Proof that an English degree is harder to get than an engineering degree

[zinfamous]

This is totally true. I'm a card-carrying scientist (or I was before I sold out and started my MBA) for nearly ten years. It drives me freaking nuts when I see people on ATOT talking up science, and engineering, like it is some end-all, be-all to everything. Most people who say this probably are not scientists themselves or they are still in college or right out of college and are acting as pretentious as hell.

In regards to how "hard" programs are, a few years ago when my wife was working on her PhD in art history, she was told to go and take a semester to learn German. There is no way in hell I could have learned a new language in a semester. My point in this story is that technical people scoff at so much of the arts and humanities, yet I would tend to believe that most of "us" would be absolutely terrible at learning a new language in a few months.

Finally when I was working as an analytical Principal Investigator I had to compile big-ass reports, and the ability to be a pretty good writer is absolutely paramount. Arguably you can be a genius at science stuff, but if you cannot convey your data then all of that work you did was almost meaningless. Writing and communicating with others are crazy important skills and should not be casually dismissed.


I assume this is some slam of English majors, which if so is a clear indication of your inability to think critically. As noted by somebody else, the typical English major has no desire at all to go to medical school so of course as a percentage of applicants there is likely not to be a significant amount of English majors.

Also at one point some stats mentioned that philosophy majors tend to do the best in medical school. Food for thought.

Philosophy majors also tend to make better CEOs than do MBAs. The ability to think is somewhat essential for success.

 

[zinfamous]

Nah. The thing is engineers can write. We can't write beautiful eloquently written pieces of literature, but we sure can write technical papers, and we sure can argue on P&N and we sure can do decent writing. I'm sure most engineers do more than FINE on their general requirements classes.

On the other hand, even the biologists struggle with a simple physics class and struggle with concepts that we learned in high school.

nah, you only think you can write.

As with any science these days, any field has become a very niche focus. I would think out of all the areas encompassed by engineering, there is a solid foundation of physics that most would share, while areas of chemistry and EE are more enforced depending on your work, so your level of expertise and understanding would differ among engineers.

That's probably as good as it gets, I'd think. Even within Biology, the work has become so narrow that plenty of biologists generally don't know wtf other biologists are doing.

say I'm in embryology, looking at heart development. I'd share certain tools that a an evolutionary geneticist would share, if both did a fair bit of wet lab work, but the tools for analysis, let alone the type of data we would be interested in are vastly different. Presenting a talk to one via the other's work would require a significant amount of background info to bring one up to speed.

Now when you get into population genetics...these people don't really even do science (in my mind, anyway). it's mostly computer programming, 100% modeling, all theoretical, analyzing others' data, essentially. Interesting stuff, but I don't give a damn. This field is more similar to CE, even physics, in a way, than most areas of biology

 

[zinfamous]

nope, business major; way more marketable than either of those two



One example isn't a trend

Business is not a major. it's common sense. It's a school, or trend, really, that should have nothing to do with academics, b/c it isn't academic.

 

[hanoverphist]

I am an engineer and I think writing papers based on essays and poems is pretty tough, almost impossible for me to do it with ease. Same is probably true for history and english majors that write very well, but can't do hard math like differential equations and all the math that goes along with signals and systems. To each his/her own...

engineers arent typically artistic or creative. thats why they hire guys like me to make their programs/ apps look cool and have more than 4 colors in them. those 4 being a grey background, red/ green for status and blue for info. i work with engineers daily, they are the black hole of creative design. they can go for days being creative on ways to improve a process (or figure out a new process) but ask them to make a spiffy interface and you get boring, hard to read screens

 

[SunSamurai]

engineers arent typically artistic or creative. thats why they hire guys like me to make their programs/ apps look cool and have more than 4 colors in them. those 4 being a grey background, red/ green for status and blue for info. i work with engineers daily, they are the black hole of creative design. they can go for days being creative on ways to improve a process (or figure out a new process) but ask them to make a spiffy interface and you get boring, hard to read screens

So basically they make sure houses don't fall on top of people killing them instantly, and you make sure the carpet matches the drapes.

:awe:

 

[ShawnD1]

So basically they make sure houses don't fall on top of people killing them instantly, and you make sure the carpet matches the drapes.

:awe:

Hey now, my duty as an engineer is to make sure the house wiring plan complies with electrical codes. I didn't say it would actually work properly or that it wouldn't cause a house fire.
(We've all seen houses that have 2-3 rooms on the same overloaded Federal Pacific stab-lok breaker)

 

[dainthomas]

Penny: No, I mean has he ever dated someone who wasn't a brainiac?
Sheldon: Oh, well there was this one girl who had a PhD in French Literature.
Penny: How is that not a brainiac?
Sheldon: Well, for one thing, she was French. For another, it was literature.

 

[TuxDave]

I'd rather spend time trying to understand that over trying to understand wtf a Bessel function is.

 

[Babbles]

Philosophy majors also tend to make better CEOs than do MBAs. The ability to think is somewhat essential for success.

I would tend to believe that is a bit on the made-up side. I would be totally floored if there was a single CEO at a major firm who had only a philosophy undergraduate degree, much less a large amount of these individuals from which a conclusion can be drawn. With that being said majoring in philosophy is a popular undergrad for many law and MBA students, but not as a final product. Therefore you can be a philosophy major and hold a MBA (or JD, or MD, or whatever); they are not mutually exclusive.

Keep in mind, strictly speaking anybody with a PhD in a technical field, oh say, engineering, are indeed Philosophers.

Business is not a major. it's common sense. It's a school, or trend, really, that should have nothing to do with academics, b/c it isn't academic.

That's a little short-sighted. First of all, how is it not academic? Research is conducted and published in journals, what else would you call it? Secondly since the U.S. university system is a liberal arts education, any sort of study which furthers knowledge is of itself an academic pursuit. Finally while I personally have no first-hand experience with undergraduate business studies, based on my MBA classes I would think it is reasonable to assume that learning finance and accounting is hardly common sense. In fact in many cases it sure as hell is not common sense.

There is a tendency for people to dismiss what they fail to understand, which is par for the course in the average ATOT discussion on academics.