<p>Just browsing the front page, there’s a whole bunch of threads that have this same mix: is liberal arts worth it? Economics is a social science. If you’re looking to ‘create something tangible’ in the sense that you’ll produce a working piece of electronics or a piece of security verification code you won’t find it. What you will do in the higher courses are think through difficult and often beautiful models of real-world behavior, create your own experimental studies, commit to doing your own research regarding theories of how the world works. </p>
<p>I’m going to try not sounding combative in the next part but I think the question of engineering being necessarily ‘only thing worth it’ creates some nasty implications. </p>
<p>I say this as the descendant of engineer after engineers on one of my parents’ sides, so I think I understand where this comes from. If it’s the money, don’t be afraid. Banking, consulting, big business, more than has you covered in the same salary levels that engineering has but with a much higher vertical ceiling (withstanding career pivots). If it’s the social impact idea, I’ll say this. In economic history there’s a certain transition of agriculture economies towards manufacturing-driven economies towards service economies. In the US we are in the latter stage, and government analysts, academic researchers, policymakers, politicians, journalists, and finally financiers/consultants (the very careers that you will see your Economics peers graduating to, like I did) have social worth. They create, reinterpret, and run the frameworks from our financial systems to our political systems to our media (by the by, the very frameworks you’ll read about in the Common Core). Now if you think the only thing that’s socially worthwhile, are the things that you can touch (“code”, widgets, etc.), and the respective skillsets that can create such things, you’ve answered your own question regarding where you want to go.</p>
<p>What has my economics degree given me? Similar to what the liberal arts program at the University of Chicago as a whole has given me. A toolkit to think about the world—from the small problems like how the NCAA abuses college athletes to the big problems like the European debt crisis. Can I create some basic data structures in C++, do some spreadsheet mashing with VBA and run regressions (lots and lots and lots of them) with ‘advanced data analysis’ (whatever that means)? Yes, I can. I took the time to learn those through electives and my own initiative And engineering programs that give you those ‘hard skill sets’ are wonderful. But recall that even half of those EECS curricula at Berkeley are teaching you things that you won’t need in industry [when was the last time you needed assembly at your job at Google?]—and good for them. There’s joy in learning about the big picture of things. </p>
<p>From my own personal experience [which I think can get expanded upon to many circumstances]: I was a lot less technically prepared than those Wharton folks going into finance interviews. Yet two of them told me they felt pigeonholed—they had to Wharton. Everyone did finance. College is a maturation process where you learn about who you are, what you want to do, and how your maturation as a student helps define your maturation as a human being. I learned to love the material I learned from taking classes at Booth to going downtown to Gleacher to having coffee chats with professors and financiers. I also learned to work hard to do what I want to do. We may not have an undergraduate accounting program but we have the resources for it, for those who seek it. My liberal arts learning gave me a framework for understanding how economics branches like finance or behavioral economics are refinements upon economics. With it, I learned to love the things I love—and I learned to pursue the things I am passionate about.</p>
<p>Last. Economics will not give you a skillset to fall back on. Yes it is true that the 200s sequence of Econ is incredibly mundane but if you don’t work hard to find something you are passionate about (as in if you are not even passionate about the electives you take or the basic applications of some of the constraint problems you do in the 200s sequence), you will not be successful at this school or at any other school. I didn’t want to go to a top school to learn a ‘fall-back’ school to work some mundane job. I wanted to continue being the idealist I was in high school: follow your passions. No one should come here expecting that minimum effort will get you anything. None of the great jobs you can do in life are for people who are passionless, and who don’t work hard whatever the skillset they have (Yes, even folks in Silicon Valley look for the best engineering students, not just some ‘fall-back’ students). Every worthwhile job from finance to engineering to government is the same. They want the folks who are reliable, hard-working, driven and smart; the same traits that successful entrepreneurs have. </p>
<p>If you expect yourself to be driven, I don’t think the school choice thing matters; high human capital does a whole lot of more things that whatever school you went to. If you expect yourself to be lazy, I think you have a lot bigger things to worry about than what school you went to. Work hard, study the things you like, and don’t be afraid of change (wherever you go for school). Life’s too short to pigeonhole yourself.</p>