<p>“But I’d never heard before that nursing was actually considered a STEM major, or anything other than a pre-professional major or some sort of health sciences major.”</p>
<p>BSN students take more required science and math courses than most biology or chemistry majors.</p>
<p>At the risk of coming across as a xenophobe, I wonder if part of the PhD ‘glut’ is due to the increase in numbers of foreign students who come to USA for their graduate degrees then stay and take jobs in academia and industry. The people highlighted in the article posted by the OP are not representative of people you will find in the average graduate medical science programs. Asians, especially Chinese, have outcompeted US citizens for years in graduate programs that value a hardworking uncomplaining work force. According to the article linked below, 40% of science and engineering PhD holders in the US are foreign born. Even a modest crackdown on visas to foreigners would provide a huge boost for American PhDs. But is that in the best interest of scientific progress? </p>
<p>[Foreign</a> Ph.D.s Stay in U.S. After Graduation - WSJ.com](<a href=“http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704905604575026800522011226.html]Foreign”>http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704905604575026800522011226.html)</p>
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<p>Nooooooooooooo, I don’t believe in that. This is the USA and everything costs. I rather be in a job that I just only “barely like” that would allow me to do what I actually like (international travel, etc) instead of working on a job that I love and still struggle financially.</p>
<p>I understand having love for science and all but some of these students need to be practical also. I was math major (undergrad) and while I wanted a pure 100% “mathematician” job, I made sure as an undergrad that I had my butt in those computer science courses too. Yeah, I became frustrated when employers would post that they were looking for math majors and when I get to the interview they then said “well, we would like you to meet with the manager of software systems or software whatever.”</p>
<p>Money got tight, bills were due and I wanted to live in my own residence sooooooo…I learned to like some IF-THEN-ELSE statements.</p>
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<p>Personally, I’m not sure how many of the spaces are being “taken up” by foreign students in STEM programs. I’m at a top 10 program in my engineering field, and during our visiting weekend there were roughly 20 students, all but one American. When classes started up there were only two other Americans out of the 12 students in my class. Many Americans simply choose not to attend, I imagine, because they can already get a job in the US with a BS. It’s unlikely a Chinese/Indian/etc national will be able to land a job here with their bachelor’s from a school most of the hiring managers won’t even be able to pronounce. A MS or PhD from an American program is a stamp of quality on their work, and a good way for them to enter the workforce here.</p>
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<p>Having interviewed and hired a bunch of such individuals, one quickly learns to distinguish between the A-team (say, IIT’s), the B-team (the ‘state flagships’ and other important schools) and the C-team (let’s not mention names). </p>
<p>Three cheers for Osmania University :)</p>
<p>Most individuals doing the hiring. There’s always a few enlightened souls out there. ;)</p>
<p>People who hire for global companies for a living know the difference between the U’s in China, India, Ukraine, etc. Why would you think we’re such bumblers that we can figure out the difference between U Michigan and Michigan State, but not figure out the difference between Oxford and Leeds?</p>
<p>We’re not particularly enlightened- we just like to keep our jobs, which means knowing what we need to know (like any other professional.)</p>
<p>My company opened an office in Eastern Europe a few years ago in a country where we had very little on the ground experience. It took us all of a week to evaluate the different degree programs, figure out who our core schools would be, download the certification requirements for every degree offered (i.e. how much math would a geology or urban planning major have taken vs. a finance major) etc.</p>
<p>It’s not that hard. And to our delight, we found that English majors at the top U’s in that country have better writing skills than business majors from many programs in the US. Management was thrilled to learn that their Humanities grads are “shovel ready” so to speak…</p>
<p>For as long as I can remember, there has been a shortage of jobs for PHDs who want to focus in their fields of expertise. Only the very best (and I will throw luck, opportunity, connections into that 4 letter word) get living wage jobs in research. Those ideal positions are the brass rings, the Holy Grail. and to ensure a wide field of applicants and to keep those who are teaching these fields employed so that there is not even more of a dearth of such positions, many more are encouraged to study at these levels than there are careers or even jobs for these students when they complete the course of study.</p>
<p>For many who have education, degrees, in areas that just do not have enough jobs for all in that category, thinking a bit outside of the box is necessary to get jobs. I have told many, many young people who graduate with degrees from highly selective school, very bright young people who cannot find jobs that pay enough to make them self sufficient, to spend the next couple of years living with parents, working part time to make enough to complete or even just take some certificate level course of study at the local community college or sometime community programs that will put them in line for jobs that pay relatively well and are positions that are looking for trained applicants. Not the ideal job or what was in mind, but it can pay the bill and give job experience, the foot in the door and with the BA or BS as the extra, as other positions and opportunities arise, the chances of getting them increase. It also pays the bills and lets you live a self supporting life, though it may not be what you had planned in terms of work. There are many ways to get into careers, and it’s often far more comfy doing so with a decent paycheck.</p>
<p>So you might have a PHD in biology and had hopes of doing high level university or med school or other research directly related to your niche, but if the jobs are in running certain machines that test for this or that, and taking some courses can train in those techniques, you might want to take that detour and put that 4 year degree on ice for a bit.</p>
<p>blossom, I guess I’ve just heard different things from the experiences of all the classmates I’ve had. Also, the office you’re talking about is opening in Eastern Europe, so you’re targeting that region for new hires. Do you feel the average engineer coming out of Mumbai will fare applying for a position with John Deere in Iowa? What about with a small start-up or specialized tech company that isn’t a multinational conglomerate? How about a student from Chulalongkorn University (how many people would even know where that is)? Would they have a better chance after completing a degree at, say, USC or UIUC?</p>
<p>We opened our operation in Mumbai two decades ago. My company has been hiring students with degrees from universities in India forever (for positions in the US, Asia and Europe) so Mumbai is hardly a novelty.</p>
<p>We like to hire the top from each university we hire from… so no, an average engineer won’t fare well regardless of the school. I have never worked for John Deere and don’t have any colleagues who do so I can’t comment on their recruiting strategy.</p>
<p>I’m not sure what question you are asking though- is it to find out how an engineer trained in India will fare getting a job with a US based company’s operation in India, or how that person will fare getting a job with that same company in the US???</p>
<p>We have a strong preference for hiring people who already are legal to work in the country where they will be based. US immigration policies have become tough to navigate right now. Sponsoring students is no longer the cakewalk it was before 9/11. That doesn’t mean we are xenophobic or don’t like IIT. It means that it is very costly to jump through the legal and logistical hoops to hire an IIT grad for a job in Chicago or Boston unless they already have a Green card. We’re not xenophobic, but practicality wins out at some point.</p>
<p>So, basically, with your company they’d be able to get hired. Woo. That hardly speaks to every company, especially the majority that don’t have offices in every major city across the world. Also, not every company has the ability to hire the top talent out of each school they recruit at, so this is what many of the non-top students can wind up doing to increase their chances of getting a job stateside.</p>
<p>The question was mostly aimed at an Indian engineer getting a job in the US.</p>
<p>Another way to look at why foreign students want to come to the US to study is this. One of my good friends is on a fellowship from Thailand. When he graduates, he has a guaranteed professorship at the best engineering university in the country. Yet he’s trying to stretch out his graduate career as long as possible because he’s being paid more as a grad student here than once he becomes a professor there!</p>
<p>Another fairly lucrative career path for foreign students is to get a PhD here doing some sort of technical field at a very prestigious university, go back to their home country, and then become a politician. A diploma and advanced degree from a US university, according to them, carries a lot of weight. And, if they already belong to the right families (which they often do in order to get into the undergrad universities which then can feed into US grad schools) they have the connections to launch their career.</p>
<p>I was trying to respond to the people that say we need to stop admitting so many foreign students into our graduate programs. From what I’ve seen, many Americans aren’t interested in engineering graduate programs in the first place since they can get a job that pays well without investing six years being paid as much as if they hadn’t gone to college in the first place. Heck, my girlfriend probably went the best route. Went to work right after graduating, got her employer to pay for her MS, and is now making probably a similar number (if not more) than I will after finishing my PhD. The difference? She got paid more than three times as much as me for the years I’ve been in grad school!</p>
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<p>Hmmm . . . It seems John Deere has a huge, state-of-the-art John Deere Technology Center in Pune, India, that now does a lot of the engineering work for John Deere units worldwide. I’d imagine it’s primarily locally staffed, and with that kind of engineering presence in India, I’d also hazard a guess that John Deere would have little difficulty in identifying which, if any, Indian engineering school graduates it wanted to hire for work back in Iowa. But it may be doing more hiring for engineering work in India these days. It’s cheaper.</p>
<p>Racin, trying to be helpful by giving you facts. No need to be sarcastic. If you don’t like my advice or don’t think it’s relevant to your situation all you need to do is ignore it.</p>
<p>Woo.</p>
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I’m not sure about you, but I just read an article commenting on the shortage of positions in science. Tell me, is temporary retail or office work related to science?</p>
<p>Or do you have data showing plentiful but low-paying opportunities in science?</p>
<p>"Largely because of drug industry cuts, the unemployment rate among chemists now stands at its highest mark in 40 years, at 4.6 percent, according to the American Chemical Society, which has 164,000 members. For young chemists, the picture is much worse. Just 38 percent of new PhD chemists were employed in 2011, according to a recent ACS survey.</p>
<p>Although the overall unemployment rate of chemists and other scientists is much lower than the national average, those figures mask an open secret: Many scientists work outside their chosen field."</p>
<p>The key to success in India is not the hiring part; it’s the retaining part. We have little problem hiring people, and like everyone else, a devil of a problem retaining them. </p>
<p><glances at="" honorary="" indian="" citizenship="" :)="" bestowed="" upon="" me="" by="" my="" all-india="" team=""></glances></p>
<p>The other issue that we have faced in India is that few developers/engineers consider themselves successful unless they are managers; I know of exactly ONE engineer that stayed 5 years in the same position, and he eventually bailed also (and he was from the C-team). The attitude seems to be - again, personal experience from a dozen years - that the tenure is 2 to 2.5 years, then a second gig of equal duration as a ‘senior software engineer’, then off to ‘manager’ or ‘software lead’. With this turnover there is little opportunity to build experience in one company. This merry-go-round appears to be universal…</p>
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Mini, as a baby boomer, I am delighted whenever I hear of another student choosing nursing as an area of study. Our generation will need them.</p>
<p>However, I am highly skeptical of your claim that BSN students are required to take more math and science courses than most bio or chem majors. I just checked into the requirements of two schools in my area with very highly regarded BSN programs –- University of PA and Villanova U. In an admittedly superficial review of the requirements for a BS in Nursing compared to a major in either Biology or Chemistry, it looks to me like the bio and chem majors take significantly more science courses. And that is with my giving full comparable credit for anatomy classes taken by prospective nurses, while the bio major might be taking physics or chem to fill the additional science requirements. The only math I saw required for nursing students was statistics. </p>
<p>It is clear that you are thrilled that your wife became a nurse (a good thing all around, I am sure), but please don’t misrepresent what is involved. Neither the Federal Government nor most universities would consider nursing a STEM major. My son recently graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering –- truly a STEM major. Few nursing students, I would bet, would have been able to handle the math and science courses engineering majors take. (And I would concede that few engineers could handle the unique demands of a nursing career.) But these are truly apples and oranges in terms of areas of study.</p>
<p>One of my sisters was a nursing major and another an accounting major. They remarked to the rest of us (Chemical Engineering and Computer Science) that they barely got through calculus - they got passing Cs but they admitted that they had no idea as to what they were doing. I don’t think that nurses are big on math and physics though I will take a peek at the BC Nursing School requirements.</p>
<p>Here’s a link to a U.S. government list of STEM majors:
<a href=“http://www.ice.gov/doclib/sevis/pdf/stem-list.pdf[/url]”>http://www.ice.gov/doclib/sevis/pdf/stem-list.pdf</a></p>
<p>That’s a big list.</p>
<p>Archaeology and a bunch of psychologies are included. Darn, I should have told my father who would not pay for such ‘non-technical’ degrees :)</p>