<p>Also, frankly kids who “do what they love” without feeling a pang of doubt as to marketability and how it will help them make good (not just bare minimum) money are I think being foolish.</p>
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<p>Oh, I thought the stuff they made in 160 was more legit than that. But then again I guess that might be why people say the class is kinda lame.</p>
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<p>One gravely unappreciated fact is that one skill that practically every US college student has - but humanities students especially - that has tremendous demand throughout the world. Namely, the ability to speak English fluently, a skill that billions of people throughout the world wished they had, for English is the path to advancement in the global economy. </p>
<p>Therefore, while this may be a subset of the aforementioned teaching credential, one of the more intellectually congruent career paths for humanities majors, is to teach English in a foreign country. Granted, it would help if you were fluent in the native language of that country - but you don’t need to be. It would also help if you obtained English language teaching certification such as CertTESOL or CELTA, but again, you often times don’t really need to have that, at least not immediately. Many countries are importing boatloads of English teachers to improve the language skills of their people, and numerous private contractors exist to provide manpower to serve that market. </p>
<p>{To that end, I wish Berkeley would take some elementary steps to facilitate that market. Berkeley would hardly have to market itself, as Berkeley’s high-prestige international brand name alone , particularly in Asia, alone should serve as sufficient marketing. How many Asian high schools or private tutoring companies wouldn’t want to have English classes taught by a bonafide Berkeley humanities graduate? </p>
<p>To be sure, you obviously won’t become rich by teaching English in a foreign language. In fact, you’ll probably live hand-to-mouth. But - let’s face it - many (probably most) humanities graduates in the United States also live hand-to-mouth. One can consider it a temporary ‘work-study’ adventure for a few years. If nothing else, at least you will return to the US with tremendously heightened knowledge of the language and culture of a foreign country - skills that themselves can likely be marketed to US employers, particularly if the country in question is a frenetically developing market such as China. </p>
<p>I don’t know about anybody else, but I would say that that sort of professional experience certainly seems more valuable than what you would obtain working as a barista at Starbucks, head cashier at Barnes & Nobles, or a front desk agent at the Hyatt, which is apparently what some Berkeley humanities graduates become. Come on, those are jobs you could have had coming right out of high school, which begs the question of why you even bothered to go to Berkeley at all. By teaching overseas, at least you have the chance to leverage the Berkeley brand. </p>
<p><a href=“https://career.berkeley.edu/Major2006/English.stm[/url]”>https://career.berkeley.edu/Major2006/English.stm</a></p>
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<p>With the greatest emphasis on stability. Everybody starting in academia seems to be shooting for one thing and one thing only: tenure, which means *you can never be fired<a href=“barring%20egregious%20violation%20of%20the%20rules,%20such%20as%20never%20showing%20up%20the%20classes%20you%20teach,%20or%20never%20performing%20your%20assigned%20administrative%20duties.”>/i</a> That concept of lifetime job security is utterly alien to the overwhelming majority of Americans. </p>
<p>It should also be said - frankly - that academia is a job with a high quality-of-life, certainly once you’ve obtained tenure, and to some extent, even before you’ve obtained tenure. You’re largely free to set your own schedule. You don’t have a supervisor walking around, checking up on you, calling you on the weekends or holidays and demanding that you come in (and with no extra pay because you’re a salaried worker). You travel often, supposedly to ‘network’ at conferences, but the fact is, nobody really knows exactly where you are during those conferences. {For example, if you just want to spend one day of a conference presenting your paper and meeting people, and the remaining conference days on touring/sightseeing, nobody really knows.}</p>
<p>Sakky, I just want to express my appreciation for your words and advice in this thread. Although topics regarding the “worth” of various majors overwhelmingly seem to dissolve into the same tired arguments (and over the past four years I think I’ve seen them all), I’ve noticed that time and time again you hit upon and explain what is actually important to the question or comment at hand. Thank you for continuing to promote understanding even when it may seem futile.</p>
<p>For the rest of you, please remember that he/she is completely correct in that you don’t have to read the post if you feel burdened by the amount of time it takes you to get through it. As a recent Cal grad with two rather unmarketable majors, I understand that it’s easy to get defensive when anyone so much as suggests that the major you’re working hard to complete might not be as valuable as you think it is. Trust me; I had three engineer roommates and countless well-meaning but single-minded relatives. Still, the uncomfortable truth is that many college students earn degrees without gaining much in the way of practical skills which can then be easily translated into jobs. And as much as we like to think (or even truly believe, as I still would say I do) that the purpose of an undergraduate humanities degree is to provide enrichment and to enhance critical thinking, we also have to understand that critical thinking alone doesn’t get you very far after you graduate. For most things in life, employment as well as merely a general state of happiness, application of knowledge is the key.</p>
<p>And I believe that Sakky is correct in pointing out the lack of attention to application of knowledge in the humanities at Cal, a deficiency I imagine is also present in other universities and colleges around the nation. I count myself as fortunate that I learned many practical skills and honed my capacity for problem solving while working on my parents’ farm as a kid. I count myself as fortunate that these abilities helped me to get an administrative job on campus, and later a promotion to a supervisory position where I gained valuable responsibility and experience. I count myself as fortunate that I have been able to transform this experience into an internship in my dream field for this summer, as well as into an offer for a “real” job starting in the fall.</p>
<p>However, for those students who may not have had these opportunities, I feel strongly that they should at the very least have the option to explore them through an academic setting and thus increase their marketability. Don’t get me wrong; I deeply value my “worthless” majors. However, I also understand that my major alone is not, nor should it be, the golden ticket to my future job opportunities and ultimately my success in life. Some departments and colleges at Cal do a better job of it than others. My EECS roommate was able to TA an upper-division project course for three semesters, conduct research with (and get valuable letters of recommendation from) professors at Berkeley and Stanford, and publish an article on his work, all before graduating. These are all translatable skills. In contrast, the English department exposed me to nothing in the way of opportunities like teaching English in foreign countries (oddly, of the several friends I have who taught English abroad after graduating, none of them were English majors) or concurrent programs such as teaching degree certification (it’s my unfounded theory that a disproportionately large number of English majors first chose this major because of our own very passionate high school English teachers), both of which would have been practical applications of my acquired knowledge. One could argue, perhaps correctly, that engineering majors are inherently more practical than English, but my other roommates who majored in Materials Science and Mech Engineering did not have nearly the same scale or scope of opportunities as was offered by the EECS department.</p>
<p>Now that my post either rivals or even surpasses Sakky’s in length, I’m looking forward to receiving the same complaints and comments suggesting that no one is going to read it. :)</p>
<p>Nice try. Get 12k posts before you start making any demands</p>
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Correction: She thinks that Berkeley would be perfect if the Haas School of Business did not exist</p>
<p>you type too much!;)</p>
<p>I suggest that we all go out and have some drinks and hug it out.</p>
<p>So I tried to see if sakky ever answered artinka’s question about where he gets his information, but got tired. Who are you sakky?? A grad student? College counselor? Someone’s dad? Do you get paid for posting on here? I swear I’ll leave you alone if you answer :)</p>
<p>I’m under no obligation to reveal my identity.</p>
<p>Sakky is actually an intelligent AI that has achieved sapience, thus how they write such elaborate and cogent posts in short order.</p>
<p>One of the CS class projects gone rogue. Lives in telebears, feeding on disappointment and heartbreak when the timeslots are handed out.</p>
<p>is there a cliffs version of sakky?</p>
<p>Thanks for reply. In fact I thought about taking CELTA next summer, so thanks for the confirm that it might not necessarily be that bad an idea 
I was just wondering if there is really anything else beside the teaching (SAT tutoring, LSAT tutoring, English tutoring, educational materials writing etc.). In this way it really just sounds that all the humanities majors must end up in academia or something learning-related unless they intend to depart from humanities or sell fries at McDonald’s…</p>
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<p>Then allow me to give you two examples of people I know of who parleyed humanities majors into professional skills. </p>
<p>*I know one girl who majored in Japanese with the explicit goal of becoming a professional translator. Granted, she already spoke Japanese at home, but she lacked the advanced Japanese vocabulary of a true native, and that’s what she used her coursework to obtain. She especially concentrated on highly technical and legal vocabulary as much (probably most) of the high-end demand for Japanese translation services comes from the science & engineering industry in terms of translating patents, technical documents, and research papers. She took freelance translation jobs to pay her way through school, and upon graduation, garnered a quite decent job with a professional translation firm. {Later she went to law school and is now a successful international lawyer who litigates for Japanese multinationals.} </p>
<p>Her strategy was clear: unless required, she eschewed the more esoteric Japanese courses in favor of those that were eminently practical: i.e. ones that improved her conversational and reading skills in modern Japanese. She also chose to supplement her coursework with her own work, by reading Japanese newspapers and magazines, and watching modern Japanese movies. I remember some Japanese students - those actually born and raised in Japan - who met her and said that by the time she graduated, her knowledge of Japanese language and modern culture had become so strong that the only telltale sign that she wasn’t born native to Japan is that she also spoke perfect, unaccented English (as very few Japanese foreign nationals speak unaccented English). Some of them even joked that on some topics, her knowledge of Japanese was actually better than theirs. </p>
<p>Granted, you cannot expect everybody to become as fluent in Japanese as she became. But the takehome point is that foreign language competence can be a marketable skill. Granted, it may help - as she had - to have spoken the language colloquially at home. But what most such supposedly ‘bilingual’ speakers generally lack is strong reading and writing ability in that language, especially on highly technical subject matter. I doubt there are many people who grew up speaking in a foreign language with their family about legal documents or engineering research papers. That could be your market niche, especially if your language of interest is associated with a country that looms large in the global economy, such as China, Japan, Korea,etc. </p>
<p>I’m also surprised that Berkeley hasn’t integrated itself more fully with the American Translations Association or other such organizations. It would seem to be a simple matter to say that a certain set of Berkeley foreign language courses serve as preparation - perhaps with some supplemental work - to pass the corresponding ATA certification exam. Berkeley could even offer an advanced elective course that specifically prepares students for that exam. {Note, as the course would be an elective, nobody would be forced to take it. It would simply be an option for those who wanted to become certified translators.} </p>
<p>*I heard of another girl who majored in art history, but with the explicit goal of become an art trader. She took numerous art history courses with the specific goal of finding an method that incorporated what various works of art had sold for in the past, in order to produce a predictive arbitrage model to determine what they would sell for in the future, within a tightly circumscribed confidence interval. She also either took some advanced statistical or econometric coursework, or self-trained on modern statistical/econometric software packages. {This is something that everybody can do - numerous tremendously capable stat/econometric software packages such as R/R-Commander, gretl, and Dataplot are available to everybody as open-source freeware.} What I remember is that she had eventually built an expansive dataset of artworks that incorporated the artist name, style, where the work of art was currently held, various time-related trends of the art market, and either the selling price of the work if it had actually been sold, or the ‘imputed’ price based on estimated insurance values if it were to be sold (i.e. the Mona Lisa would likely be the highest price artwork in history if it were ever sold). I believe she even had some of her results submitted to various finance and management academic journals (although they may not have actually been accepted for publication). </p>
<p>Last I heard, she was working for an elite art-investment-centric private equity firm - a job that many Haas students would surrender their first-borns to have - and quite successful there. </p>
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<p>The common theme of these stories is that you can certainly weave a humanities major into a tapestry of marketable skills. But you have to take the personal initiative to do so, with a clear goal of what it is that you want and how the humanities major will help you to achieve that goal. Note that the goal doesn’t have to be a specific job, which inherently incorporates the risk that you won’t be hired for that job. For example, in the case of the Japanese girl, while her goal was to be a professional translator, she could have always resorted to her fallback plan to either teach English in Japan or teach Japanese in the US. She could have also taken a job as a bilingual administrative assistant at a Japanese company regional office in the US - as those jobs pay well for those with strong language skills. What mattered is that she was leveraging her major to develop skills of clear and immediate utility. Similarly while the art history girl may not have been able to rely on a position in the private equity industry - as that truly involved a tremendous art of luck - she surely could have at least obtained a position at an auction house or one of the boutique museum management consulting firms. Honestly, how many people can combine a deep knowledge of art history with strong statistical analysis skills? </p>
<p>I leave you with the following note. Reginald Smith wrote a research paper analyzing the social network of rappers. That’s right - rappers. For example, he found that Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes, and the Wu Tang Clan were some of the most highly ‘socially connected’ rappers in the world. He even got this paper published in the Journal of Statistical Mechanics. </p>
<p>Nor does the project seem particularly difficult or costly or replicate. You could download the lyrics of rappers from various free hip-hop lyrics websites using a snippet of code written with freeware Python (which is an easy language to learn), as he did. You could then use SocNetV or some other freeware social network software to conduct the analysis. None of these software tools are particularly difficult to learn - as you could simply borrow the book “Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner” from the library, go through it with maybe a month of part-time self-study, and you probably know enough about Python to build the tool that Smith did. Then another month of learning the social networking software, and you’re good to go. </p>
<p>[[physics/0511215</a>] The Network of Collaboration Among Rappers and its Community Structure](<a href=“http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0511215][physics/0511215”>[physics/0511215] The Network of Collaboration Among Rappers and its Community Structure) </p>
<p>Here’s a similar research paper that analyzes the social network of the Marvel Universe of comic book superheroes. Apparently, Spiderman, Captain America, the Incredible Hulk, and Beast (from X-Men) are key hubs within the Marvel Universe social network. This paper has also been published in the J. of Statistical Mechanics. The author was even profiled in the New Scientist.</p>
<p>[[0708.2410</a>] How to become a superhero](<a href=“http://arxiv.org/abs/0708.2410][0708.2410”>[0708.2410] How to become a superhero)</p>
<p>[Why</a> superheroes always win - life - 01 September 2007 - New Scientist](<a href=“http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12568-why-superheroes-always-win.html]Why”>Why superheroes always win | New Scientist)</p>
<p>The point is, there are opportunities to convert your passions in the humanities - whether they be in rap music or comic books - to marketable outputs. You just have to be entrepreneurial in finding these opportunities and learning whatever ancillary skills may be necessary to exploit them.</p>
<p>I am one of those people seriously interested in practical,money making stuff to do .I am a math major.I just checked the stanford iphone applications course,but it seems to be open to stanford students only.Do you suggest i just buy an iphone applications book on amazon,and get on with it?</p>
<p>tl;dr going into overdrive in this thread hahahaaha</p>
<p>woah, I definitely appreciated those last couple of long posts.</p>
<p>Medieval Studies - minor only for ug. but wouldn’t it be awesome to say “I minor in medieval studies”? MEDIEVAL THIS!</p>