Why do you have a need to “rank smart” during undergrad? isnt it the mark of an insecure person to sit there and try to rank order other students by how smart they are? Aren’t you busy enough doing your own thing to care?
Sevmom, you’re not getting it. I didn’t have a “negative experience with engineers.” The few who were of the mindset that they were sooo much smarter than everyone else weren’t worth anyone’s time and energy. Of course, the majority of engineers were just like anybody else - they accepted people for who they were and what they were interested in, and had no need to spend energy on comparisons. They had lives.
I hope most kids don’t worry about how they will be perceived in terms of being “smarter” when they pick a major. With my oldest, he wanted to apply ED and we toured the physics and engineering departments. The choice to apply to physics (in arts and sciences) or engineering was left totally up to him.
Great. PG. but you often don’t seem to clarify your negative, sweeping comments until after the fact. Honestly, the most pretentious, obnoxious college kid I’ve come across lately was an English major, but I figure (and hope) this kid is not representative of most English majors!
And then there is an entire pantheon of majors outside either either STEM/premed - some of them are smart too
Have not seen anyone here say that STEM majors are the only game in town. There are certainly many kids in other majors that are “smart too.”
I don’t know, but many students do have certain perceptions. Could be the result of a “competitive” environment. There are also things like STEM folks putting down humanities and social science majors even though many (if not most) wouldn’t dare taking some of the more intensive social science or humanities courses for their gen. ed requirements. Again, such folks pretty much just go to RMP to ensure they picked easy gen. ed instructors.
What a concept! What are you TALKING about? /sarcasm/
@ucbalumnus My observation is that well-run companies have well thought- out hiring practices. The ones with personnel problems tend to rely too much on hunches and impressions. Yes, a simple algorithm as a screen before interview would have save them a lot of time, money and grief. These folks are either unaware of the research in the field or they have too high an opinion of themselves.
STEM vs non STEM creates a false dichotomy. In the Duke study, Arcidiacono found not just the natural sciences and engineering, but also economics are “more difficult, associated with higher study times, and are more harshly graded”. In an earlier quote of mine, it seems like MBB consulting firms put analytical philosophy into the hard group as well. (It is no co-incidence that these are the very same subjects that are associated with high standardized test scores, btw).
I have no reason to doubt him because the Wellesley study also found the same thing: some departments give easier grades than others, and a change in grading practice create changes in student behaviour-choice of subsequent courses and major, faculty evaluation, and what have you. Here is a nice summary:
“Based in part on grades, students make choices about how hard to work (Babcock 2009), courses (Sabot and Wakemann-Linn 1991), majors, and careers. ……, graduate schools make choices about whom to admit (Wongsurawat 2009), and employers make choices about whom to hire (Chan, Hao, and Suen 2007)”.
As far as I can see, “passion” has little to do with it.
@bernie12 You may find the study interesting. It confirms a lot of what you are saying:
@Canuckguy : Yes, I remember old charts that would show social sciences awfully close in study time to natural sciences. Also, I remember something like natural sciences having lower grades than engineering. This may be because engineering courses have more project based learning and not just high stakes exams and quizzes.
Also, I thought that econ. was supposed to be hard (though at Duke, especially in the last decade more so than many others). Emory has always had a struggling econ. dept (thank you b-school for getting too much shine) since it separated from GBS and over the years had become really easy (perhaps to preserve or increase number of majors) and I always had a feeling it was an anomaly among schools. Then suddenly like 3 years ago they were apparently reprimanded and next you know it a Princeton-style grading distribution had been suggested to faculty: http://economics.emory.edu/home/undergraduate/major_minor_requirements.html . Actually its harsher because it prescribes the range of B’s and C’s (the business school uses the same distribution but only for core courses which are actually few). In addition, it appears many students are saying that instructors who were not writing difficult exams before (including some of the highest quality and most revered instructors) are now writing exams with averages on par or lower than many more challenging science instructors (talking 75 and lower). I suppose this makes sense because you wouldn’t want to give easy exams and then curve downward. Better to challenge them and then fit the grades to the distribution.
In addition, it seems like they are intentionally placing certain difficult instructors for certain courses to ultimately function as weed out and this was apparently non-existent before. My guess is it is looking more and more like a normal econ. department. Their attempt to compete with the business school seems to have gotten them some attention and it has now been reversed. The other day a friend (who is a rising junior) explained to me how he tried to double major with biology, took a couple of classes under the new econ. regiment and is now deterred because they were far more intense than he anticipated (his brother had easily double majored) and would take away time from his science courses which can’t happen because he’s pre-med. Also, the next courses in line for him are those with weedout instructors like econ. stats. Kind of funny they turned easier to compete with the b-school given the reputation UG business programs have when it comes to rigor with the overall curriculum of certain concentrations being questionable to academics and even those who teach them:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/education/edlife/edl-17business-t.html?_r=0 . Business schools used to report study times among the lowest.
IMO, most engineers (and scientists more so) are undervalued by American society (and I’m speaking as a non-scientist/engineer).
Does anyone care who thought who was smartest/most pretentious/most anything in college after they left college? I thought people left that stuff behind after HS.
How could they leave it behind, when there is a relevant xkcd?
Not afterwards…but during there is some weird intellectual hierarchy. I don’t really even remember it happening as much in HS. Maybe I was different because I was more likely to praise one of my friends who is a religion major. He was a transfer student with the most ridiculous ways of thinking and like many transfers (for some reason, they seem more “excited” about the course offerings and instructors that a school more selective than the one that they transferred from is. They more willingly take challenging courses as a whole from what I have seen. Often transfers from similar caliber schools transfer for social reasons and thus don’t tend to do the same) I’ve seen, took advantage of academic opps thrown at him even when they were challenging. He attempted to take a drugs and behavior class for fun for example. It didn’t work out that well grade wise but it is the interest that counts. He was regarded by some faculty members of religion as “one of the best they’ve seen in a decade or so” and having conversations with him was always amazing because he was just as willing to learn from me and my friends (mostly sciences) as we were from him. It is no surprise that he will be off for a masters in the philosophy of science at Cambridge in October. I try to remember my relatively recent UG days for my interaction with folks like that guy. Though surprisingly many of the graduate students I’ve met in my chemistry program are as well-rounded as I am if not more so talking non-STEM with them is always awesome as well.
As for undervalue of engineers, may have to do with how many people imagine it as manual labor for which there seems to be a distaste for. And scientists, there seems to be this thing in the media where often what we (I will claim to be one as I do aim to be a professional at it one day lol) do is not useful or practical. I remember some of what was said by politicians when government funded research was being slashed…with them highlighting “useless” projects as the reason why federal money was being wasted. And as always, I would argue that even students in STEM classes may come to undervalue what science actually is.
As a biology major, it seemed many students viewed science as a series of facts and algorithmic processes as opposed to a series of processes (or even a way of thought) that are supposed to answer open ended questions. Often textbooks de-emphasize processes (like how things were discovered, the data that led to a certain conclusions. Often it is “this is how it works, accept it!”) and experimental underpinnings and they also tend to gloss over nuanced evidence. For example, it wasn’t until I took the graduate molec cell/biochemistry course that I learned that semi-conservative DNA replication was not actually fully supported by the original experiments. The experiments where they just concluded it was most “probable” actually left open another seemingly viable model. Usually, even when this experiment is taught to UGs, the result that led to some doubt is glossed over or just not addressed. Again, the way life sciences is often taught, I’m not surprised that people in it rather just take their content knowledge where the money is, medicine (though you could risk it and try for biotech companies or pharmaceuticals).
@bernie12, I think that it’s due to more short-term selfish thinking, which (somewhat ironically) goes hand-in-hand with lack of an existential threat. The payoffs of basic science research are often uncertain, far away, diffuse, and unexpected. When the US and West were facing the threat of Soviet Communism, there was greater abasiya among American elites (you can read Peter Turchin on abasiya) and thus greater resolve among them to invest in projects that will benefit society as a whole rather than engage in mere money-grubbing.
“Does anyone care who thought who was smartest/most pretentious/most anything in college after they left college? I thought people left that stuff behind after HS.”
I think we have just done a 360. See my comments at post 392. As far as why posters are so negative about it, I think psychology has the answer, evaluation anxiety:
http://www.stes-apes.med.ulg.ac.be/Documents_electroniques/EVA/EVA-PROG/ELE%20EVA-PROG%207406.pdf
It should be post 192. 392 has not been written yet…what was I thinking.
Have not heard from OP for a while now. Is he still here?
“I think we have just done a 360. See my comments at post 392. As far as why posters are so negative about it, I think psychology has the answer, evaluation anxiety.”
I swear, there is so much strangeness in your posts. No one on here is “afraid” of being evaluated. Bring it on, babes. We just think it’s odd how there is a group of posters on CC who overvalue STEM, think that they are The Bomb, and aren’t even bright enough to realize that there are skills and talents that they completely don’t have at all, but rather than deal with that, they pretend that those skills and talents must not be important.
^^ This.
If nothing else, the edge cases present problems. Take linguistics, for example—where does it fit in STEM vs. non-STEM? What about psychology (and is there a difference between BA and BS programs)? What about quantitative economics? And so on.
Yep. There’s no right brain/left brain divide either, at least among the most creative:
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/06/secrets-of-the-creative-brain/372299/
Fascinating article and author.
^ Great article. Just two quick comments:
A former gold medalist for Romania at the IMO talked about this abstract “crystal clear world” he can switch into at will. He believes it is something you are born with, and he thinks it is one step from autism. Apparently he can stay in that state for hours even when he was as young as five.
In the TED talk I posted earlier, the good professor sees the link between creativity and intelligence. Creativity is not just picking the little bubbles that come up to your conscious mind, but to also know which ones worth pursuing and which ones to discard.