Open a philosophy store, perhaps.
“Life is a cookie. That’ll be five bucks, please.”
(paraphrased from a standup comedy routine and for the life of me, I can’t remember who the comic was.)
Death says, “There’s just me.”
[Café Society-esque OT joke]
But he usually uses SOLID CAPS.
[/Café Society-esque OT joke]
bow, the 2nd pit thread in my honor. I think the title of this thread really shows what class you have, even sven. And to pit someone to prove to them you aren’t a failure is pathetic. The sooner you come to terms with where you are in life, the sooner you’ll get back on the right track. Stop blaming everyone else.
Let me clarify my statement - stay in school and you won’t work at Walmart if you so choose. By staying in school I don’t mean barely pulling through high school, or floating through a useless college degree. I mean choosing a useful major, getting up everyday and going to class, studying for tests, going to office hours, get a degree, graduate with a good GPA, and make yourself a valuable asset to society. If you do this you will not be working the cash register at Walmart for minimum wage.
Cite:
And I finish with a quote from Neal Boortz:
Quit making excuses for yourself, and quit taking your frustrations out on me. Don’t blame society for your lack of forsight with your choice of majors, or the current administration for not having a high paying job. The sooner you realize what’s keeping you down in life the better, but more than likely you will go on blaming others for earning minimum wage. If you don’t like it, do something about it. But please leave me out of it.
Amen and say it again.
Not that it isn’t hard to be one of those folks–the majority, I think–who don’t have an over-riding vision of what they want to be and do upon exiting high school. (Note the insistence on completing high school, though. That’s the absolute minimum for anything else…skilled trades, more academics, whatever.)
Telemark quite elegantly distinguished the possible disconnect between vocation and avocation. It’d be great if all, or even most, jobs blended lucrative work with what we love…but they don’t. Heck, even the jobs that do always–always–come loaded with aspects that can be a real drag. There’s no pure paid joy.
Don’t really worry about the “uselessness” of an English major - I did the same thing that you did. I didn’t know what I wanted to do after college, so I just picked a major that I was interested in and wanted to learn about.
Then, my last semester in college, I did a lot of job searching with the goal that I would be employed by the time I graduated. One week before graduating, I received two job offers from two separate companies. I had gone to a job fair and found two companies that had “English” or “Liberal Arts” listed in their summaries and basically did a full-court press on them. Emailed them before the job fair to say I was going to say hello, read up on them on the net, talked with them at the fair, gave them my resume, and emailed them the next day to thank them for their time. Got interviews with both, got offers for both, I chose the one I wanted more. Granted, this was in 2000 and the market was considerably better then. But I put in a shitload of hardwork to get a job and I got one - neither of the offers were English related.
Now, nearly five years later, I’m one of the lead analysts at a Newspaper advertising agency - not what I pictured years ago by any means. But it’s interesting enough, I get paid okay, full benefits, 401K.
What I’m trying to say in a rambling sort of way is that just because you have a major that some consider to be useless, don’t let that get in your way. Find a company or industry that doesn’t specify for majors and show them that you’ll work your ass off to learn their industry and help their company. They’ll likely train you anyway. I didn’t know word one about marketing before I started, but I know a lot now. I feel I got the best of both worlds - I got to study something I really enjoyed and now I have a good job, a good future, and have learned about real world skills that will help me no matter where I choose to end up.
I have a BA and MA in anthropology, with a strong minor in English lit…and made them work in insurance, law enforcement, book retailing and now municipal goverment. (The latter after getting a masters in librarianship, but I’m on a roll…the Germans will bomb Pearl Harbor any minute now.)
It was a roundabout route but not much from my educational background was wasted. Okay, some of those electives on my resume…
The whole shebang melded into perspective, and more skills than I was aware of even picking up along the way. The perspective part is too subtle to endorse without getting gushy. The skills…respect and ability for tough research. Ditto with winnowing out good stuff from the junk–not unknown in academic circles. Having the radar for diverse information, then putting it all together in concise form.
Sometimes it took a bit of explanation to convey that to potential employers but hell’s afire, if I didn’t believe–KNOW–the worth of it all, how or why should they? The onus was on me to apply that knowledge to their needs.
That was the real buzz, frankly.
If “luck” is what it takes to get a job that pays more than $13/hour, then we all might as well kill ourselves right now. Working at Wal-Mart won’t pay off $20,000 of student loans. Not unless we eat dog food, live in a box and give up any notiont of retirement.
When student complain abotu tuition fees, the hikes are explained away by saying: University education is expensive because it’s supposed to pay off in the long run. If it’s not a guarantee of getting a living wage later on, then how do you justify incurring thousands of dollars of debt? Some people could live for an entire year on what their Uni asks for tuition. It has to balance out somewhere, and that somewhere is supposed to be at the end, when they are qualified for jobs that pay a living wage.
The company I work for is like this.
We had a guy that was a production employee like the rest of us and an office opening came up for a trainer. This guy had just finished his 45 days and got his foot in the door as a real employee when the job posting went up.
He got the job over people who had been there for years because he had a degree.
He had a stinkin’ degree in radio broadcasting! But to upper management that showed he had goals that he stuck with.
I would think that being a good employee for five years and trying to work your way up the ladder showed goals too.
Heck, I once got a job because I am a mother of five. The assistant manager told me that the GM was really intrested in me because as a mother of five I should have great skills in time mangement and multitasking, and that I would be a hard worker.
Funnest job I ever had! I was a bartender/cocktail server and although not a hard job, very fast paced. I thought it was ironic that I was working along side of people with degrees who thought they were better than me because they had a peice of paper saying they were smart.
They were broke, working their butts of and miserable, and I was broke working my butt off and happy as a clam.
Yup, and if I’m not mistaken, isn’t a English degree a way to get into Law School too? I’ve heard of people doing that. They’ll get degrees in what they’re interested in/love, and use them as a means for even higher education/great jobs. Kind of like a springboard. Something like that.
I guess the universities should cease offering classes that offer no ROI to students. Buh’bye history, languages, soft sciences like psychology and sociology, and hard sciences that don’t have much practical use, like mathematics and biology. Clearly, education is only meant to train students for specific trades, like computer programming and business management.
Really, reading books that have application to a clear, defined job posting is an utter waste, right? Fuck Shakespeare and Chaucer! I mean, did knowing the relation of The Tempest to Elizabethan politics put a dollar in anyone’s pocket?
Because, y’know, having a basic corpus of knowledge can’t possibly help an educated person adjust to new, unforesen economic climates, or help her learn to acquire new skills as need demands.
Heck, I’m all for torching the libraries; who’s with me?
Hehehe. I’m hesitant to tell you, considering that I really don’t want to prolong my recent pitting, but you seem genuine.
For two years now, almost every morning has begun with reading the want ads/Craig’s List ads for Santa Cruz, San Francisco, San Jose and occasionally New York and Sacramento. A couple times a month I go nuts and spend the day looking at the county/city/university employment websites and the corporations that I’d really like to work with with. It’s hard because the University is a big employer here and they havn’t been able to hire new people because of Arnold Schwartzenagger’s budget cuts. I did the walk up and down the main drag filling out aps thing, and when that doesn’t work I scanned in every application, typed in my responses, and printed them out- which yielded a lot of interviews but still no job. Almost every time I see a “help wanted” sign I respond (In fact, one of my “to dos” today is to reply to a restraunt that needs holiday help- I’ve applied there three times, but you never know). I was told by one employer to dumb down my resume- nobody wants to hire me because they think I’ll move on to something better soon. My resume isn’t bad (I’ve had it looked over and thouroughly torn apart and rebuilt on the dope) and my cover letters are darn good (and proofread by someone who can spell- a big problem on mine)
I once spent my last $30.00 ever on trainfare to an interview. My resume has been on Craig’s list for the better part of these two years. Once I sent out letters to every single restraunt in Santa Cruz (about sixty of them) offering to train for free/wash dishes/whatever if they’d train me to be a waitress (that worked and I worked as a hostess at Denny’s for a while, but they wouldn’t advance me because they said I was the best hostess they ever had :rolleyes:). I get a handful of rejection letters in the mail every afternoon. I’m signed up with temp agencies and I call one each week, but so far nothing. I have held a few jobs over the two years since I graduated, but nothing that would ever lead to any advancement (except this hotel job) and nothing that has paid a more than change over minimum wage (except for the crazy scary guy that I talked about a while ago- he’s done some low-lever stalking of me since I quit. Thank god I got out of there).
So yeah, it’s hard times out there. If I’m in a bad spot, I can honestly say it’s not for lack of trying. It’s not just me. My brain-science-from-berkeley best friend works as a part time waitress. My computer engineering left selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door to lift boxes at a warehouse. My other friends that I graduated with grade standardized tests, temp, wait tables, or are still looking for work.
Biology? But that’s what all the pre-meds and pharmacy majors take. With a biology degree, you can at least run blood samples in a hospital or feed the shit-flinging monkeys at the zoo.
I say leave biology but take out ecology. Ecologists are just Burkinstock-wearing potheads masquadering as real scientists.
You could get a job tomorrow at UPS or Fed Ex helping with the Christmas rush. It’ll be stacking boxes and working long hours, but you’ll make more than minimum wage and a lot of it at time-and-a-half.
Here’s a link: UPS
Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz , CA 95060
(Accepting Applications)
Go to graduate school, of course!
One of my classmates with a BA in philosophy went on to law school – at Columbia, no less. Psychology and library science are also popular graduate programs for philosophy majors, although of course some go on to advanced degrees and eventual professorships in philosophy.
Comedy is also an option – Steve Martin was a philosophy major!
So was Stone Phillips (who graduated with honors) and Alex Trebek.
This argument is near and dear to me - once I was a philosophy major; at no small cost to my graduation date I’ve switched to computer science. CompSci might not give me near the level of certainty of getting a job that I’d like, but it’s far more practical than philosophy. And the mathematical background prepares me better for more lucrative stuff I’ve thought about, like economics and actuarial science.
Did I have any reason to stay in philosophy? No. I’m reading through Spinoza’s Ethics (slowwwly) right now, with no teacher at my back with a cat-o-nine-tails. Not spending a huge amount of my future income to attain an education that I can get on my own doesn’t seem so bad to me. Come look at my bookshelf - books on philosophy, economics, mathematics, literature, whatever. And not a liberal arts major in sight.
Why even bother getting a liberal arts degree?
I feel it prudent to add that my favorite philosophy professors had undergraduate degrees in biology, physics, and engineering.
Is anyone taking bets on how long it takes for even sven to make up excuses why she can’t apply? Just wondering.
I just wrote an entire paper on this. My argument came down to this.
The main problem for liberal arts majors is that people tend to believe if you get a major in English, Art, Film, or other Humanities, you must work in one of those fields. That is the result of so much focus being placed on career specialization. Liberal arts students should be capable and strong in many fields. With a degree in English, I can teach, write, edit, and work in similar fields. But I have also learned how to analyze, organize, problem solve, look for minor but important details, utilize time, and communicate efficiently and effectively. All of these skills are important in any job. Will you learn these skills in non-liberal arts areas? I don’t know, I’ve never had the oppurtunity to find out. My guess would be yes; however, it’s extremely unfair and inaccurate to state that liberal arts degrees are worthless. They’re not if you do them right.