SAT for jobs

Parent Cafe
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<p>Canuck, I wouldn’t advise that student anything until I asked what that student wants to do for a living. There is no banishment- and guess what, even C students from third tier universities get jobs in corporate America all the time. No- the C student from no-name is not getting hired as an analyst at Credit Suisse, and isn’t going to be working on new derivative algorithms at DE Shaw. So tell me what this student wants to do and there are for sure things that he or she can be doing to enhance the odds.</p>

<p>Many of the companies I have worked for look for strong and persistent initiative. That can take many forms. Doing an Independent Study at a U that doesn’t make it easy- that’s initiative. Persuading a professor to let you join a team of grad students heading to Peru on an archaeological dig when typically only grad students can go- and then being able to integrate that experience into the overall education/intellectual aspirations- that’s initiative. Working for three years for the same professor- first, just indexing and proof-reading, then research, then ghost writing, AND being the person who wrote an Op-Ed under the professors name (with guidance and final edits going to the professor, of course) AND being the person who got the Economist or Financial Times to run the Op-Ed. That’s initiative.</p>

<p>Many of the companies I’ve worked for look for peer influencing skills. So being a camp counselor and telling people who are younger and shorter what to do all day is a type of leadership- but not peer leadership. Being president of your fraternity and persuading the frat to eliminate its hazing rituals, or to go dry, or to eliminate dues to make the organization accessible to low income kids on campus- that’s peer leadership.</p>

<p>I won’t bore you. Tell me what the kid wants to do and there are ways to enhance the odds- but they should come out of what the student is interested in, not some blind checklist of “here’s how to get hired by Corporate America”. I won’t tell a kid who loves urban planning that he should have majored in electrical engineering (there are great jobs in urban planning right now BTW- and LEED certification is a fantastic career enhancement down the road).</p>

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<p>“Were such students those who did poorly in the LSAT section that tests skills not as well practiced by their majors? E.g. English majors who did poorly on the logic puzzles.”</p>

<p>@ucbalumnus: no. To get that type of LSAT score, students are getting the majority (ie 55-65 of the 101) questions wrong, only about 22 of which are in logic games. I’ve seen English majors with 3.7s unable to get more than 15 of the 26-27 Reading Comp questions right. </p>

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<p>@blossom: Thanks for another excellent response, blossom. If I come across applicants like those you just mentioned, I would want them as well. This is an area I know little about, but it has gripped my interest for many years now. I will surely pick your brain on this topic again.</p>

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<p>Here is data on how students from different majors perform on the LSAT:</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.phil.ufl.edu/ugrad/whatis/LSATtable.html”>http://www.phil.ufl.edu/ugrad/whatis/LSATtable.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Does not look very different from the GRE list I posted earlier, does it?</p>

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<p>@canuckguy: please read the entire dialogue and you will understand. You are taking a sentence so completely far out of context that it’s a waste of time to explain. </p>

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<p>^^No, that was not the point. I was simply looking at the information presented here holistically, and try to piece them together in a way that makes sense to me. Your comment is consistent with the Hsu and Schombert study at Oregon, so I decided to explore the relationship between LSAT, GRE, and the student’s course of study. The information I have so far does not conflict with the study either. So I posted it in the belief that other participants may find the information as fascinating as I do.</p>