How popular is philosophy as a major?

College Majors
101

<p>btw, here is the exact idiotic quote.</p>

<p>“Don’t talk anyone down for not taking the easy way out…which is majoring in something practical.” TheRippa</p>

<p>Right, majoring in something practical is the “easy way out”, talk to any sane person and they will say that majoring in something practical is the SMART THING TO DO.</p>

<p>What kind of intelligence does it take to major in a subject, even though it’s not practical for a job?</p>

<p>Ohhh but I have passsion! Passion and a bus pass will get you to the soup kitchen, enjoy!</p>

102

<p>well, at least that answer is better than

where you completely misunderstood what TheRippa meant.</p>

<p>But once again, your most recent post is one that has already been gone over many times in this thread, in addition it did not contribute to any knowledge that an outsider might be looking for, and finally it once again shows how close-minded you are.</p>

103

<p>BigBeast you seem to have no concept of logic in your toolbelt.</p>

<p>Let me present you with a situation:</p>

<p>There are 50 careers, each one earns EXACTLY $50,000/year. They all earn the same amount. Somebody (god knows why) decides to organize a list of their related salaries, and since they are all the same puts it in alphabetical order.</p>

<p>Number 30 on the list earns exactly the same amount as number 1, this is what your current argument breaks down to.</p>

<p>The discrepancy between a philosophy major and some of the hard sciences/maths was real, unlike my scenario, but it was insignificant.</p>

<p>You’re stating “Philosophy was #30!!! LOOOLOLDSODDJDJOOLLL!!!”</p>

<p>If you actually read the statistics (didn’t you claim you were good at this?) you’d figure out that being #30 on the list means nothing when it earns nearly as much as #10.</p>

<p>You sound like somebody who, when was younger wished to lead a life that would have been accessible to you via philosophy, but for some reason went the other way. Now to cope with your resentment/hatred of your current life you try to put others down who are following the path you (deep down inside) wished you would have taken, to reassure yourself on a superficial level that you’ve made the correct decision.</p>

<p>You’re clearly unhappy with your life, and you want to force your children to follow a major purely for materialistic purposes-not for love, enjoyment, passion, interest, etc.</p>

<p>I suggest you read some Nietzsche, and Tuesday’s With Morrie, they would enhance your life greatly imo.</p>

<p>There is more to life than the system, than cash, cars, houses, and the like. I think you need to smoke a joint, relax, listen to some Bob Marley-and start ENJOYING your life a little bit. I suspect you may have a drinking problem as well, your kind typically does.</p>

<p>This is coming from a Maths major who is considering picking up a double major in philosophy.</p>

<p>Philosophy might not translate DIRECTLY into a typical job, but it develops person, enhances life, and strongly develops many skills which give people great potential.</p>

<p>I’m tired.</p>

<p>:)</p>

104

<p>oh boy, this was fun to skim over. Got a few good laughs. For someone who claimx to have such a full and rewarding life, bigeast spends a lot of time arguing how pointless a philosophy is.</p>

105

<p><em>Sigh</em> - I think the problem here is people both vastly underestimate how tough it is to support oneself and a family properly and vastly underestimate how what one majors is often unrelated except in a vague sense to what one ends up doing.</p>

<p>Also, you can major in philosophy while doing other things. Philosophy and math go well together. Philosophy and CS can too. </p>

<p>I think too much emphasis is being placed on majors, as opposed to skills. You can major in CS and come out knowing nothing but theory, and come out not being very much more than a math major in disguise.</p>

106

<p>Laughable? I wish I would have known my Philosophy degree was laughable. But since my wife has that stupid Classics degree I don’t feel so bad. We both enjoyed our degrees so consider them useful. Turns out you can actually get jobs with Liberal Art Degrees. IT Manager for large firm and a National Sales Manager for a pharmaceutical company. Learning to think turns out to be very valuable. Companies pay for it.</p>

107

<p>So are you implying that people in majors such as engineering, math and science don’t learn how to think? That would be rather arrogant, considering those curriculums are much more challenging and intensive.</p>

<p>I’d be interested in knowing your age and when you and your wife graduated school. If your wife is a national sale manager for a pharm company, I’m assuming you aren’t youngsters. </p>

<p>Majors like Philosophy and Classics provided skills needed in the past, but not in the present economy. As an IT manager, would you recommend students who want to work in IT to pursue a degree in Philosophy or Computer Science/Information Technology?</p>

<p>If you were a 18 year old kid, entering college to prepare themselves to gain employment in this economy, would you recommend Classics, or Philosophy? </p>

<p>How many Philosophy majors have you recently hired to work in the IT department you manage?</p>

<p>Decades ago, a college degree opened up the right doors, regardless of the major. Employers just wanted college grads because it was assumed if you could finish college you were a thinker, writer, ect. Plus, it mainly separated you from the pack, because back then, most people didn’t attend college. Not like that anymore, a college degree doesn’t travel very far. People can go online and get them for cheap in two years. </p>

<p>Simplying having a degree doesn’t impress anyone as it use too. Now, you need practical skills to go along with a degree. Skills like engineering, finance, programming, accounting, or a specialized knowledge such as chemistry.</p>

<p>Sure, the ability to read and write is important, but a person can acquire those skills rather easily and the level of comprehension needed to work in our tech-driven society is nowhere near as high as it was decades ago. Most business communication is memos, emails, and reports that are written either from template or partial template. It doesn’t take much to acquire that level of proficiency, and they can also be strengthened with actual work experience.</p>

<p>We are in a very down economy. Unemployment is teetering 9%, companies aren’t expanding, jobs are being outsourced, and employers have their pick of experienced applicants out of work willing to take lower-level positions. It’s not a good time to be a graduating college senior. If I’m a fresh grad, I don’t want to walk into a job interview armed with the knowledge of tribal cultures, Socrates, Hemingway, or Shakespeare. I want to tell a potential employer that I can operate database systems, apply program languages, understand GIS technology, perform statistical analysis, ect.</p>

108

<p>I think at some point societies need thinkers and visionaries, the larger that society and its corresponding economy, the greater the demand. A structural engineer can design a great bridge but for all his indispensable skills he’s probably not the person you want deciding where and why said bridge should be built. That’s how people like economists, political theorists, sociologists etc still manage to have jobs despite their skill sets having limited ‘practical’ applications. Philosophers, writers and theorists are the ones dealing in big pictures, suggesting the possible alternatives and solutions to people working on the increasingly smaller and fragmented parts of ‘the picture’ so to speak. Were it not for philosophers and thinkers like Francis Bacon, Spinoza and Locke the western world might still be in the grasp of one superstitious religious organization or another. It would be difficult if not at times impossible to imagine the development of modern scientific thought and its subsequent technologies without them. </p>

<p>Certainly not everyone who studies humanities is going to end up being an influential author, theorist, philosopher etc. That however is not the goal of their education at any rate. It is to open their fields of intellectual vision so to speak and enable them to view the big picture. One could easily argue that the american financial crisis was partially caused by financial firms having a very narrow field of vision. People whose vision, not so unlike one of our fellow posters’, was only capable of discerning the need for individual financial security. </p>

<p>I find myself increasingly disgusted with the peculiarly base and peculiarly american notion that an individual’s value to society is somehow primarily determined by ones credentials and vocational capacity. Software engineers do not necessarily make better or worse parents than literature professors nor are they necessarily more useful in improving anyone’s quality of living other than their own. They are even perhaps less able than humanities folks to even conceive of what being a useful or good individual might mean.</p>

<p>It’s also been my experience, albeit limited, that an individual’s employment prospects depend as much as anything else on their personal qualities. I have come across people with degrees in things like comparative literature having much better jobs and living standards than people with degrees in engineering.</p>

109

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<p>Um, your entire post was arrogant. Post #106 doesn’t even imply what you said. You’re picking out of thin air. </p>

<p>WGM states:

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<p>This.

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<p>Your reading comprehensive skills need work.</p>

110

<p>Beb, for someone who seems to have all the facts on the job market, you misinterpreted WGM’s post entirely. If you’re in the workforce, it might be a good idea to pick up the English Lit. and Comprehension for Dummies. Seriously. </p>

<p>Here’s the answer:
Reading WGM’ post, it would seem that he is indirectly saying that he and his wife were able to find jobs even with LAS degrees. Better yet, they were able to advance in technical fields due their ability to think and adapt.</p>

111

<p>No, I think I comprehended his snarky post pretty well actually.</p>

<p>I also posted a few important question such as when the degree were obtained, which makes a major difference. </p>

<p>As I mentioned, a LA degree today isn’t the same as a LA degree 20 years ago because the demands of the workforce have changed. I’m sorry if you don’t like that, but it is what it is…</p>

<p>The elitist attitude of “We know how to think” implies those with practical skill-based degrees do not, which is arrogant.</p>

112

<p>You’re still not getting it. His post implies no such thing.</p>

<p>Slightly unrelated, but when I read a post by BigEastBeast I imagine him drinking beers and watching the big game every weekend and complaining about immigrants stealing our jobs. Maybe that’s not fair but the total incomprehension of why things like philosophy are actually really important makes me think he’s a USA Today kind of guy if you know what I mean.</p>

113

<p>My family has employed immigrants for nearly two decades, most likely since before you were born.</p>

<p>Long before illegal immigration was a hip and trendy issue for college students like yourself to politicize, I was working side by side with them on our farm suffering through 10 hour days in freezing temperatures, rain and mudd. </p>

<p>Beer was drank on the weekends, many times with them while having a barbecue or watching a game (GASP!). </p>

<p>Beer was also drank at their weddings, which I have been invited to and attended several, as well as many Quincea</p>

114

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<p>I don’t really see him complaining about immigrants. The permanent inebriation is definitely there though.</p>

115

<p>I wonder… are LastThreeYears and BIGeastBEAST one in the same? Perhaps it is one person with dual personalities who really hates his past choices? Or could it be that it is someone who enjoys manipulating and toying with people’s hopes and dreams so much that he has created two different characters with which to do it? Oh such tempting thoughts…</p>

<p>On topic though, I find philosophy to be a highly engaging subject and I would love to major in it, but my issue is that there are too many interests going on in my head for me to settle on just one! I want to study, extensively, the following in no specific order:</p>

<ul>
<li>Physics</li>
<li>The biological sciences specifically microbiology, botany, and genetics</li>
<li>Chemistry, not just to learn how to extract certain parts of over the counter drugs <em>wink</em> <em>wink</em></li>
<li>Meteorology</li>
<li>Astrophysics</li>
<li>Aerospace Engineering</li>
<li>Mathematics</li>
<li>Philosophy</li>
<li>History</li>
<li>Economics </li>
<li>3D Animation</li>
<li>Anthropology</li>
</ul>

<p>Yep… I am scheduling a meeting with both a clinical psychologist and a psychiatrist in order to determine if my lack of ability to choose just one stems from some sort of mental defect. All I know is that those subjects turn me on in ways no woman could! I wish I could study them all and earn multiple PhDs in every single one. I will say something about the interest that strings them all together, at least I think it does, knowledge… I want to acquire vast amounts of knowledge. </p>

<p>I think the main thing is that I want to study heavy mathematics and science, but also everything else! I will say that i absolutely abhor writing assignments that last more than a few pages! I cannot stand it anymore! I used to absolutely love writing back in high school and I completely hated math and science… what a flip huh? HAHA… Don’t ask, because I don’t know what happened. It’s like some wired crossed in my brain or something!</p>

<p>Here’s the thing though… I want to go to graduate school no matter what I choose to major in. I want to earn a PhD, I want to obtain a decent amount of work experience in said field, and I want to teach. Above all my ultimate goal is to teach, but I don’t want to be one of those professors who never had an ounce of real work experience… I don’t want to go straight from PhD to teaching! I want to at least work in the field post-doc for about 5-10 years before teaching.</p>

<p>I think that mostly I prefer actually learning the sciences and mathematics. I like reading about the rest! If I were asked to narrow it down I would pick meterology, aerospace engineering, astrophysics, physics, and mathematics… in order of most interested to least. I also want to learn to fly and own a small passenger aircraft… be it helicopter or plane! I think it would be great to fly my family to our vacation spots! Also it would be nice to know how to fly a commercial jet just in case the pilot and copilot happen to fall into a state of unconsciousness or die…</p>

<p>Cheers!!!</p>

116

<h2>I don’t really see him complaining about immigrants. The permanent inebriation is definitely there though. ~ ThisCouldBeHeaven</h2>

<p>Wheeewwwww…tell me about it brother.</p>

<p>I’ve been on a two week bender for about the last…well, I don’t know how long it’s been.</p>

<p>I’ve been bouncing back and forth from the Motel 6 and the Red Roof Inn. The Motel 6 is nice because it has HBO and Cinemax but the Red Roof Inn is much closer to the liquor store. I’m three days behind on my payments, hopefully the manager will accept sexual favors - again. He’s pretty cool but the hair pulling and name-calling is a bit extreme, I mean what does he think this is, a Marriot? </p>

<p>One thing that sucks is that I have no cups or glasses so instead I’m doing all my Bankers Club vodka shots out of a bowling ball I found in the back alley. I’d drink straight from the bottle but when I woke up this morning from my Crystal Meth binge the bottle was jammed straight up my…um, nevermind.</p>

<p>On a completely unrelated note, if anyone sees my pet gerbil let me know.</p>

<p>Maybe later I will ask the midget down the hall to blow some shotguns in my face and bump a few lines with Veronica, a very friendly dancer I met who works down the street at a strip club called the Dawg Box.</p>

<p>Anyways, I gotta get going. The manager is coming up the stairs and damn…he’s got a ball gag with him tonight. I guess I’m just gonna have to man this thing out, huh?</p>

117

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<p>Whatever makes you sleep at night.</p>

118

<p>What is the point of this post?</p>

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<p>If your “family” was the employer, why were working with them? Also, mud only has one d.

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<p>I’m assuming it didn’t rain on weekends, only durring the work-day?

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<p>Beer was also drank at their weddings, which I have been invited to and attended several, as well as many Quincea</p>

119

<p>It is my opinion that Philosophy is a good preparation for law school.</p>

120

<p>This is all silly. The point of getting a PhD in biology, physics, mathematics, history or philosophy and things of that nature are academic research. It’s got nothing to do with a job. Liberal arts degrees aren’t intended for jobs. That’s why you go to professional or trade schools. If you’d like to be marketable get a PhD/MD or PhD/JD or just get a PhD and then go onto professional school. The point of academic degrees is to be a scholar and be active in academia, publishing work. Sure you can just get it for the lulz as well, but that seems like a huge waste of money.</p>