<p>Congratulations, you missed the joke. The media tattoo is most technical jobs have been offshored. Likely not true but come on, as a humanities major who now works in a technical field I should have the advantage to make overly general digs at technical majors lol. Come on, seriously, there really isn’t a such thing as a worthless major.</p>
<p>^^^ and mathboy is absolutely correct.</p>
<p>The importance of majors is generally overstated. A friend of mine has a father who majored in electrical engineering, but ended up being a programmer. His mother majored in computer science, but works as a grade school teacher. More famously, actress Natalie Portman majored in psychology at Harvard, and Robert Andrew Millikan (the guy who won the Nobel Prize in physics for measuring the charge of an electron) majored in classics.</p>
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<p>Allow me to make a ‘softcore’ post: as I’ve always said, those (not you, mathboy98) who don’t like my posts don’t have to read them. Nobody has a gun to anybody’s head. </p>
<p>I always thought that was a simple concept. Nevertheless, it seems to be a concept that some people can’t (or don’t want to) grasp.</p>
<p>Except that Natalie Portman was making bank. Of course she could afford to do a degree in Psych. Not banging Psych or anything that is.</p>
<p>Irrelevant. My point is that the importance of majors is overstated because people often find work in areas unrelated to what they studied.</p>
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<p>If a person’s priority is to find a well-paying job and make money, then yes, the listed majors are near “worthwile.” But if a person’s priority is to study in a field he is passionate about, then the majors listed will be worth the time.</p>
<p>Almost everyone’s goal is to find a well-paying job and make money.</p>
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<p>I agree that the importance of specific majors is somewhat overrated - what really matters is the importance of marketable skills, or in the absence of that, the capability to quickly seek and develop marketable skills. That tends to be correlated with certain majors, but clearly not perfectly so.</p>
<p>Which is why I’ve always believed that Berkeley could and should do a better job imparting its students with basic marketable skills, regardless of major. For example, they could have the opportunity to learn trade skills such as carpentry, metalworking, basic machinery, or information technology (IT) skills. I’ve always found it offputting to meet mechanical engineering graduates who don’t know how to fix their own cars, or electrical engineering graduates who don’t know how to properly connect their HDTV’s to their DVD’s. </p>
<p>These are skills that everybody ought to have, not just the engineers, for not only are these skills useful from a day-to-day standpoint, but can also be used to help pay those students’ way through Berkeley. For example, somebody with decent auto repair or IT skills should be able to find some part-time or summer jobs that certainly pay far better than flipping burgers or stocking shelves at the mall, which is what many Berkeley students end up having to do to pay their way. Nor are these skills specific to any major, as even a humanities major can learn basic auto repair or IT skills such as Cisco router configuration. They’re really not that hard. For example, I know one Legal Studies major who earned his Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert (CCIE) certification on the side, whereupon he realized that he no longer really needed to graduate at all, as he could obtain a decent-paying career simply with that certification. {He still graduated anyway, but only as a matter of personal pride, and he nonetheless entered a career in IT.} The CoE along with the Law School could jointly offer a series of undergraduate courses on the patent system that prepares students to take the USPTO exam to become licensed patent agents. Note - you don’t need a law degree to become a patent agent, you just need an engineering or science bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience. Haas could offer finance electives that prepare students for the CFA and CMP exams. </p>
<p>Lest anybody think that such training would be ‘vocational’ and therefore inappropriate for an academically oriented school such as Berkeley, allow me to proffer the following examples:</p>
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<li> Harvard offers an undergraduate statistics upper division elective - although admittedly a time-consuming one - that provides students with the training to become a fairly decent entry-level SAS programmer. Students who do well in that class could almost likely the SAS certification exam with a few months of part-time study, and even those without such a certification could still find a quite decent job as a SAS tech. Somebody with a Harvard degree and the SAS knowledge garnered from this course could surely find an excellent job at a hedge fund, investment bank, or quant consulting firm.<br></li>
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<p>*MIT used to offer, and may soon offer again, a course on Web application engineering, in which teams of students were assigned to develop fully live, highly scalable e-commerce enabled websites for actual clients. Students were encouraged to use whatever toolkit they wanted - many made available for free through MIT - whether it be Microsoft .Net, Oracle, PostgreSQL/MySQL, Ruby on Rails, etc. The goal of the course was that by the time the course ended, every student should be fully qualified to build a fully functional site such as Ebay, Amazon, or Facebook all by themselves. Many students, upon completion of the course, actually dropped out of MIT to start their own Web companies. </p>
<p>*Speaking of Facebook, Stanford used to offer an advanced computer science course about Facebook applications such as Farmville or Mafia Wars, with the final project to actually develop and launch your own application. That course is no longer offered, but Stanford now offers another computer science course that teaches you how to build Iphone apps, with the final project being to develop and launch your own app. If you do well in this course, you may not even need to graduate from Stanford at all, as you can drop out to start your own Facebook/Iphone app company, or work for an existing company such as Zynga who builds these apps. </p>
<p>Hence, given that other top-ranked schools are offering highly practical and marketable courses for credit, there seems to be no reason why Berkeley couldn’t do the same. </p>
<p>Perhaps the most obvious way that Berkeley could aid its students - so obvious that I’m surprised that Berkeley still hasn’t done so - is to offer an easy path for students to obtain official teaching credentials. After all, Berkeley not only already has a Graduate School of Education, but it also happens to be one of the highest ranked GSE’s in the country. Berkeley therefore has a golden opportunity to offer an integrated credentialing program within the undergrad program, or if that is somehow not forthcoming, to offer an integrated BA+MA program with credentialing. Last time I checked, California teachers were paid $35k a year to start - quite the respectable pay packet when you consider the fact that they have the summer off. And - let’s be honest - most teachers, whether in California or elsewhere, went to lower-tier schools; surely Berkeley graduates have better academic qualifications than they do. </p>
<p>Every Berkeley student, regardless of major, should have the opportunity to pick up a marketable skill/certification. To be clear, nobody would be forced to do so. But the opportunities should be available and easy to obtain.</p>
<p>My God. Sakky has 12,330 posts. And a lot of them are probably long.</p>
<p>Actually CS 160 (UI) does iPhone apps too, I think. Also Dan Garcia mentioned some Decals and seminars (i think they were seminars) that teach some design skills to get good money.</p>
<p>I’m not sure whether it’d be very smart to integrate these “manual/marketable/technical” skills within the majors themselves… Maybe you intended to say that Berkeley could offer these type of electives or certificates, but in no way should they be required. I’d agree with what andrew was saying, that there’s not really a “worthless” major, although maybe you should get to be more specific to how you’re defining worthless - by how much income the student makes right after graduating, or by how much it contributed to their intellectual and cognitive development. </p>
<p>As a psych major, I’m thinking in the perspective of how the major will be useful for more abstract skills such as creativity, communication, critical-thinking, and mental flexibility. I think most majors aren’t really training the students directly for the professions, it’s more like gearing their thinking towards a specific field, and allowing them to make associations in that context using their gained knowledge. As it’s true for most parts of life, pursuing something from “intrinsic” motivation (e.g. knowledge, thinking skills) rather than from “extrinsic” factors (money, prestige) will probably get you the furthest in life.</p>
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<p>Again, I’m not forcing anybody to read any of them. </p>
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<p>I’m not talking about the silly “Hello World”-esque apps that 160 asks you to do, but rather a fully fledged app that actual consumers might actually want to use. </p>
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<p>Nobody is saying that such coursework should be required (although I still find the notion of electrical engineering graduates who don’t actually know how to properly connect their own HDTV’s to DVD players or mechanical engineering graduates who don’t know how to do basic car maintenance to be bizarre). But the practical and marketable options should be available as part of elective credit. </p>
<p>As an analogy, nobody at Harvard, not even the Stats concentrators, is forced to take the SAS course. But that course counts as a fully fleged statistics upper-division elective that also teaches you what you need to know to be a decent SAS entry-level programmer.</p>
<p>i’m sure sakky’s posts are very informative and everything…but i’ve just stopped reading them because of the sheer volume. :D</p>
<p>i don’t just don’t have the time</p>
<p>sakky, may I just ask where you find all this information? It is just so impressive… Do you work in some career center or whatever? BTW could you think of any in fact useful certification outside of IT beside perhaps the teaching credentials? Just something suitable (i.e. learnable) for an average humanities major with really little to no experience with anything bordering on applicable in real life?</p>
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I got the joke, but your serious argument is wrong. An illogical criticism of one major does not nullify legitimate argumentation against another.</p>
<p>On an interesting note, I read on article on yahoo yesterday (on iphone4 so excuse lack of link), but apparently online apps are blackholes and linkedin and networking ate the way to go as far as getting jobs go. How I ended up where i am. I program and playhack computers in my spare time.</p>
<p>Sakky, I enjoy your posts and they give me a lot of information. I was simply amazed and slightly appalled you have so many posts, especially when most are very long.</p>
<p>There was no serious argument.</p>
<p>Leftist, I actually think aspiring professors are attracted to what many of us are - wellpaying jobs with stability. It isn’t a job that has you rolling in money, but I think few people would remain postdocs forever because you are paid so little and have no stability. Also, Phd students are the minority.</p>
<p>It is a safe assumption most people want a job making them live comfortably, which includes pay and stability.</p>