elective (upper-division) ones instead of required (upper-division) ones.
I’ve recruited for a bank training program. Like many, we had an in-house training program for new grads. The humanities kids regularly out-performed the business/finance kids. Most banking functions (middle market lending? virtually any of the retail banking departments, lock-box/treasury, municipal finance, large commercial servicing) require HS math… and not much more. What kids learn in “finance” majors tends to be a lot of plug and chug- put this number into the numerator, put that number into the denominator, out pops your answer.
This isn’t math. This is arithmetic. Which is why the truly “math” oriented financial jobs- DE Shaw, Bridgewater, etc. tend to go to engineers, math majors, etc. out of rigorous schools, and not to finance majors. DE Shaw doesn’t need to hire kids with a finance degree who can multiply.
There is nothing wrong with encouraging a kid who loves finance to major in it. But to take a kid who could be a star in another discipline and tell him that he’ll be a basement dweller unless he studies finance, or “international business” or some such major is flying in the face of reality. You can’t predict the next banking downturn. And you can’t predict when another wave of off-shoring is going to move even more banking functions to India or Poland or Costa Rica. And you can’t predict which new technological innovation is going to make which function (which your kid has studied for four years) completely obsolete- ask a bank which has a substantial small business lending business what they think about the new online lending models where a department of 200 credit analysts and relationship managers has been replaced by an algorithm and a programmer.
None of us can predict this stuff. So don’t saddle your kid with the equivalent of a buggy whip for their education. Your kids should be lapping up college courses which teach critical thinking (both numeric and verbal/analytical), writing (succinct), and the ability to be both wide and deep.
My office doesn’t have my college major on the door (Classics in my case). Does yours?
“There must be something about Purchasing that I don’t know about. They seem to be scooping up some serious candidates I’m not kidding. This girl I mentioned was one of the smartest people I went to school with.”
My sister graduated from Smith so definitely smart, but this was also 40 years ago. She loved her job. Got wined and dined by vendors all the time.
My son, a Poli sci major, history hminor was accepted into exec management training program by multi national corp. He just started last June right after graduation. His starting salary is more than the 10% for his major in the chart above. He also, already, has gotten feelers from other companies to go work for them.
He was a pretty good student at a LAC (3.2 GPA) but certainly not a stand out. His friends all have jobs now, too. The ones who plan on going to grad school are all working for a few years first. S might go back and get his MBA, but would work at the same time. His company has tuition reimbursement.
If a kid has ambition they’re not going to end up in parents basement no matter what their major is. If they think the jobs are going to come to them, then there is a problem regardless of major.
It mentions that the survey is of people with only a bachelor’s degree.
Philosophy is somewhat unusual among majors in that it requires one to think both humanistically (like other humanities majors) and logically / analytically (like math and science majors). It is likely that, for non-major-specific jobs, that combination of thinking skills tends to improve adaptability to various types of job situations, and therefore better performance in various types of job situations (of course, actual job performance still varies on how well each person thinks and does).
Yes, students in other majors typically have general education requirements, but they often pay less attention to them than their major courses, choose the easier-for-non-majors courses, and/or take them passed / not-passed.
This Guardian article titled “I think, therefore I earn,” is a bit dated (2007) and the data are from the UK, but it does a lot to explain why philosophy majors are highly valued by many employers:
I was thinking more on the Investments side of the bank, but I still would have thought that in the areas you mentioned, they would have preferred kids with Finance over Humanities. I’ve learned something.
A bunch of years back, I worked with a number of smaller banks on the Cash banking side, and I remember thinking that most of the people probably didn’t have college degrees at all. There was no Math involved. It was basically administrative type work on cash accounts. That’s a whole different world.
Mine doesn’t either. Like I said, I think it matters way less as your career goes on, but when you’re coming out of school, your courses (not necessarily just in your major) constitute most of your experience, unless you have great internships.
I had specific courses that I’m sure got me interviews and job offers. I’m all for exploring and taking courses in all sorts of areas, but I would just encourage my own kids to make sure they use some of those 40 courses they’re going to take to acquire at least a little bit of applicable knowledge. I think you can do that without fear of being obsolete when you graduate, so why not do it and have something to show the people who do want to see some hard skills. I’m just saying, I’ll encourage my own kids to do that if they end wanting to study something that isn’t one of the more directly applicable majors.
I forgot to respond to this part. I agree. I guess when I think of STEM, I’m really thinking of EM. I think CS, all the variations of Math (Applied, Pure, Statistics), and Engineering share that weeding out process you described. That’s why I think they’re valuable majors to have on your resume IF you have the desire and the aptitude.
If a hiring manager is looking for someone who can solve difficult analytical problems, they can have pretty good confidence that a kid with one of those majors on his resume can do it. If the kid couldn’t do it, he/she probably wouldn’t have made it through the program.
If you’re looking for creative thinkers and expressive writers, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
Although if that ability to solve difficult logical / analytical problems is required or desired, but knowledge or skills specific to math or engineering are not, then philosophy majors would likely be qualified as well.
True. I’m all over this Philosophy thing. I loved Philosophy in college, but I didn’t have time to take more than the two courses I squeezed in. I had a girlfriend who took an intro type course that was a survey of all of the big guys, and I ended up reading the books and writing all of her papers for her. I was doing my STEM stuff part time at that time, so I had the time and it was a lot of fun.
See @blossom, and @romanigypsyeyes, I’m a Humanities guy at heart. I was just beaten down by my over-practical, high school educated parents, and forced to toil a lifetime away as a soulless, mindless tech worker
Headcount at global banks for people who do “investments” is a tiny component of the workforce. People think Banking and the assumption is that the “good” jobs are in one function. Risk Management, Trust Administration, Commercial Lending, HR, IT, Marketing- these are huge areas.
Like I said- you can better help your kid by learning about the labor market- how it operates- who gets hired to do what- than you can by shoving them into the “you have to major in accounting” box. But it’s easier to insist on “something practical” even if it doesn’t jive with reality.
I am currently counseling a kid with a marketing degree who is getting frustrated that the companies she is targeting seem to prefer psychology majors vs. marketing majors.
Who told her to major in marketing? The fearful parents who didn’t want the psych major living in the basement. But psych majors take a more rigorous statistics sequence than “Buyer Behavior” for marketing majors- which is “Stats-Lite”. Psych majors take bio- and some take a neuro or cog/sci sequence- which is both more rigorous and more relevant than the "business law " classes that my young friend took. She is aggravated that a marketing degree isn’t opening doors. I am frustrated that she doesn’t realize that skills count more than content.
All my siblings lived at home until they were married.
I do NOT get the huge difference in cultures, where it is some kind of “pride” that your child moves out before they get married.
“living in your parents’ basement” is a trope. The point of living at home is to help your parents and to be a source of comfort to each other, until you move out when you marry. If you don’t marry, you live at home and take care of your parents until they pass.
It is very easy to be a “living in your parents’ basement” person while living on your own, or with a roommate, or at your aunt’s, etc. It’s a certain kind of person.
My mom made me and my siblings lunch every day we wanted it (most days) when we all worked after college; she was working as well. She fed us if we were home each night and on weekends. They’re your kids, they take care of you, you take care of them.
Of course there are negative possibilities. Like my friend who had to not marry so that she could continue taking care of her mother bedridden with RA (years ago). Or the true “sponge” who has enabling parents, worse than helicopter parents. There are negative possibilities when not living at home as well - I have friends in their 40s who have very negative relationships with their parents, and they don’t have to live in their parents’ basement to get that treatment.
FWIW, my one son is very very good at math, but one of the majors he is looking at is history. I will no doubt encourage him to major in a science or engineering, and minor in history. We are pointing him more towards liberal arts schools than his brother, who was more heavily into STEM. We’d rather pay for five years of college for him to get a minor or double major than just get history as a degree…
What is he actually interested in? As stated before, not all sciences have significantly better job prospects than history (e.g. biology), and some engineering majors have very volatile job markets (e.g. petroleum engineering). Also, even if the major-specific job prospects appear good, he needs to be interested in the types of jobs involved.
A good knowledge of math and statistics is generally desirable for a history or other social studies major.
It is not necessarily true that it will require more than 8 semesters to double major, though it depends on the school and the majors involved.
I’m not kidding. This girl I mentioned was one of the smartest people I went to school with.