STEM students are trained to find solutions to problems that can be either rigorously proven or at least demonstrated convincingly. Many of them are less interested in assertions that are drawn from flimsy cherry-picked data, or based on subjective and unverifiable premises.
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STEM folks design & build bridges & airplanes. Love that they are required to have an intense, narrow focus. Thank you STEM people !
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My engineering kid has had plenty of room for non stem courses. She’s taken classes in art history, music and culture, philosophy, communication, business, etc….she has room for 1-2 electives/semester.
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My engineering kid is also a sharpshooter and knows how to drive a tank. Sigh.
The “extra” room in his schedule was filled with combatives, self-defense (you don’t want to know the details here), survival swimming, cyber competitions, rapelling from helicopters, ethics of war, policy and strategy, military art, (much) history and, oh, how to go without a shower indefinitely.
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My comp sci kid took 1 semester of world history, 1 semester of writing (that was still geared to his major) everything else was comp sci, physics or math. His choice BTW there was plenty of room in his schedule to branch out. He’s actually a decent writer and reads a lot.
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My electives during engineering school were two semesters of astronomy and one semester each of tennis and racquetball. That was it!
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Engineering students can sometimes be limited by what their college offers, but for many students the opportunities are wide open. Want to explore? Look for colleges where you do not need to declare a major and where you can easily change majors at a drop of the hat. Want to dive into engineering and add in some non-engineering classes? Look for colleges that offer a wide range of classes and encourage students to try something new. Look for colleges where it’s easy (and encouraged) to audit classes simply to learn something new. Want to focus only on engineering without those pesky fuzzy classes? You can do that too. Some students feel they have the time (and money) to take extra classes outside of engineering while others feel the need to finish asap to start making amazing money. That’s OK too.
Our S took lots of engineering classes and lots of liberal arts classes and enjoyed them all. He did mention at one time that “Engineering majors take more liberal arts classes than liberal arts majors take engineering classes” .
Coming from an experimental psych background, my undergraduate training was definitely more social sciences/humanities whereas I would consider my graduate education in stats/experimental design to be STEM. I’ve interviewed a lot of candidates for data science/analytics roles from all kinds of backgrounds, and I find that candidates with exclusively STEM training often exhibit rigidity in thinking/problem solving that doesn’t make for great analytics professionals in practice. The communication skills are often lacking as well, but definitely some do pick this up as a soft skill (I often see great communication in candidates with post-graduate education that included teaching experience).
This is often comes up when we’re faced with a business question that we don’t have great quality data to answer, or where the standard approaches in the data science/analytics toolbox don’t apply. Candidates with a strictly STEM background will often either try to force the problem into one of the approaches they’re comfortable with (when you have a hammer…) or they’ll throw their hands up and treat the problem as unsolvable. In reality, in most cases we can approximate something reasonable (in Excel, even!) that is leagues better than doing nothing or something overly complicated.
We’re also often in the position of having to convince C-level executives to invest in avenues that we have determined are opportunities for the company, and we can’t do that if we can’t get someone with a business degree to understand what it is we’re doing. There’s nothing so complicated that the broad strokes can’t be communicated, but again when I interview a lot of candidates their explanations are masked in so much technical jargon that I have trouble understanding what they’re trying to convey.
I’m sure there are lots of cases where following some sort of SOP for solving a problem in engineering is warranted/desirable/necessary, but it’s definitely not in all cases. In my experience I have better luck with candidates who have some combination of STEM post-graduate/professional training and social sciences/humanities undergraduate training and/or real-world experience in a business environment.
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ucb, you’re fighting a rear-guard action here.
The humanities/soc-sci people are notably less practical in nature than the STEM people are, and aren’t particularly bound up in what they can afford if someone will give/lend them the money. They’re also more prone to wandering away from university altogether for a semester or two to go do something of interest, coming back, and finding they have to do an extra semester or so. They do it.
As for DEI in STEM, there’s a world of difference between having nonwhite/nonmale/noncishet students in a department and having an inclusive department. The lack of understanding of these things is a significant part of the problem in having the conversations. And again, it’s down to lack of practice in STEM in having these conversations – which itself comes from long-held attitudes in STEM saying that this is someone else’s concern, and generally not as important as STEM anyway.
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Amen.
You have clearly never met some of the humanities/soc sci people I have.
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I’m talking generally, after watching thousands filter through.
@bennty, my information is old and episodic. But, observing my classmates and observing my son’s classmates at a top-ranked LAC, I would have guessed that humanities majors have a smaller percentage of math and real science courses (e.g., not “Rocks for Jocks” as the geology course for non-science majors was called) in their transcripts than science majors have of humanities courses. In my experience and my son’s, folks who majored in math or science also took philosophy or linguistics or political science but many of the folks who majored in English Literature or French rarely took physics or chemistry (and took as few science/math courses as they could). Was that never true (beyond my anecdotal experience)? If it was true in the past, has it changed?
I saw the something similar when I was a business school professor teaching a quantitative course. There was a cluster of folks who were always in danger of failing because they were humanities majors with no mathematical skill (and the course basically required HS algebra although it was more conceptually demanding). There were also a cluster of folks I didn’t see who had trouble with the softer skill courses who were not strong on psychological insight and interpersonal skills (though this was not about writing skills). This was probably a subset of the more technically trained kids.
Two caveats. Engineering may be different as the course requirements can be pretty heavy. I have not addressed social science majors as I think there has been a sea change there. Although there was always a track for econ majors that was math-heavy, psych majors in the old days had to take one formulaic quantitative methods course, which was just rote and required little understanding. Now social science has a lot more quantitative and some will have gone well beyond the formulaic.
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My engineering kid enjoyed his course in sailing as well as his geology courses. Don’t recall him taking courses that involved writing but he does up with current events and politics. He used to read voraciously, not sure about any more.
Still more or less the case, though you’ll see a bit more now (often disguised as “sustainability”). The point, though, was that you see fewer humanities majors overall now, because there’s such a hard push to STEM through K-12 and because so many universities have pulled money from humanities, pushed it to STEM. So as an overall workforce thing it’s a problem. Too much STEM, not enough history, philosophy, literature, arts, etc. (eta: not a problem for me; I clean up. But a problem overall.)
(also eta: stats nerds, this is not an invitation to go to BLS and look for the number of people in each field expected to be needed. You have to know more, which is something that the humanities people are good at. The STEM-field demand has buried in it a demand for people who know how to read, write, think about more than one thing, and not just STEM things. When they don’t have those people, for reasons hyperJulie explained, they go hunting for humanities/soc-sci people to help them out. Used to be plenty of those people who also had some passing interest in STEM and could do the work. Now the capable passing-interest people have already been recruited hard to STEM and been trained all wrong for the work actually needed.)
Oh, and yes, the soc sci that can be quantitative-sci’d has been, often to its detriment. So econ, psych, some anthro, anything involving GIS and flashy big-data analytical methods. But other soc sci is still very much soc and heavy on narrative.
STEM, perhaps even more so than humanities or social sciences, covers a broader spectrum of subjects. They require different types and levels of skills. Lumping them together and/or STEM graduates together is highly flawed. You don’t hire an engineer to do a job that’d better be left to a mathematician, for example. Even within the same STEM subject, the levels of skills varies so much that there’s no equivalent degrees of variation in humanities or social sciences. The more difficult the subject is, the greater the variation in skills.
As an example, quantitative hedge funds hire many STEM graduates these days, but they don’t hire any STEM graduates. They only hire computer scientists, physicists and mathematicians (and most often with their PhDs). No engineer needs to apply. People without sufficient quantitative skills often regard people who are doing somewhat quantitative jobs as “quants”. They aren’t.
I agree with you that there’re sometimes communication problems between those on the technical side and those on the business side. These problems are the result of technical people lacking understanding of the business and business people lacking understanding of the technologies. The fault lies on both sides. Large businesses these days all have Chief Information Office, Chief Data Officer, Chief Technology Officer, etc. to coordinate and act as an intermediary.
This is not to say that humanities and social sciences shouldn’t be part of STEM students’ education. On the contrary, the STEM-miest colleges (MIT/Caltech/HMC) all have significant requirements in humanities/social sciences that often exceed similar requirements for non-STEM majors at many other colleges. They obviously consider humanities/social sciences should be part of everyone’s college education. Another point I’ll make is that a great STEM student is often equally adept at humanities and social sciences, even though s/he may not want to devote as much time and energy to them as a great non-STEM student. The same often cannot be said in reverse. Take Caltech as an example. Its students have the highest, or among the highest, verval scores of all colleges, so they’re equally capable in non-STEM subjects.
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1NJParent, it sounds like hyperJulie knows about variation across STEM. I will say that she’s still correct. These are deficiencies found across STEM – and again, they’re not helped at all by the rigidity of the curricula. The British and Irish scientists of the late 19th and early 20th c. were some of the finest science communicators there have been, and the reasons aren’t mysterious: their schools and universities of the day were ruled by humanists who took poetry and prose very seriously, and sciences less seriously, and engineering less seriously still. If you were a young scientist, you could not get through school without massive doses of history and literature, including plays, and rhetoric, and you wrote and wrote and wrote. You were also expected to correspond, and to formulate your ideas cogently, in paragraphs and the occasional witticism, and on your feet. Now, of course, you can get through an engineering BS without producing so much as a lab report, and without reading very much of anything that doesn’t arrive on a powerpoint slide.
The mathematicians (speaking grossly generally) tend to have different communication problems, because they don’t share STE’s presumptions about what knowledge is, but if anything, as a group, I would say they’re worse at communicating their ideas to non-mathematicians who don’t want to be math students, and are even less interested in communication with outsiders than the others are.
The successful/high-level business people working in STEM industries are, in my experience, exceptional communicators, and remarkably patient with their scientists, engineers, and tech people, often helping them to communicate and investing a lot of time in teaching them to communicate and work with each other and with non-STEM people. Often they’re STEM-trained people who also happen to be fine communicators – which is why they don’t do STEM anymore. They’re far more valuable as translators, managers, and directors.
If you go looking for clumps of good communicators within STEM, I’d say you usually find a bunch in cell bio and population studies, but you also get many more abysmal alphabet-soup communicators there, too. People for whom text is merely a matrix for figures, which themselves don’t communicate any too well. Mol bio really has both poles.
Chemists, seldom, and when they’re good they tend to be old-fashioned, a little stiff. Physicists… sometimes, but weirdly. Engineers think their explanations are a lot snappier than they are to non-engineers, IME, mostly because other people don’t share their singlemindedness about engineering concerns.
As for great all-rounders – I’ve met very very few. Like one-hand few. It’s a difficult thing, because while I might meet, say, a Victorianist who’s got a knack for and interest in a biological science, they won’t claim to be a really sound biologist, or a biologist at all; on the other hand I do meet quite a lot of STEM people who really don’t get [humanities or arts field], just don’t have any sense of how it swings, but have devoted a lot of attention in a very STEM way, and are sure that this makes them good at it, that they’ve mastered what matters, and that they could make the switch in a heartbeat. Bit of doctor problem in there. They just don’t notice (and no one will bother trying to persuade them) that they don’t really have it.
The closest tie I’ve seen: doctors and jazz musicians. No idea why. My guess is they were actually talented young jazz musicians whose families insisted they have real careers and stop wasting their brains, and that they’re good doctors, not great, not quite the right temperament. For all the math-music talk, and the existence of pianists trained as mathematicians, though, I’ve met no mathematicians who are also truly powerful pianists.
The dismaying thing in reading comments like this, though – and I read a lot of them – is how apparent it is that the writers are not acquainted with the arts and humanities. High SAT verbal scores…that’s not the measure of ability or even an indicator of serious promise in those fields.
Now that goes beyond mere exaggeration, whether you are referring to either technical course work or the general education that is required to be part of any ABET accredited engineering bachelor’s degree program.
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Seen it with my own eyes.