@maya54, you and @bennty may be over-reacting a tad. It is probably worth noting the second part of my statement:
So, clearly I did not argue that learning how to prove theorems is the only way to learn to argue logically (gee, there might be some counterexamples of that assertion like great Greek philosophers). As noted above, I’ve worked with folks who are incredibly good at logical argument without training in proving theorems. However, I’ve also encountered folks, including lawyers (I have worked with partners in many of the major firms in the US and UK and elsewhere over the years) and social science professors and even a philosophy professor who are weaker at logical argument. They don’t distinguish well between assumptions or definitions and logic statements. What I was saying is that if one has that training, one is highly unlikely to have difficulty understanding and structuring logical arguments, not that one could not do it well without that training.
The fact that it is a floor does not imply that it is necessary or that it would be any kind of threshold for pursuing a particular career. It also does not rule out the possibility that training in theorems/proofs would not also improve people who are already very good.
@ububumble and @ucbalumnus, now that you mention it, I did take a course in logic in the philosophy department as a freshman or sophomore and it was just trivial for someone with a math background. What I didn’t take, and, in hindsight, would have liked to have taken, was a course in rhetoric. Not sure that was on offer.
Being able to think logically is often far from sufficient for someone to prove or deduce something in math or theoretical physics. S/he needs to be see connections that are beyond logic. That ability may also be useful in other fields. One of the most successful quantitative hedge funds hire a lot of them, provided they do not actually know much about finance.
Absolutely agree. Learning the think logically is the easy part. The hard parts they don’t actually teach directly, but instead by example and by osmosis.
I could be mistaken @1NJParent, but if I’m right, the hedge fund you are talking about was the one I mentioned earlier that offered to buy the hedge fund I’d started.
Don’t regret going to my small, not particularly highly ranked liberal arts university one bit. Don’t know if my engineering degree helped me at all in my occupation (Air Force and airline pilot), wouldn’t have mattered if I went to MIT, Harvard, military academy, whatever. Just retired with zero incidents, accidents, check ride busts, or even an email questioning a decision I made. So yeah, school graduated from didn’t matter whatsoever.
Oh, I didn’t intend to suggest that. What I’m saying is that there’s been a huge push to STEM over the last decade or so, particularly for bright kids, while simultaneously universities (esp. public) have pulled money from arts and humanities to build out the much more expensive STEM. STEM curricula, however, tend to be pretty rigid and wall-to-wall, and in the US don’t admit much room for non-STEM, especially if it’s not STEM-flavored or incorporated into some ill-conceived STEAM sort of thing. The result’s that the kids emerge narrowly-educated, disinclined to explore (edicts against time-wasting, aimless wandering, etc.), and with serious trouble reading and communicating in any form. It’s become a little disastrous in the current social environment, too, as STEM people who haven’t been high school students recently find that their language and mental furniture is decades behind the current unavoidable DEI conversations – just trying to understand what they’re being yelled at about is difficult.
As professionals, those people notice that they need help and go looking, only it’s not so easy to find the help when you’ve already pushed anyone with half an interest in STEM all the way in. Or when there’s real mistrust of the utility of anyone who wasn’t formally trained in STEM. So – up go the wages.
I cannot say I ever expected to be paid for explaining to national-lab types and engineers how to ensure their work is fit for poor people, but here we are.
I think that’s why my husband wants to retire, since our structural engineering company has never been sued in our 22 years of business! We are told we need to keep paying for liability insurance after we quit in case an old project has any issues.
You can buy “tail” coverage, I believe it to cover for that. Speak to a good insurance agent about what your coverage options are if you are thinking of retiring so you don’t have an expensive surprise.
I think we need more bright kids in STEM, rather than in politics or on Wall Street. We don’t have enough of them at the moment and the fact that Silicon Valley is full of first generation immigrants and their kids tells you something.
The issue of breadth vs depth in one’s education is an interesting one. It is true that many in STEM regard other subjects as unimportant or even irrelevant. That’s unfortunate, but you have to view it from their perspectives too. To be really good at certain STEM subjects, they need to be dedicated and devote enormous amount of their time and energy, however bright they are. Arguments in non-STEM subjects often appear to them as not rigorous, wishy-washy, and even frivolous in some cases. They’d rather not spend their time and energy on what they regard as unfruitful discussions we frequently have these days.
The most popular non-STEM majors at some of the most elite schools are political science and economics. These colleges apparently thought they were bright.
What an interesting topic… It is hard to conclude any path, everyone is different and that’s the fun part.
My hubby went to a school with much lower ranking than mine (mine is all time top20 since old days). The reality is he makes twice my income since graduation if $ is an index of success? But I would not make different choice even if I knew it I love my school and it is where I started my career. So far so good.
My best friend went to a school with better ranking than mine. She often said that she could have spared herself with more time and fun during HS instead of working her butt out to achieve IVY. She is a HS teacher now. Seeing her students struggling and fighting so much for the elite colleges, she has a lot of thought on this topic.
I finished undergrad about 10 years ago, so hoping my example will be relevant to current students. Apologies in advance if this comes across as braggy, that’s not my intention!
I was a first-generation college student with no parental financial help in the cards, so I focused on getting an affordable education. In undergrad I wound up transferring a couple times but ultimately received my undergrad degree from a decidedly NOT prestigious SUNY college, graduating only $6K in debt. Not really having a strong vision for my future career, I switched majors a few times and ended up with a degree in psychology plus a math minor.
Knowing I’d need further education to get a decent-paying job with my degree, I applied to PhD programs (scholarship + stipend) and earned my PhD in a computationally-intensive field of experimental psychology from a somewhat more prestigious SUNY school that was at best middling in my graduate field. Then I did a 2 year post-doc (initially wanted to be a professor) before I decided to make a major career change by leveraging the research/statistics/programming skills I developed in grad school to become a data scientist.
A few years later, I’m now head of my team and probably the highest earner of my generation in my family (low six figures). I haven’t really felt like my college choices have held me back. Getting into grad school was mostly a function of my grades/GRE scores, and getting into my current career was a function of having the right skills at the right time (a huge market for data scientists was emerging and data science degree programs were only just graduating their first cohorts). If I’d known that data science would exist when I graduated high school, I’m sure I could have made more optimal choices, but I’m ultimately really happy with where I wound up. Keeping my debt low gave me flexibility to take a risk on a career change, and I think I’ve gotten to where I am being open-minded, working hard, and looking out for whatever the next best opportunity was for me at each stage of my life even if it wasn’t what I had initially planned on.
Science and math majors are typically not wall-to-wall, in that they consume about the same percentage of course work for a BA/BS degree as do humanities and social science majors. Engineering majors need more – ABET accreditation requires at least 62.5% in technical course work, but also requires humanities and social studies general education, which keeps the technical course work from being wall-to-wall.
Seems like an overly broad stereotype of the kind that can be thrown right back at humanities majors.
If DEI means diversity, equity, and inclusion, why do you think that any of this is specific to STEM people?
ucb, not trying to put you on the defensive, here, but:
No, I do not see that humanities and soc sci majors have the same percentage of their curriculum mapped out before they walk in the door. It’s a significant problem in trying to design interdisciplinary courses, because the humanities and soc sci people have far more freedom in how they arrange their courses and in what they can choose to satisfy degree requirements than the STEM folks do. They’re also generally more open to staying for an extra semester. The tendency to rigid course progressions in STEM is also a barrier, as students don’t want to miss a course because it can set them back a whole year. The STEM kids also understand that if they’re maxed, sacrifice the non-STEM coursework, take the grade hit there because it “won’t matter”. You get disciplines where the students have few choices in the non-STEM courses they can take until they hit junior, sometimes senior year.
Humanities and soc sci allow for (and explicitly encourage) wandering. Advisees are also unlikely to be told they’re wasting time if they’re following interests that don’t feed directly and obviously into their majors. I cannot say the same is true in STEM, though I wish I could. While there are (many) terrible readers and writers across all majors, I find more capable writers among humanities students than among any others. They just do more of it; they also read more. (Read, not cherrypick their way through papers they don’t actually read.)
The backwardsness in DEI in STEM happens because of (1) and (2). The humanities and social sciences are where that language and conceptual furniture has been developed over the last 30 years, meaning that those students have been marinating in it from go. It’s almost nowhere to be seen in STEM, and if the students are discouraged from looping through soc sci/humanities except to tick off gen ed requirements, they don’t spend the time necessary with the ideas to be able to engage in the conversation.
I have these conversations almost daily with STEM people suddenly confronted with DEI requirements, some of whom are defensive about it, some of whom are not. Defensive or not, the questions they ask are when they do engage are, by the lights of humanities and soc sci, generally 1990s-vintage. I remember STEM worlds back then, and the sense was that all that stuff had nothing to do with STEM, waste of time, basketweaving, etc. Now it’s living in their departments and there’s a whole lot of catching up to do, and less and less choice about it. The exception’s the grad students and postdocs who become fulltime activists and are almost never white straight men.
Being able to voluntarily stay extra semesters seems to be more of a function of financial capability than anything else (regardless of major).
Conversation… or what was actually happening? When I went to college, it did seem that the percentage of non-White students was higher in the engineering division than elsewhere.
Of course, H/SS has not universally been in favor of DEI. There is plenty of backlash every time “non-traditional” literary authors, interpretations of history (or even what should be uncontroversial interpretations, like the causes of the Civil War as written by the seceding states’ governments), etc. are included or proposed to be included in courses and curricula.
