My advice would be “get good at all the soft skills and at least one hard skill”, and this is coming from someone who was firmly in the “STEM Master Race” camp until just a few years ago. As galling as it is for technocrats, people skills are overwhelmingly more important than technical skills when it comes to career advancement and promotion. This isn’t some massive conspiracy against the nerds, it’s rightly the way business should work.
At the end of the day, you rapidly butt up against all that you can accomplish swinging a hammer against a rock or tapping fingers on a keyboard. Once you become good enough at that, the only way to get better is to lead a team of people below you into accomplishing the same thing. The further you move away from the thing you were actually trained to do, a) the less you need to know about the specifics and the more you need to understand the field in abstract terms and b) the more you need to get rapidly up to speed about totally unrelated fields by necessity.
If you never learn that one hard skill, then you become the Pointy Haired Boss type that everyone hates and who has only advanced due to his social skills. However, for every PHB, I can point to a dozen technically brilliant contributors who were pushed into management before they were ready and made a total hash of things because of their poor soft skills and lack of social awareness of how badly they were failing.
There’s never not a time in your career where your soft skills won’t be valuable. We are not a society of loners anymore, anything worth doing is done by vast teams of people, working in tight synchronization. You don’t really have a choice to not participate in this system anymore, despite our continued simplistic models of work that act as if that’s not the case.
Fortunately, we figured this out a long time ago and we decided to name it the “Classic Liberal Arts education”. Unfortunately, we seem to be intent on forgetting this lesson and pushing education into being more and more vocational despite this clearly not being what the economy or the citizenry needs.
One point in which I will significantly diverge from the received wisdom is that I put statistics very firmly in the soft skills category (I believe it has far more in common with epistemology than it does with math). Data is now an unescapable part of the business conversation, regardless of what industry you are in. The ability to reason and speak about data fluently is as important as the ability to speak English. Without it, you’re cutting yourself off from vast reams of the conversation and putting yourself at a severe disadvantage.
The dismissiveness towards non-STEM fields on this board has always been a little irksome to me. Basically, what people are arguing for is a world in which everybody who likes numbers becomes an engineer, scientist, finance exec, etc., and the people who don’t want those things should just become plumbers, electricians, and so on (I have nothing against those professions, mind you). I just think that such an environment would lead to a massive decline in cultural critical thinking and creativity. Where are the artists? Filmmakers? Authors? Journalists? Should we forget about those industries because those professionals didn’t want to crunch numbers for a living?
For example, I, as an undergraduate Communications student, will be presenting a research paper to an undergraduate research conference next month. Are my efforts “lesser” because my paper deals with communication and not biology or math?
That said, I do think that there are some general suggestions that future undergrads should follow. For one, certain majors (think Philosophy or Psychology) cannot be concluded at the undergraduate level; if such students want to actually work in an environment that is conducive to their undergrad degree, then they basically HAVE to continue their studies in grad school.
Still, that brings me to a broader point. Prospective undergrads should shoot for majors that either (1) lead directly into a career or (2) lead to a promising grad school program. This is where the math and natural sciences people generally have a leg up on the liberal arts crowd; for example, a BS in Petroleum Engineering more clearly leads into a career than a BA in Feminist Studies. That isn’t to say that the latter degree is not useful, however; I still see all the time postings on my college’s Career Center website for good-paying jobs that merely require a bachelor’s degree (ANY bachelor’s degree) to get a student’s foot in the door.
On the whole, a good way to judge the health of a given discipline is to see whether it is overproducing PhD’s in that subject. Unfortunately, this applies to a huge chunk of the Humanities & Social Sciences, but not to all of them. See my own discipline as an example.
Nothing new about that. 40 years ago I TAed a class in Assembly Language, which was the second computer class for most CS majors. We graded the hell out of the first non-assembler assignment (and later dropped that assignment when computing grades.) So I agree that CS is only good if you have natural skill in it - but you can also make a decent living even if you aren’t a super-programmer. I’m in Silicon Valley, and there are still plenty of openings.
I see the resumes of a lot of MIT grads, and they seem to be a lot smarter than me and most of my friends when we went 45 years ago.
Now most people who go there already have good study habits or they wouldn’t be admitted, though there might be some who burn out or some who had it so easy in high school that they never learned to compete. But mostly MIT professors assume students are smart, and give them the benefit of the doubt.
Some more reasons to go to the very best school you can get into (which was how we did it for our kids) - big prestigious companies today recruit from a select set of schools. Go to MIT and you will always be on the list. Go to a good but not great school and you might get excluded without extra work.
MIT in particular has all undergrads do research, which is quite a leg up. And small elite schools give you easier access to famous professors than big ones.
But going to the best school works for all fields, not just STEM. NYU film majors are going to have an easier time getting a job than someone from, say, Kansas.
Not just best, but location as well. Having a network of alumni in the city or region you plan to work in is often helpful. Even with good schools, a school that has a great reputation in the NYC area may be relatively unknown in Dallas.
This is especially true in the Midwest, where we have a lot of good colleges, that don’t necessarily get respect on the Coasts, but around here, people will say “you went to Grinnell?!” and it means something.
I work in maintenance, taking care of different machines.
The key is to be handy with electronics, mechanics, and just have a good general knowledge of how certain machines work like motors and compressors. Then have a knowledge of how to use a meter or diagnostic tool to find things like voltage, resistance, and current drop. Be able to read a ladder diagram and a schematic.
With those tools one can learn to fix a variety of equipment from say food processing package handling. Most boilers and chillers work on the same principles and you only need to know were to look for things like sources of power and sensors.
Certainly true for lots of colleges, but I picked NYU because it, like USC, has a national and international reputation in film.
BTW the NYU Masters program in film prefers that you not major in film as an undergrad, but have broader artistic experience.
But you are correct. For top schools, the physical location of the university is less important. No one goes to Yale because it’s in New Haven, CT.
Lord no! They should be bartenders, waiters, salespeople, retail clerks, internet bloggers and other “people” jobs that just require they smile and look pretty!
