Question for college grads

[NJL]

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.

[dcgut]

I'm a philosophy major and completely miserable.

[AllisonLeGnome]

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.

[cavorting with nudists]

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.

[Steve of Bloomington]

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.

[Shaggy 2 Grote]

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!

[yesno]

Never too late.  I'm taking classes at the Alliance française right now.  Those and Pimsleur tapes are pretty good. 

[Bryan]

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?

[buffcoat]

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.

[Shaggy 2 Grote]

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.

[yesno]

Yes, Rosetta Stone makes good stuff.

[JustSheaNo]

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."

[Keith Whitener]

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!

[dave from knoxville]

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!

[Bryan]

Thanks for the reply, buffcoat. You remind me that I've often thought that some accounting knowledge would really be a big help.