FOT Forum
FOT Community => General Discussion => Topic started by: Smelodies on March 27, 2011, 03:39:12 PM
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The only class I took in the hard sciences was Intro to Astronomy.
If I had the time and money, I think I'd go back and take a physics or cosmology course.
Would you ever take a course again, and, if so, which?
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The only class I took in the hard sciences was Intro to Astronomy.
If I had the time and money, I think I'd go back and take a physics or cosmology course.
Would you ever take a course again, and, if so, which?
If I had the money(rich parents) I'd go back to school completely and get a degree in something that leads to a well-paying fruitful career that makes me happy. I graduated with an English degree and I feel stuck in my government job.
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I'd take more classes at the school of hard knocks.
Seriously, I majored in business and every class I took has been useful in my career in business. I loved my electives and they made me a better rounded and more erudite person, but I can't say I've used them for anything much.
My friends who were English majors nearly to a person wish they'd chosen something else, which goes in the sad, but whaddayagonnado file.
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I'd take more classes at the school of hard knocks.
Seriously, I majored in business and every class I took has been useful in my career in business. I loved my electives and they made me a better rounded and more erudite person, but I can't say I've used them for anything much.
My friends who were English majors nearly to a person wish they'd chosen something else, which goes in the sad, but whaddayagonnado file.
I was an English major and here at law school, I find all the book readin' and writin' I did come quite in handy.
I really dislike the glee with which people single out English majors and the uselessness of their degrees.
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I wish I'd taken more fencing classes.
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I'd take more classes at the school of hard knocks.
Seriously, I majored in business and every class I took has been useful in my career in business. I loved my electives and they made me a better rounded and more erudite person, but I can't say I've used them for anything much.
My friends who were English majors nearly to a person wish they'd chosen something else, which goes in the sad, but whaddayagonnado file.
I was an English major and here at law school, I find all the book readin' and writin' I did come quite in handy.
I really dislike the glee with which people single out English majors and the uselessness of their degrees.
Not that you were necessarily talking to me, but I take no glee in it. In fact, I take glee when I hear from an English major who has put their degree to good use. I was just speaking purely from my own pool of friends and neighbors.
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I'd take more classes at the school of hard knocks.
Seriously, I majored in business and every class I took has been useful in my career in business. I loved my electives and they made me a better rounded and more erudite person, but I can't say I've used them for anything much.
My friends who were English majors nearly to a person wish they'd chosen something else, which goes in the sad, but whaddayagonnado file.
I was an English major and here at law school, I find all the book readin' and writin' I did come quite in handy.
I really dislike the glee with which people single out English majors and the uselessness of their degrees.
Not that you were necessarily talking to me, but I take no glee in it. In fact, I take glee when I hear from an English major who has put their degree to good use. I was just speaking purely from my own pool of friends and neighbors.
I guess I get my hackles up rather quickly about this subject because it hits so close to home. No doubt I had many years of wondering if I was going to be able to do anything.
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Don't worry, there are plenty of unemployed lawyers.
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Don't worry, there are plenty of unemployed lawyers.
Oh I know that as well.
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I studied pure Math, so I really shouldn't be employed at all. I don't really regret it, because it was pretty awesome and I ended up convincing people to hire me to work for them anyway.
All that said, were I to go back to school I'd go someplace like the ITP program at NYU. Science and Art. Art and Science. Games. Robots. I look at the course list and just drool. http://itp.nyu.edu/sigs/program/ (http://itp.nyu.edu/sigs/program/)
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I wish I'd taken more fencing classes.
Me too. A class would have helped because, sadly, I do not possess the skills needed to build fences.
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In that case, en garde, mon frère!
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Huh...? I guess I should have taken some German classes too.
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Now that I have wasted my life teaching, I wish I had pursued that double major in philosophy.
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I employ almost none of what I learned during my extensive fencing training in the swordfights I find myself in these days, but I am firmly in the camp that says you should learn the rules before ignoring them.
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I employ almost none of what I learned during my extensive fencing training in the swordfights I find myself in these days, but I am firmly in the camp that says you should learn the rules before ignoring them.
That's what I learned at jazz college.
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A literature class focusing exclusively on James Joyce's Ulysses so I could get through the fucking thing.
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I had such a class.
Classes are good for things you wouldn't learn otherwise. Science classes are a tricky thing. Are they at the popular level you can learn on your own by reading a book or doing a Teaching Company course? Or are they building blocks to a career in the field?
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If you're 60+ in the US can you enroll in courses for free?
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I employ almost none of what I learned during my extensive fencing training in the swordfights I find myself in these days, but I am firmly in the camp that says you should learn the rules before ignoring them.
That's what I learned at jazz college.
At jazz college I learned it's not the notes you play that matter, but the notes you don't play. So I put down the saxophone for good.
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I had such a class.
Classes are good for things you wouldn't learn otherwise. Science classes are a tricky thing. Are they at the popular level you can learn on your own by reading a book or doing a Teaching Company course? Or are they building blocks to a career in the field?
There's always the Khan Academy, although the course list is kind of overwhelming. http://www.khanacademy.org/ (http://www.khanacademy.org/)
What specifically interests you?
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So I put down the saxaphone for good.
Todd Snider - Talkin' Seattle Grunge Rock Blues (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CPKPpgJAwo#)
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A literature class focusing exclusively on James Joyce's Ulysses so I could get through the fucking thing.
I had such a class.
As did I. Really glad I took that one. Also a course in Dostoevsky taught by Czeslaw Milosz, so that I can actually say I have read The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov. Good times.
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I did drop out of jazz college before I learned to spell saxophone, though. Then I drank scotch whisky all night long, and dined behind the wheel.
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This thread is jazz, with all the be-boppin' and scattin'.
Which is the fencing class when you get to slap the other dude across the face with the sword. I want to learn that one.
For now, I'll have to settle for foiling you all with my rapier wit.
Now I have to go to the zoo to see the great épées and watch Buffalo play hockey.
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For now, I'll have to settle for foiling you all with my rapier wit.
Very sharp double pun, Buff.
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I have a technical business degree (construction science) and I often feel like I'm not as well rounded as my other friends who got degrees in somewhat softer subjects (especially my wife who has a philosophy degree and no interest in philosophy.) I'm currently working on my MBA, which won't do much of anything for me in my career field, but I like school and I like learning.
I would live to take an astronomy class or some other interesting class like that. I'll bet if you went to the professor and explained it to them theyd let you audit whatever class you wanted to. No need to pay for the class if you're just in it for the knowledge.
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You can sit in on my class any day, Andy. Heck of a commute though.
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For the past six months I've been back in school. I did an arts degree (linguistics & literature) and did in fact use my linguistics in the work I'd been doing over the past several years. But I'd been increasingly feeling like I didn't really know how to DO anything, and so I'm studying cabinetmaking now. I'm not 100% committed to working in that field, but am enjoying learning about it. In fact, I'm enjoying it far, far more than I enjoyed any other type of school that I've done in the past
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Warning about astronomy classes, though - it's a lot more physics and a lot less NOVA than you would hope for. I know from experience.
I did not take the lab despite my university having a world-class planetarium, so maybe that's my fault.
I hated school, though I love learning. I was always bored. I'm planning to teach a class at UNC after I "retire," which I hope is in the not too distant future. At least that's what Tim Ferris says.
To pick a class, I'd look at the type of thing you spend the most Wikipedia time on and find a class that specializes in that type of thing.
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I studied pure Math, so I really shouldn't be employed at all.
Jesus, I thought we needed more math and science majors. It seems like there are so few majors that are actually supposed to be good for you financially.
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I'm a philosophy major and completely miserable.
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This is really interesting to me- I'm approaching the end of college and getting worried about everything I haven't had time to study. I spend a lot of time trying to justify everything I do (biopsychology and music with a dash of french lit and ethnomusicology) as useful, but at the same time I already wish I had taken more "well-rounded" sorts of things I'll never learn otherwise, like art history or another language or something. Looking at the responses, I guess I'm a little surprised by the extent to which "practical" subjects really are practical, though I probably shouldn't be.
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For what it's worth, ALG, things like languages and art history are probably a lot easier to find courses in later than subjects like biopsychology and ethnomusicology.
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I studied pure Math, so I really shouldn't be employed at all.
Jesus, I thought we needed more math and science majors? It seems like there are so few majors that are actually supposed to be good for you financially.
For a while they were saying we need more math and science teachers, and I pondered that for a while, but now there's this concerted effort to blame teachers for all our states' budget problems that really killed my enthusiasm for that idea altogether.
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I wish I was fluent in another language: given the time I'd like to study German, French, Spanish, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, and/or Arabic, in roughly that order.
I wish I had learned to play an instrument and/or read music.
There are huge gaps in my literature background: I've never read Joyce, Faulkner, Jane Austen, Dickens, any of the great Russian novels. I don't need or want a class for any of these, but it might be fun.
I took a lot of dance classes in college, but I'd like to keep up with it. I also dropped out of an 8am karate class my first semester freshman year after missing every class except the first one, but I'd like to study it again.
I took a 300-level class on Marx and Marxism, also as a first-semester freshman (everything was filled by the time I registered), and had no business whatsoever being in it. I'd like to do it over. Ditto for my one science requirement: it was Earth Science with this horrible old creep. I actually enjoy science, so I wish I had taken something with a better teacher.
I suppose I could do with some business classes, but these Harvard Business School Pocket Mentor books are reinforcing the idea that I didn't miss much.
Here's a tidbit: I somehow weaseled through four years of college without ever taking a freshman Expository Writing class but then ended up teaching that same subject at Rutgers for six years, which was infinitely worse. Karma's a bitch!
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Never too late. I'm taking classes at the Alliance française right now. Those and Pimsleur tapes are pretty good.
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I suppose I could do with some business classes, but these Harvard Business School Pocket Mentor books are reinforcing the idea that I didn't miss much.
I've always wondered about this, too. Buffcoat, any chance you could elaborate on the useful things you learned in business school?
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I suppose I could do with some business classes, but these Harvard Business School Pocket Mentor books are reinforcing the idea that I didn't miss much.
I've always wondered about this, too. Buffcoat, any chance you could elaborate on the useful things you learned in business school?
Yeah, I would actually agree that a lot of MBA programs are not that valuable to people who've actually BEEN in business. What I learned from 18-22 was a great help in starting out.
I'm of an entrepreneurial bent and went to work for a then 2-person company that became 30 people and then started my own company. At both of them I used the stuff from: accounting (especially), business law (alas!), marketing (most people have no idea what marketing is), operations (though not in a formal sense), finance (calculating the expected return of various options) and organizational behavior (business psychology - really, really helpful in business and any other organization).
I work with people who majored in everything from econ to folklore, and it's been my experience that all kinds of backgrounds are helpful in any environment - it's just that having been through a thorough undergraduate grounding in all those subjects gave me a head start and let me focus more on application of skills than on learning the skills.
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Never too late. I'm taking classes at the Alliance française right now. Those and Pimsleur tapes are pretty good.
I've made a couple of halfhearted attempts at learning French and Hebrew over the last couple of years. Has anyone ever tried those Rosetta Stone kits? They seem pricey, but I've played with the vending machine display at the airport and they look effective.
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Yes, Rosetta Stone makes good stuff.
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I majored in theoretical linguistics and semiotics. While I never did become a practicing linguist, but the courses I took in socio-linguistics, philosophy of language, and semantics, helped me a bunch more than you would think. Mostly they taught me important lessons on communication: knowing your target audience its capacity for understanding, and making logical arguments or picking apart illogical ones.
The downside is that I don't always get the joke, because I am busy asking "why."
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I'm a philosophy major and completely miserable.
I'm a philosophy major and perfectly content. Maybe you're doing it wrong? Or maybe you're doing it right!
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Warning about astronomy classes, though - it's a lot more physics and a lot less NOVA than you would hope for. I know from experience.
I did not take the lab despite my university having a world-class planetarium, so maybe that's my fault.
I hated school, though I love learning. I was always bored. I'm planning to teach a class at UNC after I "retire," which I hope is in the not too distant future. At least that's what Tim Ferris says.
To pick a class, I'd look at the type of thing you spend the most Wikipedia time on and find a class that specializes in that type of thing.
You've just killed the dreams on non-Wikipedia users. My death shall be on your head!
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Thanks for the reply, buffcoat. You remind me that I've often thought that some accounting knowledge would really be a big help.
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I really enjoyed the two accounting classes I took in community college. I even briefly considered becoming an accountant.
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I really enjoyed the two accounting classes I took in community college. I even briefly considered becoming an accountant.
I thought for awhile that I might be some kind of art history prodigy after my professor gave me an A even though i never showed up for the final.
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When I was 17, I thought I was going to be the next Quentin Tarantino and signed up for the radio/TV/film production focus in communication at my school. Everyone in his group met together during orientation. I was grouped in with people who had spacer earrings, listened to KMFDM and talked a lot about nihilism.
I had an inkling at the time that this field of study was not for me. However, I unfortunately stuck with it for four miserable years. The major provided me with absolutely nothing I can use today, aside from the really awesome paper I wrote about "Heathers". And I also got to read a screenplay called "The Island of U.T.O.P.I.A" written by a stoner kid named Brooklyn ("They call me that because that's where I'm from.) that was absurdly entertaining and a topic of discussion on a recent edition of my basketball podcast.
I, fortunately, ended up taking a lot of history classes. Unless you're planning on becoming a teacher, history classes are practically useless. But the professors in that department were all really brilliant and strict in terms of quality of work. My writing and researching skills improved exponentially in those classes.
I wish, as an undergrad, I took more history and political science classes. I'm REALLY glad I didn't take any creative writing classes -- my friends who fancied themselves aspiring writers all ended up becoming lawyers, for the most part.
When I was in grad school, I was able to load up on a bunch of finance, business, accounting and economics classes. These classes have been ridiculously useful. Finance seems really boring but it comes in handy now when I have to pick a 401K plan for my wife and I.
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When I was 17, I thought I was going to be the next Quentin Tarantino and signed up for the radio/TV/film production focus in communication at my school. Everyone in his group met together during orientation. I was grouped in with people who had spacer earrings, listened to KMFDM and talked a lot about nihilism.
I had an inkling at the time that this field of study was not for me. However, I unfortunately stuck with it for four miserable years. The major provided me with absolutely nothing I can use today, aside from the really awesome paper I wrote about "Heathers". And I also got to read a screenplay called "The Island of U.T.O.P.I.A" written by a stoner kid named Brooklyn ("They call me that because that's where I'm from.) that was absurdly entertaining and a topic of discussion on a recent edition of my basketball podcast.
I, fortunately, ended up taking a lot of history classes. Unless you're planning on becoming a teacher, history classes are practically useless. But the professors in that department were all really brilliant and strict in terms of quality of work. My writing and researching skills improved exponentially in those classes.
I wish, as an undergrad, I took more history and political science classes. I'm REALLY glad I didn't take any creative writing classes -- my friends who fancied themselves aspiring writers all ended up becoming lawyers, for the most part.
When I was in grad school, I was able to load up on a bunch of finance, business, accounting and economics classes. These classes have been ridiculously useful. Finance seems really boring but it comes in handy now when I have to pick a 401K plan for my wife and I.
Actually now that you mention it, I think history classes are really useful in terms of giving people better perspective about why things are the way they are, awareness of paths that lead to really bad outcomes, our situation is not that special or unusual, etc and so on.
I do wish one of the languages I studied had stuck.
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My International Studies professor in 1993 or '94 talked a lot about his trips to North Africa and Tanzania, and al Queda, if not in name, but I was more interested in the Australian chick who sat next to me.
I still have my notebook from that class though, and it's pretty interesting.