<p>I think the best advice has been to stop having this discussion. You are still at home and the focus of your mother's apparently over-vigilant supervision. When you will have to make the decision on your major/minor, you will be away at school, with the benefit of months, if not years of more independent living. Not only will you have a different perspective on how much weight to give to your mother's opinion on this matter, you will have a lot more skill in how to deal with her-- keeping her happy while doing what you want to do.</p>
<p>another bit of info..College of Wooster is one of the schools DD2 applied to, and has a great anthro dept. Check out what kinds of jobs the anthro and sociology grads are doing now. names removed by me..</p>
<p>Senior analyst for the U.S. Government Accountability Office</p>
<p>A life scientist for the U.S. Environmental Protect Agency</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Outdoor Educator for Pacific Crest Outward Bound Naturalists at Large </p>
<ul>
<li>A civil engineer for the United States Air Force</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
<p>› - Owner of own pottery shop, Moorefield Pottery </p>
<ul>
<li><p>Professor of Anthropology at Roger Williams University </p>
<ul>
<li>An options trader for Apex Investments</li>
</ul></li>
<li><p>Health Education Specialist for the Center for Disease Control & Prevention </p></li>
</ul>
<p>those are some anthropology majors. The sociology grads have amazing jobs as well. lots of business ones.<br>
no need to hound mom now, but if you can't have some interesting classes during the BA, when will you? I know so many older adults who did what their parents wanted and are very bitter about their jobs.</p>
<p>Well, business degrees are more marketable, but you are already going to have that. Perhaps you could ask your mother (respectfully) the basis of her opinion that having a liberal arts minor in addition to the business degree would make you less marketable.</p>
<p>You'll be majoring in business, and intend to get your MBA.
I don't understand her problem with your choice of a MINOR. There's a good chance this could be the only opportunity you'll ever have to study these subjects -- so take advantage of it! I think she is being unreasonable.</p>
<p>Marian: 1) I don't think she'll take away my funding. Mostly because I am a type 1 diabetic and rely on her medical insurance for my medical supplies. So, if she cut my school funding, she would cut that funding, and i don't think she'd ever do that to me. </p>
<p>momray: They both have bachelors degrees. My mom's is Math from a small Ohio college, and my Dad's is Electrical Eng. from Purdue. I think they both are very successful, and I should take into consideration their backgrounds with careers, but again, very literal. </p>
<p>OldinJersey: Thanks for those links! The 2nd one looks good. </p>
<p>dg5052 & Fredmar: I would rather understand what to say about this issue now than worry about it later. Obviously I don't understand the workings of college yet, but I would rather show her my interest in minors like these than to have her think I am wasting my time in college when I bring it up later on. I won't press the issue too much, but I would just want to have a good footing. </p>
<p>Thanks for everyone's input. I'll just keep it cool for now, and keep mentioning my interest in Liberal Arts subjects. I really do want to major in business, but would like to have some other classes that keep me intellectually stimulated besides the business ones.</p>
<p>My cousin majored in Social Anthropology, got a PhD. in it, got a Fulbright Scholarship in it...and now has an international business consulting firm advising Fortune 500 companies on user needs. His most recent work was in Beijing, where he filmed teenage cellphone behavior, documented that teens were the main decision-makers in their households for which model to buy, evaluated which features were prized on the phones by interviewing them on their user behavior. The companies needed to know this to break into the cellphone market in China, so paid him plenty to get his advice.<br>
Even if you don't do "all that" with a minor in a human interest field, I would imagine you'd be a more interesting person to deal with at a business lunch if you could talk about something other than business. The minors you mention seem to have great relationship with the world of business, which rests on human decision-making. She's probably reading course catalogues and dwelling on the course descriptions about antrhopology re; cave dwellers. But much of it has contemporary applications as well.</p>
<p>^^ whoo, not a bad life.</p>
<p>Haha, no, Im not looking at cave dwellers, but I have been dwelling on course descriptions, you're right.
Im actually starting to read "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared Diamond. Im not sure which field the information covered in the book is geared for, but it's really interesting to learn how certain civilizations came to be, and how networks were formed, and their ultimate downfall in some cases. I haven't gotten that far, though. </p>
<p>It would be cool to find out what people thought about the classes taken while studying Anthro, Sociology, or Religions. Just to know.</p>
<p>If your mom is dead set against a minor other than a business minor, consider no minor at all. Possibly just do the business major plus whatever extra courses you want in whatever area, and forget about a minor that might not significantly help you anyway.</p>
<p>You'll probably get the extra advantages of not being tied in to taking minor requirements (instead taking only classes you really want) plus taking those courses possibly pass/no pass for considerably less stress (whereas a minor usually requires letter grading)</p>
<p>I read Guns, Germs, and Steel about a month ago, and I thought it was OK. Afterward I read the guy's other book, Collapse, and I liked it exponentially more - I read it twice even. So if you like guns, germs, and steel, I suggest Collapse also. My only complaint is that he focuses entirely too much attention on 1) New Guinea societies and 2) environmental influences, which if you look into his background, are precisely his areas of expertise.</p>
<p>Social science backgrounds are EXTREMELY helpful in business. So are communications and English specialties.</p>
<p>When I was in college 30 years ago I fell in love with anthropology and took a lot of classes, but I ultimately majored in marketing because what would I do with an anthro degree, right? Well, that was before the software industry even EXISTED and the web did not exist either.</p>
<p>There is a huge opportunity in e commerce for anthropologists and psychologists in the field of usability design and engineering. Understanding how humans interact with a web page is a vital piece of a successful web strategy for any business with a presence on the internet. Psychology now has a sub specialty called "human factors" that grew out of a better understanding of human/machine interaction.</p>
<p>Market research has reached out to anthropology and we routinely do ethnographic studies to better understand consumers. This was unheard of back in the day when focus groups were cutting edge.</p>
<p>We also hire a lot of English majors to write the content we publish on our web sites, to write the help files that support our site, and to write the reams and reams of internal documentation (this is a specialty called technical writing/editing) that are necessary to support our site. </p>
<p>If you want to combine human factor or ethnographic/cultural design knowlege into your work, look at E commerce and be sure you understand the basic building blocks of the online world--you don't have to be a developer, but the better your tech skills are as an entry level person the more opportunity you have at smaller places where you may need to wear several hats. </p>
<p>Your mother's thinking is at least a generation out of date--tell her I said so!</p>
<p>^^ haha ok, thanks for the suggestions. My parents actually sent me to a computer camp in 5th grade, and I learned a lot about programming, obviously a while ago, but I still remember a lot of it.</p>