<p>One is not limited to bioE jobs if one earns a bioE degree, correct?</p>
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And in reply to unlimited's and hopeful's questions: Once you're in a major, it's hard to get kicked out. If you do very badly (grade average of less than 2.0) they will bother you, but in general you won't get in trouble as long as your grades stay reasonable.
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<p>I would just point out that in engineering, it's very easy to end up with very poor grades. Plenty of engineers do, and thus get kicked out of the major (and sometimes get kicked out of Berkeley completely). </p>
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I thought people who would want to major in bioE would only compete with the people that are interested in Bio E right? (correct me if im wrong).
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<p>That is mostly correct. You are also somewhat competing against Engineering Undeclared students (EU) because those students could theoretically switch over to BioE.</p>
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One is not limited to bioE jobs if one earns a bioE degree, correct?
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<p>Also correct, and I think this point needs to be emphasized. Just because you get a degree in something does not mean that you are restricted to doing that thing. It's just a major, it's not a career. I know plenty of people who are doing quite radically different things now than what they studied in undergrad. I think I read in Fortune Magazine that the typical working person changes his career more than 5 times in his lifetime. </p>
<p>Let me give you some examples. I know a guy who graduated EECS and is now a real estate broker. I know a guy who majored in English and now writes computer software for a living. I know a guy who majored in Legal Studies and is now a manager in the testing division of a computer company. I know 2 guy who majored in Chemical Engineering, and both are now investment bankers, one in India, the other in London. I know a guy who majored in MCB and took a job as a business strategy consultant at Accenture. </p>
<p>The point is, you're not really choosing a career. It's just a major. It may help you to get to certain careers, but you are not restricted by any means. Heck, two of the most enduringly popular career paths for engineers coming out of Berkeley (and MIT, Stanford, and other top engineering schools) are management consulting and Wall Street investment banking.</p>
<p>I don't understand why an employer would be compelled to hire someone who majored in something completely irrelevant to the job.</p>
<p>Then you have much to understand about the bachelor's degree in particular.</p>
<p>Please elaborate :)</p>
<p>Well, the bachelor's degree is, in general, not a pre-professional degree in the sense that it prepares you for a particular job. Thetwo most common exceptions are engineering and business, and in these two fields the degree earned is given to prepare someone to be an engineer or businessman. However, these people get other skills as well, or else they would only be able to be engineers and businessmen, respectively. If one majors in English, one can do things besides teach English or receive advanced study in English. One learns to read texts closely, recognize themes, communicate effectively, complete tasks as demanded, and so much more. One who receives a bachelor is supposed to have a relatively high level of communication skills, quantitative skills, time management skills, and other skills. These are the kinds of things that come with the degree. Yes, you do in depth study of a particular subject, and you can continue this (by going to graduate school or doing it on your own), or change fields, by going into Law or Medicine by going to law school or medical school. The bachelor's degree prepares you for these more difficult types of learning, and eliminates some people from doing these things because of poor performance at the bachelors level. </p>
<p>Lists like that, with themes similar to why go to college? will give even more ideas.</p>
<p>Some people think that choosing a major is choosing a career path, or that you are stuck doing whatever you choose and only that. This is rarely, if ever, so. It might be part of the reason why the "science types" tend to look down on the humanities- because we're not doing anything practical. Well, in many ways, neither are the science people, unless you plan on doing biology for your life, or physics, or chemistry. Both the sciences and the humanities are equally "practical" in many ways, in that they will develop skills which are probably necessary for employment into many jobs.</p>
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I don't understand why an employer would be compelled to hire someone who majored in something completely irrelevant to the job
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<p>I agree with everything that drab said. </p>
<p>I would also point out that nobody's being 'compelled' to do anything. Companies are interested in hiring who they think will be the best employee and that is often times not related to the specific subjects that the person has studied, but has more to do with personal motivation and innate intellectual talent. The fact is, most jobs really aren't that hard to learn and train for. What cannot be trained quickly is your motivation and your talent, and your ability to think.</p>
<p>Let me give you a story. I remember being a young engineering intern in a research lab, filled with people with MS and PhD's in engineering. While there, I remember one guy, who had a PhD in chemical engineering, trying to remember how to do basic simple calculus problems because he was trying to teach his daughter calculus. He then realized that he couldn't remember how to do it. And then he asked other people in the lab, and they couldn't remember either. Finally, he came to me, and I knew how to do it. </p>
<p>But think about that. I, as a young intern, was teaching a guy with an engineering PhD how to do basic calculus problems. What's wrong with this picture?</p>
<p>What's 'wrong' is not that he never knew if before. Obviously at one point in his life, he knew far far more advanced stuff than I will ever know. What it really means is that you don't really need to know that stuff to do the job. As a consequence, you inevitably forget it. All the people there had forgotten it all, because they never used it. And this is a research lab where you would think that people might use this stuff. But the fact is, you don't. </p>
<p>So does that mean that all that math they learned was just a big waste of time? No, that's not what it means. And now, at my age, I probably can't remember how to do those calculus problems either. So was it a waste of time for me to have learned it? </p>
<p>I don't think so. Consider this. Just think about everything you've learned in school since, say, the 6th grade. How many of those specific skills will you actually be using on a job? Think about it. How many people do you know go around conjugating foreign verbs, or cranking out trig problems, or deconstructing Shakespearean plays, or writing papers about the War of 1812 as part of their job? I would say practically nobody. So does that mean that the US is stupidly wasting national resources by having American kids spend time learning this stuff? Maybe the US should shut down all junior high and high schools for they are evidently wasting money in teaching things that nobody ever uses anyway? </p>
<p>No, that's not the goal. When you learn how to bisect an angle in geometry, it's not because you're going to be getting a job later in life where you have to go around bisecting angles. When you learn how to analyze Shakespeare, it's not because anybody expects you to get a job where you'll be writing essays about Shakespeare for the rest of your life. When you're writing a paper about the Franco-Prussian War, it's not because you're going to be spending your whole life writing papers about the Franco-Prussian War. It's because these tasks teach you how to think. </p>
<p>The point of academic education is not to teach you specific skills that you will be using forever. The point is to teach you how to think logically and creatively. By writing all these papers and doing all these literary analyses and solving all these math problems, you are learning how to use your brain. You are exercising your mind such that when you do have to learn something new (like a task for your job), you can learn it very quickly. That's the point of an academic education. It's not vocational education here where you're learning how to fix your car or do metalwork. Academic education is about making your mind stronger and more flexible. </p>
<p>Taking it back to an engineering curricula. Engineering lectures are invariably just pages and pages of complex mathematical derivations. But the fact is, no working engineer actually does that. No engineer actually spends his whole day deriving math equations on a piece of paper. So why teach it that way? Because it teaches the students how to think logically and adopt a rigorous engineering mindset. All those equations, you are going to forget. But you are still going to have that highly logical engineering mindset. </p>
<p>Similarly, most humanities majors revolve around writing essays about books. Yet the fact is, of those people who graduate with humanities degrees, only a very tiny fraction will get jobs where they will have to write essays about old books. Yet most such graduates will end up in jobs that have nothing to do with that. For example, I know plenty of English majors who went to sales, marketing, HR, project management, strategic consulting, elementary-school teaching, medical-school, etc. etc. Those careers don't require that you write papers about old books. So does that mean that their degree was worthless, and that those people should never have gone to college at all? Of course not. The college experience taught you how to think. </p>
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It might be part of the reason why the "science types" tend to look down on the humanities- because we're not doing anything practical. Well, in many ways, neither are the science people, unless you plan on doing biology for your life, or physics, or chemistry. Both the sciences and the humanities are equally "practical" in many ways, in that they will develop skills which are probably necessary for employment into many jobs.
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<p>Well, I don't want to digress into another subject, but I think the true cause of the resentment is that, let's face it, humanities majors tend to be easier, on average, than science majors, both in terms of workload and in terms of grading. Now don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that ALL science majors are more difficult than ALL humanities majors. Indeed, some humanities majors are quite difficult. </p>
<p>Yet the truth is, there really are some humanities majors from which you can graduate without doing very much work and without learning very much. And there are students in those majors who are there just because it's easy and they want an easy degree. I remember back in the old days when the Cal football team used to publish what each player was majoring in, and I noticed how relatively few of the players were majoring in science (and especially not in engineering), and how a disproportionate number of them were majoring in the humanities. I don't think this has changed. While obviously some of those players were majoring in a humanities because they actually liked it, some of the others were doing it just because it's easier to get the grades to keep you eligible to play.</p>
<p>wow sakky... a different perspective.. thanks :)</p>