The Useless College Degree

I just really really regret not having (making?) the time to do any internships or the ability to make it to job fairs because I was busy with my service job or rushing to catch my bus all the time I wasn't in class. I feel like that + recession and shit really fucked me over.

I got an english degree a little more than a year ago, did a bunch of internships while in school, and just lucked out and got a job doing tech writing

english degrees allow you to post on ILX all day and have people say OTM

p much

i got myself an English degree many years ago and i'm about to get another one. i think jaymc was totally otm about the best part about an English degree is not, you know, knowing how to recite the prologue to the Canterbury Tales in Middle English, it's thinking and writing critically. my job requires a lot of reading, but i don't "use" my degree that much, and that doesn't bother me?

i never did interships or anything, but i always write, just about every day, i try to see it more as a hobby than anything else, that way i don't get down about it.

sometimes I get drunk and write wedding vows

sometimes i fall asleep and dream about The Mayor of Casterbridge

w/ my philosophy degree, i thought that i wanted to do phd work in phil and was only planning on taking a year or two off between undergrad & grad. i just looked for random jobs at universities and publishing companies.

i ended up getting a job in an ethics library at georgetown university, where i worked for 2 years (kind of crazy tho that i actually found a job that was interested in the fact that i studied philosophy - this is totally the exception imo), and it was awesome. seriously, university/college jobs are the best imo. usually pretty decent pay, great benefits, really cool work environments.

also, my first job totally helped me figure out at least the start of my long-term career. a couple of library jobs later and i'm now doing a master's in library & info science. it was seriously the best decision i've made to NOT go into a philosophy phd program

i think it's *super* important to take LOTS (like at least 2+ years) of time off between your first college degree and your second

yea absolutely

I did a bunch of internships in publishing places, they were fun but it was weird working w/o pay in a field where it is almost impossible to work into a steadily paying gig

then again I interviewed for a job at a textbook publishing company and they gave me a spelling test that was easy as fuck, but I panicked and spelled everything wrong so maybe I don't deserve that shit I don't know

had i had more luck in job-searching, i might've taken more than 2 years off before starting grad school. but i wound up working for minimum wage with no benefits, with a bottleneck of eager overeducated people waiting for promotions ahead of me, so at that point a stipend, health insurance, and flexible schedule were pretty attractive. even if you just get screwed in the academic job search later, 5 years of guaranteed pay and some level of independence might be worth it, right?

I did an internship at a textbook publisher that may have led to my first job out of college, which was at a textbook development firm, although I think it's probable I would've gotten the job anyway. I did another internship that same summer at Minty Fresh Records, which mostly just served to deromanticize the notion of working in the music industry.

i think it's *super* important to take LOTS (like at least 2+ years) of time off between your first college degree and your second

Depends on your field, though. This would 100% not have worked for me in lolscience unless I had been working directly in lolscience. Like, taking two years off to be a barista would have been a bad plan.

why "lol"science? is it because most people around here have english degrees?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolsci

More lol to me than anyone else really because after studying lolscience I now spend my days in front of a computer lolemailing about nothing scientific.

And then, the longer I was out of school, the more insular the academic world seemed to me in general.

this feels very OTM to me

kinda weird this morning I got an email from some university telling me that I should apply to their complit phd program - and as far as I can tell it's not spam, and I haven't talked about grad school plans anywhere except here. somebody has it out for me

yeah out of the blue yesterday i got a card in the mail from a seminary

i was like lol 5 yrs too late yall

comp. lit. professors are kinda the very definition of self-important challops dropping geeks, though.

― Mad Vigorish (Eisbaer), Monday, January 5, 2009 8:32 PM (9 months ago) Bookmark

sorry dyao :D

haha I agree completely with that statement Eisbaer

which is why I wanna become one

jk complit dudes are chumps WGSS is where it's at

gbx how did you make the transition from english deg to med school? did you need to take any classes to get the science background? MCATs?

bigtime

did a post-baccalaureate program (about 15 months), wherein i took alllll of the prerequisite science classes in one fell swoop

chem, physics, orgo, psych, biochem, bio, w/MCAT prep on the side

it is secretly the easiest way into medical school, btw

all of my non-post bacc classmates were bewildered 20 year olds, tryin to deal with college, and i was over it

man that sounds nice. I always did well in chem/bio in high school.

shit guys, life is hard! :o)

i want to go back to college and take orgo and biochem! maybe someday.

lol, i am doing that right now. don't have a clear motivation for why, but i am anyway.

i don't think it should be legal to let people be english majors like i was

The greatest time of America is the turn of 20th century, when the industrial foundation was being built by great men and industrious labourers, most of those had no college education, and yet still learned to govern well and write well. The arch example is Andrew Carnegie. I strongly recommend you to read his booklet "the Empire of Business." I wish had read it in college so that I would not have wasted five years of my life pursuing a Ph.D. degree.

― Y. Chen, Saturday, November 30, 2002 1:56 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

didn't know thiel used to post here

Two English majors I knew wound up making mad $$$$ (to me, my standards are low) as advertising creatives

You may have noticed by now that all those claims made about a college degree being the key to a good job and increased lifetime earnings are never made by the actual institutions of higher learning, for this might be construed as a promise to provide one with that outcome. Their course materials only promise to provide a reading list and so many hours of classroom instruction, lectures, seminars, or labs. Which they deliver. Along with a hefty bill.

I think my English major was extremely useful, just overpriced.

my second-in-command was an English major and is doing just fine as far as I can tell

a friend of mine is a teacher and said she had students coming to her wanting to go to community colleges or local state colleges to avoid the 20-40k of debt and that she told them "Screw the debt, it's a priceless education, the benefits you get from it will offset the debt" or something like that.

I don't know if I have a frame of reference for whether that's good advice anymore, I assume it would depend on what your degree would be in. I have a bachelor's in psych and I do nothing with it but it did get me into the company I started at 11.5 years ago which (at the time) I wouldn't have gotten in without. but i can imagine someone not that lucky might be struggling with those debt payments/credit score/etc.

also depends if you're getting the education purely for career purposes or not I guess

I know we'll never do anything that Europe does first because GALLONS INCHES FAHRENHEIT MOTHERFUCKER but the 3-year degree concept seems like it could be pretty handy dandy especially if we want to make baccalaureates affordable (and accessible?) to everyone

a friend of mine is a teacher and said she had students coming to her wanting to go to community colleges or local state colleges to avoid the 20-40k of debt and that she told them "Screw the debt, it's a priceless education, the benefits you get from it will offset the debt" or something like that.

the world is a complicated place full of variables and i am an expert neither in education in general nor in these kids' cases in particular but fwiw the emotion this induced in me was blinding rage

In my own case, I loved my liberal arts education. I find academic subjects fascinating and I continue to pursue a loosely academic, but wholly autodidactic, education even into my seventh decade. But in a way this was my birthright. My family has a strong streak of academics and the liberal arts running through it.

I hate the idea of people mortgaging their futures to get a mediocre education in subjects they have no natural affinity with and scant appreciation for. It's a shame and a waste and leads to no good for anyone involved.

A friend of mine went six figures into student loan debt for a Masters in Library Science.

Today, she works at a library.

feel very blessed that my totally useless 4 year ba in history and spanish and latin american studies cost me < $7000 US, i only paid say $3000 of it, and my no longer paying it has no impact on anything including my credit rating #albagubrath

I guess some poignancy re: "forget the debt, embrace your college years" is tied up in nostalgia for a liberal arts college lifestyle overly represented in fiction that's unavailable to all but a few privileged kids... but if there was a moment when that wasn't true it was a very small moment anyway so fuck it.

the world is a complicated place full of variables and i am an expert neither in education in general nor in these kids' cases in particular but fwiw the emotion this induced in me was blinding rage

― le Histoire du Edgy Miley (difficult listening hour), Friday, August 12, 2016 10:22 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tbh I was annoyed by it too simply cos to me it's easy to tell someone else to take on 20k in debt when you ain't the one paying it back. esp when students are likely to listen to you when you're their teacher.

"forget the debt, embrace your college years"

gah, that makes my head explode in rage.