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What are the most and least useful majors?
- Thread starter NSNick
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And Slovak Literature.
I'm going to add things like photography, painting, drawing, etc, to the list. If you were meant to do these things, do it. People make budding artists feel as though they should still go to school because it's "better", but they're really careers where your portfolio is the most important part. The only benefit I can really see from doing such a degree is that you can dedicate 3 full years of your life to art without any pressure to find full time work by your parents. If you choose not to go to uni, there'd be pressure to get a job, which takes time out of your development as an artist, as there is no chance that you'll be able to spend 3 year being unemployed and not going to school.
Yeah...don't remind me.
Hopefully, the funding situation will be better when I'm ready to eke it out on my own ten gajillion years from now.
Studying to be an artist is some fashion is riskier than getting something like a business degree because there are fewer opportunities and career paths. A mediocre artist is practically doomed, but a mediocre business major will find something, somewhere.
It's interesting, I've run into a few undergraduates from different programs who are utterly worthless because they lack many of the "soft" skills that other majors conveyed to their students. These people cannot communicate, have a flimsy grasp of logic and mathematics (?!), and know next to nothing about history, cultural, or literature. It's weird how oddly myopic some degrees are.
For someone working on becoming an artist in some fashion, school can be a wonderful way to learn techniques and practices from masters. But, the portfolio is the center of any art program. Art school, and a few other majors, are defined by what you do with the major rather than just the existence of a piece of paper.
total bs, dude
why don't you ask them?
do you even have a clue as to what a canadian attorney has to do to practice?
or a canadian engineer vs. a us engineer?
look into what a japanese attorney has to be capable of
do some basic research
oh, i am sorry, i didn't see the invisible ink in the statement where you said this is only about the usa...my bad
i guess people who recognize the other 5.7 billion people on this planet are just off topic
as far as usefulness, think of all the world figures who studies something like the dismal science, or some other social field. then think about all the engineers..... obviously the starting salary of an engineer is higher, but i know i could never do that on a day to day basis..... just like accounting... nothing about ti appeals to me. Now of course we are on a computer based forum...on the internets, so the technical fields will be higher rated, but in the end, where does all the content come from?
....where does all the content come from?
Ah, so your answers are porn star, and idiots who make YouTube videos?
Yeah, I do understand what a Canadian attorney has to do to practice. Lets see, receive LLB, take about 10 weeks of further classroom courses, pass bar exams at end of class, and complete a clerkship of 9-12 months. So thats supposed to be harder than 4 years of college, 3 years of law school, and a 3 day California bar exam? Give me a break, I have talked to lawyers I work with, most would not consider a Canadian lawyer completely equal to their US counterparts. Sure, they preform similar duties, but are you honestly telling me you feel its as hard to become a lawyer in Canada as it is in the US? I considered leaving the US to become a Solicitor in the UK because it was much shorter, less difficult process and because instead of paying $150,000 for my legal education all I had to do was go to uni for a LLB and then do a few years of paid internship.
I could really careless about what a Canadian engineer has to do to practice, I have no mathematical talent beyond accounting, and as such I have no interest in engineering as a career.
I have done basic research, sure, I didn't look every country on earths legal requirements up, but I have looked into practicing law in Canada and the UK, and found it quite lucrative because of its relative ease of entry when compared to three extra years of school and a 3 day bar exam with a less than 50% pass rate. So unless all the attorneys I work with, the law students I know, and my research is mistaken, it is somewhat easier to become a solicitor/attorney in the UK and Canada than in the US.
Sorry mate, wrong. Information Systems is a real major and it isn't on the list.
Besides, any poll with more than ~6 choices is too many. Ever hear of categories?
That's wrong, but if you want to believe that, then OK.
The most "useful" major is in something like mechanical or electrical engineering, because with such a degree, you can enter the widest number of fields, including business. You can go anywhere, do anything, and still get paid a decent amount of money. You can volunteer in a 3rd world country to build homes, and still put your skills to use. Many high-level business people aren't even business majors. They're law, accounting, or engineering majors. Even computer enginners and comp sci majors are joining that group. Business degrees don't always get you to the highest business ranks.
Like I said before, the most useless degree is anything you're studying because you like it as a hobby, such as drawing.
Obviously you dont understand it.
to even apply to law school you have to have three full years of university.
then you do the LLB.
i don't think abstract, you, or others are going to convince him...surely, i tried and i doubt he really talked to his lawyer friends in the know
my torts professor last year practiced both in the commonwealth and the usa and holds an ll.b and a j.d. and while the paths are slightly different, they are more or less equal with entrance into the inns of court harder than any state bar
my wife and i have not just entertained vancouver as a passing thought, so i did literally hundreds of hours of research into common law as well, as it relates to canada
last night i was talking to international law students and we all concurred that while the study of law was hard in the usa, at least we only had to study modern english and some latin
canadian law, with french and old english thrown in, greatly adds more time to the study of law
i didn't even get to the point of french, originally based roman civil law, as it pertains to a lot of eastern canada, and parts of western canada
last year, part of our curriculum to add color to our studies of american law was to get a small background on pre-colonial common law but few could understand the old english so it was dropped
even 18th century english and its grammar and usage is brutal when one reads the federalist papers and tries to interpret its ideas to modern day america
however, many of the ideas the us constitution holds dear actually came from early renaissance england, and some from the same period in france
......
that being said, i certainly think the study of law in the usa is harder than the graduate business studies i did a decade ago or the undergrad studies in labor and employment law
i tired to pry open his incredibly narrow world view, too
maybe, he's barely old enough to drink, or smoke?
i am going to give up my age, i guess, but when i started college, the major that the techies/programmers entered was math
the mainframe had tubes in it and the printer, when we had one, was a major fire hazard
i originally put ee/el as the best major (as for pay and finding jobs), but i think cs will be huge again as it was in the 1990s
there was an obvious drop off of cs where i live in silicon valley after 2000, and people put their investments away from the high tech sector, but i think people are coming around again
right after dot.bomb, i saw so many kids change from cs to another major, any major as if cs was a death knell and there was a flight away from anything computer related
the local colleges and universities are again putting microsoft and cisco certifications back into the cs progam and more students are enrolling again
there has been a trend in people wanting to be apps programmers, and less so for game programmers, so i think cs is growing up and becoming more practical
Quite right, I am sorry, in Canada a bachelors of law is three additional years after "college." I was mixing the UK and Canada up, in the UK you can obtain a bachelors of law as a 3 or 4 year undergraduate degree.
Personally, I look up to an attorney/solicitor/barrister of any country. It shows you've had a lot of patience and dedication to make it that far, but I do believe the US has a very difficult system (especially certain states), if not one of the most difficult.
But I'm not going to be here for a while and I think thread has already been derailed, so I'm off. And man, you wake up early 63.
My choice going into University was between Electronic Systems Engineering minoring in Computer Science, or Music.
I chose Engineering since I find science fascinating, I love understanding how things work, I love applying knowledge and I enjoy creating things. I also feel proud being an Engineer knowing everything that Engineers have done for civilization throughout history.
I love music too, however I decided that getting a degree would not change my skill level of playing nor my technical knowledge with respect to music theory. I also felt that if music became my livelihood I would not enjoy it as much. To me, the arts should stand on their own and not need to be tied to money - when you start performing or creating for money and to survive, as opposed to doing it solely because it's your passion, I feel it loses something.
So, I am currently a manager in a Network Engineering group and I perform with the Symphony Orchestra as well. I have the best of both worlds, get to exercise both sides of my brain and couldn't be happier.
As for the specific poll question, I agree with others that it is flawed. An interesting subject to discuss nonetheless.
I chose Engineering since I find science fascinating, I love understanding how things work, I love applying knowledge and I enjoy creating things. I also feel proud being an Engineer knowing everything that Engineers have done for civilization throughout history.
I love music too, however I decided that getting a degree would not change my skill level of playing nor my technical knowledge with respect to music theory. I also felt that if music became my livelihood I would not enjoy it as much. To me, the arts should stand on their own and not need to be tied to money - when you start performing or creating for money and to survive, as opposed to doing it solely because it's your passion, I feel it loses something.
So, I am currently a manager in a Network Engineering group and I perform with the Symphony Orchestra as well. I have the best of both worlds, get to exercise both sides of my brain and couldn't be happier.
As for the specific poll question, I agree with others that it is flawed. An interesting subject to discuss nonetheless.
I agree that the arts, humanities, and social sciences are valuable. However, I take umbrage to your assertion that the sciences are "uncreative, unfulfilling" subjects. Science wouldn't exist without massive amounts of creativity, and particularly at the higher levels, success requires being creative. And as far as unfulfilling--why on Earth wouldn't the sciences be fulfilling?
I always thought Major Major Major Major was the best major even if he was sometimes mistaken for Henry Fonda.
I wasn't really talking about science as a whole (biology, chemistry, etc...) but rather programs like computer science and the like.
And my post was mostly an angry reaction at what I saw happening throughout the early pages of the thread (and is still continuing).
I think choosing a major based upon the amount of money you can make with it after graduation is the worst thing you could do. Rather, I'd encourage people to study what they enjoy, even if some people find it "useless". If someone finds computer science fulfilling and enjoyable, then more power to them, but I could never do that to myself. Likewise, people who see no value in humanities degrees should realize that other people DO see value in one.
I would be interested in finding out why people think humanities degrees are "useless" without having to resort to job/money arguments. I know full well I won't be entering the corporate/business world with my History degree. But that doesn't make my degree useless, especially since I have absolutely no interest in getting a traditional business/corporate job.
lol
it's trying to change from crim law to torts in my head and i got killed on a test not knowing the diff.
They are in every single aspect inferior to natural sciences. Let's see now:
- much worse education matching employment
- worse wages on average
- humanists can't create and invent
- humanists never make new discoveries
- humanists lack expertise in every scientific field imaginable but think they know everything which makes them irritating
List goes on and on! What's more fulfilling than learning how to manipulate E. Coli genome, witnessing horizontal gene transfer, uncovering mechanisms of death and maybe some day overcome them?! Meanwhile humanists are debating hard about portrayal of feminism in "Tron".
WHICH IS MORE INTERESTING AND FULFILLING? Yet you humanist scum keep on acting like you were better people. Get a grip, losers.
it5five said:
Funny, I hate the attitude that technical degrees are uncreative and unfulfilling.
So as for passing judgments, pot, meet kettle. Just keep in mind that if it wasn't for computer science you wouldn't be typing replies like this on a Forum (web technology) on your Mac (hardware/software programming) using the Internet (evolution of DoD's ARPANET).