<p>So, I'm a declared linguistics major about to enter my sophomore year. I love linguistics and if college were all about learning what you love, I'd definitely stick with it.</p>
<p>But I'm worried about the more practical aspects such as being able to find a job after college. I'm going to be in some serious debt after I graduate and I don't want to be unemployed and unable to pay it back. I know the cliche is "do what you love and the money will follow", but I'm also well aware that having a college degree doesn't mean one will find a better job than fast food, especially for humanities and social science majors.</p>
<p>Originally I wanted to do grad school or law school after college, but that isn't looking like such a good idea with the recession and job prospects for young lawyers the way they are.</p>
<p>So I've been thinking about trying to incorporate something more marketable into my college career. The only thing is that I'm horrible at mathematics anyway, so even if I wanted to switch to computer science or something, I'd struggle. My friend is currently tutoring me at math but I don't know how much I'll be able to catch up. </p>
<p>Anyhow, sorry for the long rant but I just need some advice. Thanks</p>
<p>Unless you’re looking to switch to say, business or accounting, a linguistics degree is a good pick, job-wise. Many people wind up in jobs that have little to do with their college majors; the important thing is the critical thinking and other skills that you pick up along the way. Also, it’s important to remember that a linguistics degree does not necessarily lead to becoming a “linguist” as such. There are many more “practical” specialties such as speech-language pathology or speech therapy which could follow with a bit more training. You can still stick with what you love–it’s just up to you to make it into something marketable!</p>
<p>Hope this helps a bit. Best of luck with your decision-making!
Cygne</p>
<p>I have no idea why anybody would say majoring in it is a good career move. Come on. Businesses either sell a product or a service. It’s real simple. If your major doesn’t have to do with helping them then it’s not a good major.</p>
<p>Unfortunately linguists do nit have good job rpospecta from why I understand. A science major would be smart because they usually are able to find a job much easier. There are plenty of sciences where no math I’d involved.</p>
<p>Hey Andrewsky, crawl back to Wall Street. I heard it’s doing real well.</p>
<p>Linguistics can be very marketable, IF you can combine it with something. But since computer science is out, maybe you could get into speech-language pathology. You’d have to go to grad school for 2 years, but you’d have a nice job waiting when you got out. If you don’t like that either, then you probably should pick up something more practical.</p>
<p>Does Linguistics make you fluent in a certain language?</p>
<p>If yes, you could do worse. If you speak a language fluently you might be able to become a translator or some sort of liasion for an international company - possibly. Remember, you aren’t the only one who speaks a certain language (native speakers who also speak English).</p>
<p>If no, you’re screwed - seriously, panic time.</p>
<p>If computer science is out, that leaves you with speech-language pathology, teaching English to non-English speakers, or generic sales jobs. If none of those sound good, I suggest you switch majors to something more marketable.</p>
<p>It doesn’t matter if you’d “struggle” in something else really. A 2.5 in Mechanical Engineering is more marketable than a 4.0 in Linguistics. The major you choose determines your entire career path.</p>
<p>To be honest I’m not quite confident in my ability to even graduate from an Engineering program.</p>
<p>Anyhow, I’m thinking either Speech-Language Pathology or an MBA in marketing would be a good choice for me, and I could keep my major and still have good job prospects to look to.</p>
<p>An MBA program that would admit you without work experience would be a waste of your time and money. To be successful at marketing you must want to market something in particular. Like maybe something related to speech pathology?</p>
<p>There’s a real job out there for someone with your education but it might be a very lowly position depending on the need for post-grad training or certification in your field.</p>
<p>Find work at something technical. Experience in a technical job will give you the foundational knowledge and experience needed to move into marketing or management if that is where your interests take you. There might even be a quality MBA program in your future if you can get grounded in a technical discipline first.</p>
<p>Linguistics is the scientific study of the structure of human language.</p>
<p>The issue is many scientific/logical studies of so and so and so which is important to human knowledge and advancement tend to be far-reaching, fundamental theory, and there is a huge barrier to using it in the current times, i.e. seeing where it fits in. Studying it for its own sake is great, and fulfilling, but the world favors what you can do for it with your knowledge right now. This is a problem people with sophisticated understanding of math can face - it’s truly at the heart of a lot of the thinking that needs to go into advancement in important fields, yet is too remote for the world to realize what it’s worth unless extra effort is made.</p>
<p>One medium via which you can alleviate all this is, as others have hinted, to get interested in computer science. You don’t HAVE to apply linguistics to computer science, but knowing that it has applications can ease you into the study, so you feel you’re not just totally shooting somewhere in the dark. The place to look, obviously, is stuff like natural language processing, machine learning, etc. I’m sure these areas grapple with linguistics, because a scientific study is necessary particularly in such a situation.</p>
<p>Once you’re happy with this, and start learning some computer science, frankly you should be able to get a fairly good job if you can program and stuff like that…and your actual career advancement should depend more on personal ambition and what you plan on doing - as people have said, it’s not like your career will be exactly what you did in college. However, you <em>do</em> have to make yourself trainable for a career, and that can be a hurdle.</p>
<p>Sorry, but this is incomplete advice, and you probably know it. Advancements happen because people learn tough foundations, and <em>then</em> learn to use them in a business setting, and this can lead to amazingly good careers. Of course, you can just get into a business and push around to see that things are still functioning tomorrow, and that’s a hard job too, but in a different sense. </p>
<p>You don’t have to MAJOR in something that helps businesses sell things, because knowing some real content and then getting an MBA later is probably going to make you more desirable anyway to those very businesses.</p>
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<p>No, your major, combined with the rest of your training (which can include significant graduate training, or training within the scope of professional life itself) determines it, to be more complete.</p>
<p>Apologies for multiple posts. I wanted to comment that anything to do with computer science shouldn’t HAVE to involve a ton of math. You can make computers interact with math a lot, but a lot of stuff really is about basic facilities of the computer itself, and mainly involves strong thinking skills and hard work to figure the intricacies out.</p>
<p>I appreciate your advice. The problem is not that actual comp-sci related jobs require intricate levels of math, but rather that the University requires math through multivariable calculus as well as stats and discrete math (whatever that is) before one can even take anything beyond Intro to Java.</p>
<p>I know that math through multivariable calc might not seem to rough, especially considering your user title, but this is coming from someone whose last math class was precalculus in 10th grade (now a sophomore in college) and didn’t even do so well in that class.</p>
<p>Though i am studying, like I said, as I find CompSci to be very interesting. it’s something I will work towards.</p>
<p>Strange, because not much math is used in computer science outside of certain special courses.</p>
<p>Still, I would give it another go - you may find that 4 years later, what you found scary earlier is a lot easier now, with maturity.</p>
<p>Math is just a bunch of logical manipulations and techniques at those stages, so just spend time and figure out what everything means, even if it takes you extra time, and you can make it. The real compsci should be fun to you. :)</p>
<p>Will do! Hopefully I’ll be prepped enough to start calc this upcoming year. And I agree that I’d like CompSci, as I’m already interested in syntax as applied to my major. As well as AI and NLP.</p>