I graduated with a business degree so he was booing me. LOL
Back in high school, I remember talking with a group of close friends about future plans our senior year. Consensus was if nothing else worked out, we could always go to law school. Of that friend group, I am the only attorney. LOL Few of them are doctors. And their kids are becoming doctors. None in our kid groups are thinking about law (including mine).
But most of the kids with pre med intentions in HS didn’t make it through sophomore year before switching majors.
My sense from friends who did follow through to med school is that it’s an extremely long endurance race!
Some probably because their grades were too low for getting into medical school (i.e. weeded out).
Pre-meds need higher GPAs to advance, but in a less challenging set of classes. Like college acceptance rates, the relative weed-out rates aren’t meaningful because the two pools are different.
I haven’t been a “developer” in a long time (I’m higher level now, architecture/big-picture/future-tech type stuff now) but I now and then have to write some code still… yesterday I did about 2k lines. Our “developers” do hundreds or more LoC of day and we have a few hundred developers (mostly offshore). I wouldn’t call someone that has only a few hundred lines of code over many months a “developer” or “programmer”.
Thanks for the perspective
Sorry, this doesn’t sound right. My brother has 3 kids who are doctors. They are bright. It’s much harder to get into medical school now. Two graduated with very high GPA, while not 4.00 but close, one from UCLA, you can’t say they are not bright. But most kids whose parents are engineers do not encourage their kids to become engineers. I have lots of engineers in my immediate family, and none became engineer. My daughter came very close to be an engineer, but she’s CS, computer science person.
My brother is a doctor after finishing an EE degree, he said medical school is much easier than engineering.
Whole family with undergrad engineering degrees on my H’s side and our D is following in that tradition. It’s been a great career choice for all of them (all ended up with MBAs and in upper level management).
(They all thought business school was a walk in the park after engineering undergrad).
It depends on the person, I switched from accounting to engineering, I remember to take heavy courses and still aced quite a lot of them, but I didn’t have a social life. Plus I didn’t want to fail a second time either.
They may not encourage them, but the kids may want to do it anyway because its something they’re familiar with. I think its quite common for kids to choose the same or similar career as their parents, regardless of the profession.
I agree. Its why I said the difficulty is in the eye of the beholder.
Well said!
Really? I have found the opposite with my classmates from a top engineering school up north. Kids encouraged to do engineering if there is aptitude.
Pre-meds also need lot more more than courses and grades (e.g. pre-med extracurriculars, MCAT score). Also, a prospective ME student who gets weeded out of Texas A&M due to having a GPA lower than 3.75 has the option of transferring to a less selective college to complete an ME degree, or choosing a less selective engineering major at Texas A&M. A weeded-out pre-med needs to find some other path. Of course, most engineering programs are less weed-out than Texas A&M or non-weed-out – a 3.0 GPA frosh year is fine in most engineering programs, but is a deep GPA hole to get out of for a pre-med.
Everyone have different strengths and weaknesses. Some people can spend all day with 30 small humans and others would hate every second. Some can sit and solve problems all day without talking to anyone. Some can get up in front of groups and talk and lead. Some people can pick up a tool and tear something down and repair it.
Some paths require a strong level of excellence not because it is hard but because the opportunities are fewer.
We have to remember what you might think is easy is hard for others, but it can be the other way around for sure.
One can take college classes towards a degree while working part time in most fields. For example, I work in engineering. Every engineering employer I have ever had will pay 100% of the cost for relevant classes taken while working, including when taken towards a grad degree. Many colleges have special programs to support employed engineers taking classes while working. When I was in a student in college, employees from as far away as HP Barcelona (Spain) sometimes called in with questions during lectures, which were apparently live broadcast at their company.
Working is also possible in many other fields. For example, my ex-GF used to work as paralegal while taking classes towards her law degree.
I’d expect differences more relate to some fields/jobs typically requiring a grad degree and others typically requiring bachelor’s or less, and differences in perceived benefit of higher level degrees in different fields.
I am an ex-engineer, and I have softly guided my son away from medicine and law. For medicine he didn’t need me to tell him to look elsewhere. But for law – it held a special fascination for him in 8th grade. He wanted to sit on the supreme court bench. This needed some extra effort on my part :-). I told him there is no leverage in those two professions. And yes – even management consulting falls into the same bucket in my framework. Anything for which you need to bill on an hourly basis or on a patient by patient basis is too much work for too little money is what I told the kids.
I guess. Neither H or I did what our parents did. Though my stepfather was a professor and I did teach middle and high school for several years. My mom was a stay at home mom, though she later became an admin assistant at her local university after my dad passed on. My father worked purchasing parts for the space program. My stepfather was an insurance salesman and then later went and got his PHD and became a botany professor and also did research. H’s dad was an Episcopal pastor and his mother was a housewife. I was a middle and high school teacher for years and now I work in administration at the school I taught at. I coordinate activities and admissions.
D works as an executive assistant and S is still in college and isn’t sure what he wants to do, but is leaning towards something in the sciences.
I have a cousin who is an engineer (he lives in Australia) and he three kids. His son became an engineer, but his daughters did not. I think one is a nurse and the other is a civil servant…
H has a friend from college who is an engineer and neither of his daughters are engineers. One works for a pharmaceutical company and the other is an elementary school teacher.
I do know two kids from my school who are engineers. Neither one of their parents were engineers. One of them was a first generation college student. None of D’s friends became engineers. S is still in college, so we’ll see what directions his friends go in. I know a lot of kids whose parents are lawyers or doctors.
Funny you should mention this. I just attended my D’s graduation from Michigan and the only school of about 10 +/- schools (CoE, Nursing, Kinesiology, LSA, etc.) that got booed, and VERY strongly at that, were the Ross Business school grads. 