Hard sciences or lib arts academia?

[Little_Plastic_Ninja]

@Sattua

A woman with a degree in neuroscience and a degree in linguistics talking: for pure marketability, degrees in most liberal arts and in most hard sciences are roughly equivalent. Meaning, you’d do a lot better to get a degree in something that leads directly to a specific job, such as accounting, nursing, or ESL.

Both arts and sciences are vanity education, imho.

Do NOT get “a degree in programming”. Any monkey can program.

I’m inclined to agree with the programming part. Computer Information Sciences is more or less where I’d go if I wanted “a degree in programming”, but it would be pointless: I’d do far better to learn a few languages and try to snag an entry-level job somewhere or do what Dad did: work for the state for a few years to get experience, then snag a headhunter.

But programming offers me no real satisfaction. It’s fun, depending on what I’m doing, but I don’t get a really strong sense of purpose out of a tidy style sheet.

@MichaelEmouse

LPN:
“I’d have to start from scratch and get a new bachelor’s before I could approach a master’s.”
Why do you want a master’s and not stop at a BS?

To follow on Sattua’s comment, why a non-applied graduate degree (or even undergraduate degree)? An associate’s degree tailored to an in-demand, difficult to offshore job might be best. If you have a passion for theater, you can volunteer. If you want to teach Shakespeare through performance, you can do that without spending 4-5 years getting a phd, unless the theater industry is much less sensible than I think.

Why do I want a master’s? I suppose I don’t know what’s required to start working as an engineer. If a bachelor’s and a good internship or two will put me through the door… well, again that’s something I should talk to an advisor about. I know that neither love nor money nor promises of gourmet baked goods have snagged me so much as a copyediting job with an English degree.

And at the moment, I do Shakespeare. I’m going to be directing in the spring. We’re adding an educational component to our group – we’re lucky enough to have contacts at a few local schools who want to use our theater and are keen on collaborating on learning and performances. But as the great T-shirt says, Shakespeare got to get paid, son. I can only take so many years of working a dull and thankless job that pays me just enough to not quite afford my own apartment and car payments in order to chase a hobby that might be quite nice as a life.

@congodwarf

How many of the jobs you can picture yourself doing when you’re 40 involve a degree in English? Engineering?

I’ve considered that. And again, from what I know right now, English would be more fun – even teaching a bunch of bratty high school and college students wouldn’t be horrible, though I certainly talk to enough of them in my daily life to know just how profoundly lazy the little bastards are. As far as engineering goes, even if I wasn’t rebuilding awesome stuff in awesome places I would still have concrete (heh) accomplishments. I could point to an honest to goodness structure and say “That is standing up because of me.” There’s something very appealing about having that kind of purpose.

In the end, I could do lots of things: I could go be an admin assistant, get promoted to executive assistant, and maybe even be a businessperson of my very own – and I’d loathe it. I’ve spent enough time in that world to know how much I’d loathe it. I’d make money, and I’d watch the clock tick by every day wishing to God that the next minute would come, the next hour would come, the day would be over, the week would be over. I am not going to spend a third of my life hoping that the next hour takes less time to end. I want to find something interesting, satisfying, meaningful. I want it to pay off my student loans eventually. I want to be challenged, to work hard, to be needed at my job instead of a teensy cog, and to have accomplished something I can point to and say “I made that happen.”

[Little_Plastic_Ninja]

Oh also:

With a degree in engineering I could, if all else failed, teach math and science to bored high school and college students. Would this be more fun than English? Maybe not. Would I actually get hired more easily and be able to keep my job when theater and English teachers are getting the axe? Yeah.

Add “reliable wage” and “health insurance” to my preferred list of requirements, which will explain why I’m not running off to be a director of OP Shakespeare.

[congodwarf]

Can’t you also get certified for English teaching, despite having an engineering degree? One of my high school English teachers had a business degree and one of my science teachers had a math degree.

[My_Darn_Snake_Legs]

I’m in humanities academia (philosophy) and my wife is in hard science academia (aquatic ecology and virology) and both are hard and they can be less than fun for various reasons.

I got lucky to get the university teaching job that I have, and I’m not sure that I’ll have it next year. My contracts are year-to-year. I’ve got a decent wage and benefits and retirement and such. That said, I’m pretty well guaranteed to have a job at least until next year. Then the process starts over again. Most jobs are at will, and one could be fired at any time. (I could too, but I have a contract so I probably won’t.) If I am, then I’ll have to hope that I can land something else for a while until I can find another teaching job. I hear that the market is pretty bad, but I’ve not been in it recently. (English might be more versatile than applied philosophy. They don’t teach a lot of philosophy in high schools. They should, but they don’t.)

My wife is just finishing up her PhD, so I don’t know what her job will be like. I assume that she’ll have plenty of opportunities available. I also assume that she’ll make more starting out than I have. I don’t know that this is true, but it seems likely. You could do amazing stuff, but you could also do boring bench work. You could also do amazing work that only 15-20 people care about at all. Everyone who isn’t a scientist assumes that my wife works with dolphins.

Do something that you think you’re going to like. There’s a lot of time invested in MAs and PhDs, so you don’t want to get too invested into something that you’ll dislike.

On the engineering issue, you don’t need an MA to be an engineer. You just need a BS and experience. I know people who have MAs in engineering, but I never thought to ask why they did it.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

@My_Darn_Snake_Legs

On the engineering issue, you don’t need an MA to be an engineer. You just need a BS and experience. I know people who have MAs in engineering, but I never thought to ask why they did it.

Well, loosely speaking that’s more or less true. In strict legal terms, though, they can’t call themselves engineers, or practice independently as such, until they pass their state, province, or country’s PE exam. This generally happens after a considerable amount of experience, and not all engineering types need to do it depending on the types of jobs they have, future ambitions, and what not.

BTW My Darn Snake Legs I’ve always loved your handle.

[My_Darn_Snake_Legs]

Thanks, Spectre.

[Ruken]

Some hard science degrees are directly employable out of undergrad in their respective field. Chemistry and biology qualify you to be a lab monkey. I know physics majors who had trouble getting a job, but one I know just started teaching highschool physics. The math folks typically had to branch out a little bit. Engineers are pretty employable.

But the fact is that most people I went to school with at a small liberal arts college did not get jobs directly related to their major. The ones who did not go to grad school or a professional program (MD/LD/etc) are doing all sorts of random stuff, and are generally successful. Obviously we didn’t produce too many nurses or accountants since we didn’t offer those programs, but the sociology, linguistics, philosophy, and theater majors all got jobs. However, I doubt the philosophy majors’ job descriptions are “philosopher” unless they’re in academia.

[even_sven]

This is a tough one. My first instinct is to say “go with your heart.” Chances are that you already know which one you really want, and I suspect that is the English major.

That said, I know A LOT of English majors with advanced degrees, and all of them have ended up being regular high school English teachers. That is the end-game for that degree. While you may eventually be able to make your Shakespeare dream a reality, it might require some creativity (You could do it easily teaching abroad…or you may have to make it an extracurricular thing…) Will that still be satisfying to you? Have you taught before? Some people are born teachers, and some are not, and that is what will make the critical difference.

As for architectural engineering…why not do some informational interviews with people in the field. That would give you a better idea of what the work is like and what it’d take to succeed.

[The_Bith_Shuffle]

I’m completing an English bachelor’s degree and there is a chance that I’ll be able to work in Human Resources when I graduate. I’m thinking that I may work as an underling in an HR department for a few years, then pursue an MBA, then become an HR manager.

My plan could totally fail, though. But even if it works, there’s no specific advantage to the English BA in my situation over, say, a BA in Business. I just happened to slide into the English major through laziness, and it just so happens that I got a part-time job in HR a few months ago.

[Tamerlane]

Bit of a hijack, but do a lot of people here consider engineering “hard science?” In my mind the sciences and engineering have always been separate if tangentially related categories, like business and accounting. Certainly at my college it was the department of science and engineering, implying an association, but separation. I certainly never think of engineers as “scientists” - neither better nor worse, just a different category.

Just a semantics questions, I guess. “Hard sciences” to me applies to everything from astrophysics to zoology, but wouldn’t include, for instance, civil engineering.

[The_Bith_Shuffle]

@Tamerlane

Bit of a hijack, but do a lot of people here consider engineering “hard science?” In my mind the sciences and engineering have always been separate if tangentially related categories, like business and accounting. Certainly at my college it was the department of science and engineering, implying an association, but separation. I certainly never think of engineers as “scientists” - neither better nor worse, just a different category.

Just a semantics questions, I guess. “Hard sciences” to me applies to everything from astrophysics to zoology, but wouldn’t include, for instance, civil engineering.

Engineering is generally considered distinct from the hard sciences. Most schools have a College of Engineering that sits outside the College of Arts and Sciences, where fields like physics, chemistry, and biology are taught. Engineers pick up a good amount of scientific knowledge on route to their degrees, but hard scientists’ work is considered to be of a different nature. Hard scientists work towards an understanding of the physical universe as it is; the understanding may end up useful, but it won’t be the scientists themselves who demonstrate that usefulness.

[Kyla]

@Tamerlane

Bit of a hijack, but do a lot of people here consider engineering “hard science?” In my mind the sciences and engineering have always been separate if tangentially related categories, like business and accounting. Certainly at my college it was the department of science and engineering, implying an association, but separation. I certainly never think of engineers as “scientists” - neither better nor worse, just a different category.

Just a semantics questions, I guess. “Hard sciences” to me applies to everything from astrophysics to zoology, but wouldn’t include, for instance, civil engineering.

My university has a separate School of Engineering. Stuff like astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, etc., is under Literature, Science, and the Arts - the traditional liberal arts fields.

[ultrafilter]

@Tamerlane

Bit of a hijack, but do a lot of people here consider engineering “hard science?” In my mind the sciences and engineering have always been separate if tangentially related categories, like business and accounting. Certainly at my college it was the department of science and engineering, implying an association, but separation. I certainly never think of engineers as “scientists” - neither better nor worse, just a different category.

Just a semantics questions, I guess. “Hard sciences” to me applies to everything from astrophysics to zoology, but wouldn’t include, for instance, civil engineering.

In general, I would consider them separate fields, but research in the two disciplines tends to overlap a lot.

[Meyer6]

Little Plastic Ninja, I’ve been through what you’re going through and unfortunately I don’t think there is a ‘right’ answer, any choice you make requires a leap of faith unless you happen to have a crystal ball and can see the future. As **Sattua **said, the degrees most likely to get you a job are probably practical fields like nursing or accounting, but it doesn’t sound like you would be interested in those things.

I have two bachelors degrees - one in liberal arts, one in hard science, and after much deliberation I eventually chose to go on to grad school in the sciences. It was a tough call though, because I truly love the arts and I miss that type of thinking. But the sciences won out since I believe the job opportunities are greater and I think that there are better returns for the time you put into graduate studies. Friends of mine who have pursued Masters or PhDs in the arts have not seen the same successes as those who followed the science path. However, they are also people who would probably not be happy doing anything else. You say you don’t want to have a dull, boring job for the rest of your life (and I don’t blame you), so I would avoid getting a degree or qualification that will simply allow you to have a slightly higher paid dull and boring job. If you feel like English and Architectural Engineering are pretty much tied in terms of how interesting you would find the career, then I’d say go for the engineering, even if it takes longer, because the rewards probably will be greater. But if your heart is set on English and the dramatic arts, then I think you should pursue that. Unfortunately only you know whether you’d be equally happy with either career.

Incidentally, I also failed calculus and I’ve done fine in every science class since. If you haven’t been in school for a while you might be amazed at how much easier it is to truly apply yourself and do well academically when you are a bit older. I know I was.

On the down side, I thought I could stay involved in community theatre or other arts groups as a hobby, but I have found that the demands of grad school have not allowed for me to commit to that and I don’t feel like it’s fair to get involved without really committing myself. I’ll probably try to get back into it once I finish my PhD. YMMV, but you might need to be prepared to put stuff like that aside for a few years while you’re in school if you choose a science path.

@Beware_of_Doug

There’s a double jeopardy in a liberal arts degree lately. It not only doesn’t bring the promise of standardized skills, it’s becoming a bit of a personal statement as far as the hiring staff over at Human Robots are concerned. In their stunted, eyes-front, snap-judgment view, it says: “I lack ambition and am neither practical nor humble enough to do what the economy demands. I care more about people, feelings, and ideas than doing, producing and delivering. I am a woo-woo moonbat, whom all you spreadsheet-monkeys owe a decent living, because I don’t live to work.”

I’m not sure this is true - in fact I think the opposite might be true if anything. Quite a few of my friends who got liberal arts degrees with me are now working in positions that required a bachelors degree, but didn’t ask for a specific one. They weren’t at any disadvantage for having an arts degree instead of a science one - in fact, there is a common perception that those with liberal arts educations are better communicators and better with interpersonal relationships, while those with science based educations are a bit socially stunted and are also more likely to be temporary employees, since there are more jobs in their specific fields that they can pursue.

[Baron_Greenback]

@Kyla

My university has a separate School of Engineering. Stuff like astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, etc., is under Literature, Science, and the Arts - the traditional liberal arts fields.

That’s an odd subject breakdown, faculty-wise. What level is it taught to?

[ultrafilter]

@Baron_Greenback

@Kyla

My university has a separate School of Engineering. Stuff like astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, etc., is under Literature, Science, and the Arts - the traditional liberal arts fields.

That’s an odd subject breakdown, faculty-wise. What level is it taught to?

That seems to be the prevalent division here in the US.

[Kyla]

@Baron_Greenback

@Kyla

My university has a separate School of Engineering. Stuff like astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, etc., is under Literature, Science, and the Arts - the traditional liberal arts fields.

That’s an odd subject breakdown, faculty-wise. What level is it taught to?

As in BA –> PhD? It depends on the department, I suppose. I go to a major research university, so it’s safe to say that most departments go to the doctoral level.

Graduate students are simultaneously students at their own school (LSA, engineering, education, law, public health, etc.) and the graduate school, with the exception of the business school, which has its own thing going on for some reason.

[anu-la1979]

My really good friend from undergrad got her English Ph.d 3 years ago and just found her tenure-track job. I am beyond jazzed for her. This is a woman who’s in kind of a “hot” field humanities-wise, was already published multiple times as a graduate student, is one of the few people publishing in his area of study, has excellent grades and went to great schools.

It still took her 3 years to find a job, during which time she made it to the “final 2” 3 years in a row. All that time she had to make it work as a post-doc at another school for extremely low wages. She’s now moving to BFE even though she’s a big city kind of girl, but is just relieved to have found the type of position she was looking for.

So…I don’t know. I’ve always been happy for her because she found something she loved to do, she does it well and she got what she wanted in the end. But this is a woman who is Type A, super hard-working, was aggressive about jobs and did everything right…and she still had to struggle a lot for that tenure track position. If you’re going to pursue the humanities, you’re probably going to have to compete with tons of people who are obsessive like she is, so consider whether or not you can handle that type of commitment to the career.

I have to say that if I could go back I would double-majored in what I really liked to do at that time (humanities) but combined it with a science or business major to keep my options open. That’s what my sister did and when she got out she had the option to go to Wall Street, go to law school or go to medical school…as opposed to my rather limited choice of slogging in low-wage political jobs in DC, soulless marketing bullshit, or absconding to law school. Looking back today…I wish I’d just sacked up and made a play for medical school in my 20s when I had the chance. I was seriously considering it in 2008, but it would have taken forever and a day for me to catch up on all the science and I had already invested 8 years in a legal career that ate up my 20s, and didn’t want to pursue medicine do the same thing for my 30s.

[scr4]

@Baron_Greenback

@Kyla

My university has a separate School of Engineering. Stuff like astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, etc., is under Literature, Science, and the Arts - the traditional liberal arts fields.

That’s an odd subject breakdown, faculty-wise. What level is it taught to?

This is pretty common. For example, go to the Harvard University web site and look at the separate graduate schools set up, you’ll see that the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences covers all traditional “liberal arts” fields - everything from philosophy, literature, music, and sociology to physics and astronomy. Fields NOT included in there, and have their own graduate school, are mostly “professional” fields like business (Harvard Business School), Law (Harvard Law School), government (Kennedy School of Government), engineering (Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences), etc.

[Yossarian]

@Inigo_Montoya

…you don’t get a science degree for the fun. Unless it’s a geology degree.

For the record, this is absolutely true.