I Laughed Out Loud.
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Tell the mockers that Latin Majors make over $500K per year…entry level.
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Wear bright green pants and a red polka dotted shirt, and a bowtie. The mockers will not even think about your major.
Best wishes,
hh
tell them latin isn’t french?
As the old saying goes (or was it Katharine Hepburn who said it?): “You can’t please everyone, so you may as well please yourself.”
Get a dual major. I’d suggest latin/physics. Latin will impress the ubber liberal nerds. The physics will impress everyone else. Well, maybe not the mathematicians but everybody knows they are cold, calculating snobs.
I agree. Life is way too short for that, especially if you end up with a boring job, anyway. If you really like languages, it’s a good hobby for your whole life even if your career has nothing to do with it.
I do hear you about how shitty being tracked is, though. That has happened to me before, and it can be really disappointing. I thought I wanted to go into law so I was a paralegal at some big law firms about ten years ago for 18 months. It sucked and law sucks, so I got out. But getting a job in a completely different field after that was a nightmare, and I was only 23 or 24.
Tell them you already have a fabulously high-paying job and you’re just there because you love it. Of course, this is predicated upon having a fabulously high-paying job.
Seriously though, why don’t you have a comeback already? Latin is one of those things that you should never major in unless you have a concrete plan for the job you want (say in a museum, or digging up and translating artifacts by submarine, or wherever), and how to get it. If you’re majoring in Latin without a definite career path in mind, don’t. Even a major in Communications would be better.
It really would be better to study a living language, if you insist on persisting; at least you can become a moderately-fabulously-wealthy translator if no other career avenues open up. Do you plan to make a modern-day rosetta stone, or something?
“Yeah. So?”
That’s the beauty of college these days, Dewey! You can major in Game Boy if you know how to bullshit
(bolding mine)
:dubious:
This is all complete nonsense, by the way.
Why is he studying it if he doesn’t even know why?
A Latin major is not something into which you casually stumble. If he stumbled into casually majoring in Latin, he should seriously re-evaluate his choice. It’s regretfully foolish to choose a major in something that has no practical modern-day application without a plan. Unless he wants to join the 9+% unemployed when he graduates.
Sure, plans change. People get jobs doing things other than what they majored in. That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to never have a freaking plan in the first place.
Catullus was a punk
(The performer is a fellow-member of mine in the Classical Association of the Atlantic States.)
People don’t “casually stumble” into classics majors because it requires a long-term commitment to taking years of sequential courses. You can’t usually just choose a classics major in your junior year by default since it typically requires four years of coursework in your primary language alone. You typically need another two years in your secondary language as well. Most people motivated to take first year Greek or Latin hate it. Classics majors usually tend to like it. There isn’t a lot of family or social pressure to study dead languages; usually quite the reverse. You have to get an early start and really like it.
As far as job plans, well, plans don’t seem to be working out that well for the 9%. What did you have to major in to work in a call center? Here’s a good plan for anyone, regardless of major: go to college career services and use it as much as possible, get useful summer jobs, and apply for everything the fuck you can when you graduate. If you go to a heavy-hitting school, you can probably get yourself recruited but you have to start the process quite early to get in on the recruitment cycle. Suggesting a plan for something classics-y sounding is terrible advice. The odds of getting a museum job with no connections and a BA in classics are about the same as getting a job as CEO of a Fortune 500 company on graduation. They are slightly better if you are graduating from an absolutely top-tier institution and are willing to move to New York. If that’s the case, PSXer, and you happen to be able to live in NYC and work for free, I can probably help you. Somehow I doubt this is the case.
And PSXer should add Boethius to his summer reading list. Boethius tells us two important things: people can be happy anywhere, and don’t be a fucking weenie. Be open to a career in absolutely anything and keep a stiff upper lip. If there is chance he would want to go to grad school (which I doubt), don’t leave college without at least a year of French and German. Italian you can hack your way through later.
You can stumble into choosing Latin as a major, just as you can in English or Sociology. But you can stumble your way all the way through graduation with English or Sociology. A degree in Latin is up hill all the way, however.
If I were an employer and I needed someone who could think and write, I’d take a Latin major over an English major, all else being equal. English is basically a default degree which you get as a consolation for just spending enough time in college. If you end up with a Latin degree, you have proven willing to work your ass off.