Sage advise from those beginning to those done! College!

Parents Forum
1

<p>Recently finished my three going through the "whole" thing. Deciding which schools to apply to, applying, choosing, selecting major, taking advantage of opportunities offered by the school, etc. I thought it might be interesting if people had advise that they wish they had in starting out. I will give my opinion.</p>

<p>Most important, in my opinion, make sure your kid's major will lead to a specific job or graduate school major. I am an educator who firmly believed in education for itself. Unfortunately, the world does not agree. Most jobs now require a specific major. </p>

<p>My S works for a bank (small town) and is very under employed. An opportunity arose and they would not consider him because they wanted a business or math major. He earned a physics major/Math minor degree from a very selective college. Really??</p>

<p>Second, if your kid is very undecided, go to a cheap or CC school first. Get great grades and you can transfer to very top colleges.</p>

<p>S 1, extremely smart but only achieves when being supervised. Should not have gone to expensive top school and should have stayed at home and gone to local state. GPA would probably be 3.5- 4.0. (he attended at the local for a semester and earned a 4.0)</p>

<p>D1 attended Ivy and took advantage of everything. She did extremely well and is now doing extremely well in her job and life. </p>

<p>D2 did extremely well at her top ranked school. She won the Outstanding Senior Award for her Major. She was an RA and had other great job experiences. She is finishing an internship that does not lead to a job in a week. She wishes she choose a different major.</p>

<p>Third, make your kid's bed comfortable. Get a memory foam from Target and a feather or non from BB&B and your kid will have the most comfortable bed. They need a good nights sleep. Most dorm beds are well worn.</p>

<p>Fourth, encourage them to get involved in something. Clubs, greek life (only my S did), sports, community service, whatever, get involved.</p>

2

<p>

</p>

<p>This shows only that he is working for a company run by morons. He needs to lift his sights to a more sophisticated employer.</p>

3

<p>Quote:</p>

<p>Third, make your kid’s bed comfortable. Get a memory foam from Target and a feather or non from BB&B and your kid will have the most comfortable bed. They need a good nights sleep. Most dorm beds are well worn.</p>

<p>Did you get both memory foam AND feather topper? Or did you mean one OR the other? I’ve ready the memory foams have a horrible smell that you can’t get rid of - did you have that problem?</p>

4

<p>

</p>

<p>If strong math skills were required for the job (e.g. quantitative finance and the like), they would not want most business majors, but would accept anyone who majored in something math-heavy, including math, physics, or statistics. Seems like they do not know what they need to be looking for. Time to start looking for other jobs.</p>

<p>Physics majors do sometimes go into computer jobs as well as finance jobs.</p>

5

<p>Nothing wrong with working in banking. Willie Sutton, the bank robber, said that he robbed banks “because that’s where the money is.”</p>

6

<p>What do other people think about the OP’s comments on selecting a major? H and I went directly to professional school from undergrad, so we never really had this issue ourselves. My own impression from my job search in undergrad (as a backup in case I did not get into grad school), was that if you had certain skill sets you could get jobs like management trainee in retail or banking even if you were a liberal arts major. This was long long ago, so I am wondering about now.</p>

<p>A business major and a math major would be very different imo. Math majors get to the point where there are symbols not numbers. In business, crunching the numbers would seem more important (outside of marketing or management courses). A lot of kids seem to major in econ rather as a proxy for a pre business career. What do people think of that?</p>

7

<p>Regarding majors, skills learned in undergrad are transferable to fields other than your major. Oldest worked for several years after college graduation before grad school.
Now she is working in a field that is only tangentially related to either of her degrees although the skills learned in her undergrad work study have proven to be very useful.</p>

8

<p>I cannot even imagine trying to force my kids into – or out of – a specific major.</p>

<p>They did as they pleased. Both have good jobs (although one will need to complete a master’s program to continue in the career field she wants).</p>

9

<p>I can’t imagine dictating majors either. That said, my older son was lucky - he majored in a field that’s in high demand, got well paid internships, and has been gainfully employed for two years at his dream job.</p>

<p>Younger son hasn’t started the job search yet (going into senior year), but will have at least one skill (excellent Arabic) that he hopes will be helpful. He’s worked for the last two summers at a job that hopefully has given him some useful skills and a good reference. (He was promoted to supervisor this summer.)</p>

10

<p>I agree with Mathmom and Marian. And remember…MANY students pursue jobs and careers that are NOT related to their college major.</p>

<p>And also…just because your kid majors in a field doesn’t mean they will want to work in that field once they graduate. Anyone who has read my posts KNOWS my daughter majored in engineering…and does not want to be an engineer at all.</p>

11

<p>In my professional degree program, I know people with ug majors ranging from math to geography to anthropology to English and everything in between. When applying for jobs, I rarely came across specific degrees when looking at jobs unless they’re like engineering, etc. Most look for coursework in specific areas but not necessarily leading to a degree.</p>

12

<p>Wise words, morrismm!</p>

13

<p>

</p>

<p>It sounds like a couple of things could have happened here – he could have been dealing with HR instead of the actual hiring manager. HR does dumb things like that… they can be awfully literal. If the hiring manager told them those two majors, the HR person probably doesn’t know how much math a physics major has to complete, and they just toss out the resumes without the “right” major.</p>

<p>Or they could have told him that when the reason was actually something else…

could have come into play and they just aren’t saying so.</p>

<p>Or he could be fudging to you on what happened.</p>

14

<p>In regard to majors, some kids are more mature about it than others.<br>
I did not dictate, but have been talking for several years, starting back in the middle school. I believed that it was important in our family situation that the college will lead to a job (eventually, with possible Grad. School). After some research, I have discovered that my D’s initial desire to be a Marine Biologit will not do the trick, very very few jobs out there. So, the next logical route was pre-med. She is a 3rd year Med. Student and cannot imagine herself doing anything else. She could have been an unemloyed Marine Biologist now.
You just have to figure out where certain goal is coming from. For the accomplished competitive swimmer who went every year to Mexico on snorkeling vacations, the Marine Biology was a logical choice. I told my kid that she should be able to financially support herself and have as many snorkeling trips as she wishes in her future, she did not have to be a Marine Biologist for that.</p>

15

<p>I agree with others regarding steering a student towards one major or another. Our youngest, now a rising Sr. is in a specialty program for IT, has several years of comp sci, and is frankly pretty good at it. We assumed that’s what he’d be heading into for college. His interests are rather broad however in history, government, public policy, and economics. The summer between soph & jr years he got really interested in behavioral economics. It was like a light bulb went off. Over six months I watched and every time he’d talk about something related to it he couldn’t sit down, arms waving, very animated, vs. ask him about comp sci and he’ll give you a factual answer but there’s no real emotion. I realized it was wrong to peg him into the ‘safe and employable’ major when it was clear he would benefit from a liberal arts education where he could take courses in many different areas that clearly interest him on a much different level. It took me another 6mths to convince his father.</p>

<p>When he looks at economics programs and their curriculums he looks for a BS. If they are in the school of business he looks for enough flexibility to incorporate enough higher level math and statistics courses to keep the quantitative rigor and interest that he wants. There is great variation in an Econ BA vs an Econ BS vs an Econ BS from a business department. Most employers (save the bank above) are going to be looking for specific skills and specific advanced coursework which you can adapt within different majors/departments depending on the university (ie a math/physics/business major may all fit the bill if they have X skills and XYZ courses). These are the types of things our son is looking at when researching a school.</p>

16

<p>skills learned in undergrad are transferable to fields other than your major. That’s my conviction. If they aren’t, you missed something in the schooling, stretching and polishing. I don’t get why people think education is only about training for one limited set of job opps. If you can’t think, analyze, write, research, communicate, you may get some specific major-related job, but how far can you go?</p>

17

<ol>
<li><p>Attend the academically-strongest school that you can afford. Once you graduate, folks just look at school name, not GPA.</p></li>
<li><p>If financial package offering is disappointing, at least ask for reconsideration. Worked for us - $6000/year merit bump despite ED application.</p></li>
</ol>

18

<p>I disagree with the OP’s remark about transferring. Depending on what college a kid wants to transfer to, it can be significantly more difficult to be admitted as a transfer than as a freshman</p>

19

<p>My boy landed a job 2 weeks after graduating from a very small school in the Northwest. He got the job because of 2 internships he had during the summer of his sophomore and junior year. His GPA was lousy BUT he did play baseball which most people were more interested in talking about then the actual jobs he was interviewing for.</p>

20

<p>

</p>

<p>Often, it is not the title of the degree (BA vs BS) that determines the quantitative rigor of an economics major. One often has to look at the course catalogs to see how mathematical the economics courses are. A way to tell is to check the math prerequisites for the intermediate microeconomics courses and econometrics courses – a more quantitative department will have math prerequisites higher than frosh calculus. Also check if there are additional mathematical economics courses. If the goal is PhD study in economics, choosing a school with a more quantitative economics emphasis, and taking advanced math and statistics courses, would be indicated.</p>

<p>Economics majors do tend to have better employment options at the bachelor’s level than many other majors, though such options tend to slanted toward finance.</p>