I just quote my billed day rate. It’s pretty steep, usually scares people off when I tell them a minimum engagement is 5 days 
I have to admit liking the stereotype of chemist = smart, though I do my best to dispell it.
I tell people that organic chemistry is like building with very tiny legos via cooking.
I’m active in educational outreach for BigSouless Corp. We take every opportunity possible to get the point across that chemistry is relevant to daily life, and even gasp! fun. We need all the help we can get - most people’s impression is that we sit around memorizing the periodic table.
If that doesn’t work, I tell them about working with phosgene.
Prior to landing my current job, I worked retail for a couple of months. My mother ran into one of the managers at a party about six months later. My mom mentioned that I had worked there, and the manager sneered, “Oh, I think I remember her. She didn’t last very long, did she?”
To which my mother replied, “No, she left for a career as a chemist.”
The manager’s only retort, “Humph. I bet she’s really fun at parties.”
Maybe not in the US. In the UK, IT tacitly suggests learning to use MS Office.
Ah, well here it is a fully accredited technical degree. Course programs here (warning PDF)
I always thought that was the case. Everything I’ve seen was, either you’re really good at math, or you’re really good at history or english. I’m probably wrong though.
I can’t do math worth a damn though. I tried, kinda gave up.
The high school computer class my daughter took was definitely not called IT. I’m of the generation where being computer literate meant knowing how to program, not just being able to turn on a computer, write a letter, and look at porn without getting too many viruses.
Get used to it. I was majoring in Computer Science in college when Gates was up the street at Harvard still, I finished my PhD before the IBM PC came out, and always have worked on Unix systems except for the PC I had at Intel for management stuff, and still people assume I know the intricacies of Windows.
The thing is, if you know what is going on under the hood, and how to search for stuff you don’t know, you usually can figure out a problem. I get the impression that most computer users these days have the slightest inkling what is going on inside their machines.
I’m not going to say there isn’t a part of me that feels a pat on the back when I get this. My bigger reaction however is to the insult that suggests I have to be different to like chemistry. Why is it that people think the “science is icky” mentality is acceptable? For some reason it’s “cool” not to like science, and people are so OK with this that they willingly make these statements to me. Anyone can and should understand science.
Solfy I have been on this board since it was on AOL and I believe you are the first other synthetic chemist I have come across. I’m not saying they aren’t out there, you are just the first I have known about. I’d love to ask you what you do, but BigSouless Corp usually frowns upon such things. I am still finishing my dissertation so have no such barriers. Anyway, nice to make your acquantance.
I’m not very good at math either. Thank goodness I became an engineer. Where they expect me to use a calculator if I have math to do. Or to use a computer.
So which group doesn’t know how to use a calculator? The good-at-maths, or the good-at-history-or-english?
No, not that at all (there are several people in my family, including my mom, who are nurses). Nursing and education were 2 of the more stereotypical female majors.
The animal studies I do for work use primarily canine models.
Yeah, as a Humanities person who gets to hear about what a waste my profession is, what a godless monster (who probably also hates America) I must be and how I clearly couldn’t hack it in a “real” field like science or engineering (or else, why oh why would I stoop to the humanities?!), I gotta say that it could be a hell of lot worse than people thinking you’re smart.
I know there’s the anti-intellectual component too, and I sympathize with you guys there, but I have to deal with that AND disrespect from morons who think that their opinions on my topic of study are equal to my own since “anyone can teach you how to read” and “anyone can develop opinions” and clearly all opinions must be equal since opinions aren’t facts. :rolleyes:
Then again, I’ll bet that many of the scientists here have run into the “oh, well, I have opinions on evolution/stem cell research/cloning” types, and I imagine that must be dreadful. It seems that all this ties into the ongoing thread about people taking attacks on things they like as an attack on their essential being. I was discussing that thread with a colleague and he observed that opinions have been assumed as a part of essential identity (in a way that they haven’t been before), so attacks on opinion (a part of the intellectual ethos) are now seen as attacks on the essential self. This would seem to foster anti-intellectualism…
I absolutely agree with this. I went to work for a MegaWhopper engineering company right out of graduate school. I was the only female engineer out of about 40 engineers. The ladies of the administrative staff all had such weird reactions to me - from “Gosh how smart you must be!” to bringinging strangers up to me, pointing and saying “This is 90 !! She’s one of our engineers !!” as if I were a zoo exhibit. It took quite a long time to break the ice so that I could engage in regular ‘girl’ talk with them.
Any you know the worst part? Most of those ladies were perfectly capable of understanding the same science I did. Some were probably smarter and more capable than I; what a shame that science was not presented to them as an option in their younger days.
Fast forward to today: I have men tell me they don’t understand physics. Balderdash, I tell them. Do you know how to play baseball/basketball/football/golf? If I get an affirmative then I can explain to them ways in which physics works in sports. Sheesh. It’s not rocket surgery. 
You see, sociology is the Delaware (or is it the New Mexico) of the sociobehavioral field. Folks don’t believe it really exists 
(no, really, I’ve met people who have categorically informed me that what really exists is social psychology). Or they think it’s a required course on the way to something else, sort of how you can meet a mathematician but not an algebrist.
Twenty-something years ago when I attended a magnet high school that required an application due to the limited number of students. For years, people would ask me, “Don’t you have to be smart to go there?” I never knew what the correct reply was so I just started saying “Yes”.
Question for those of you who say you don’t like these types of responses: what DO you want people to say? No one’s really specified.
“That’s cool” is always a nice answer. Or “My Dad/Aunt/Second Cousin is an ______”.
I get this all the time. I studied English and Theatre my first trip around. Now I’m getting another degree in Electrical Engineering. I work with PhDs from MIT. It’s wonderful! But I sometimes get someone who makes a crack about how someone who’s an Engineer can always write, but someone who’s a writer should have a hard time with Engineering. That’s when I tell them I had a 3.76 for English/Theatre, but a 4.0 for Engineering. 
But it’s all done in a light tone.
I decided a time ago not to worry about whether other people liked what I was doing. I’ve been excluded from groups because they couldn’t always understand what I was saying. The sad thing is, they never really wanted to know. I have a thirst for knowledge. They don’t. I’m cool my way. I hope they’re cool theirs. When someone calls me smart, I take it as a compliment.
Nod, my conversational examples were from Spain but in the US I got more agressive negative responses; I truly believe that it wasn’t a matter of “communication style” but of people thinking that you can have medicines, cars and bridges without chemists, physicists, mathematicians and biologists. I’ve heard Spanish medical students complain that “orgo is hard” (I tutored several) but never that “it’s got nothing to do with medicine!” :eek: which led me to wondering what notion did my American students have of what medicine is.
When I was in grad school Over There, I had people ask why someone so smart (ChemE) was studying for a PhD (in Chem) instead of becoming a Doctor in NoseJobs. Eeeeh… because if I’d wanted to be a doctor I’d be one by now? It’s a Bachelor’s, in Spain. I’m allergic to sick people. Yes, I know people who want nose jobs don’t have any bugs. No, I don’t want to be a doctor. (There’s also the detail that to me grad school was a job and not a vocation, but I wasn’t going to try and explain that).
I did! I mentioned that guys who hadn’t ever gone, nor intended to go to college would often (and often still do) ask things like “what kind of work would that degree lead to?” or “what’s the difference between a chemist and a chemical engineer?” or “was it a hard degree?”
Curiosity is a very positive answer. “Oh you’re one of those people who make mutant sheep” isn’t (and btw those are genetic engineers). The HR guy telling me that I should just sign the contract even though it says “Licenciatura in Chemistry” instead of “Chemical Engineer, Superior” because it’s not different at all (erh, two pay levels as per this particular factory’s payscale, dearie) and actually believing it until I painted that particular paragraph in hilite yellow… dude, sorry for the licenciados, but dangit, I wrote a thesis and they didn’t.
When I was a pilot in the military I did the same thing. I used to tell the ladies that I changed the lightbulbs on radio towers!
“They’re huge! Like the size of a garbage can!!”
"Really!!! :eek: "