When it comes to the U.S (it doesn’t seem to mention employment rate) Mathematics was 11th place in the highest paying majors 5 years in according to an NY Federal reserve study last month: cnbc.com/…/highest-paying-college-majors-5-years-…
I’m two classes away from both a math and physics degree, and I’m planning to go back to school for computer science once my slumlord finally writes a new lease.
Hey look, it’s my mom!(tried to be a math teacher, could never secure anything but substitute, refused to move outside the city for employment on another city, refused to “work beneath” her, my family was mostly single-income from my dad growing up)
Rant ahead: feel free to SKIP
She finally got a job when she had 0 calls in a year for a substitute position. Working for a hospital (hypocritically because of someone she knew getting her the job when she had been raging against that very thing in teaching positions for years) in their government insurance area. Or “beneath her” as she would have once said.
It gave me no small sense of Schadenfreude to see her “stoop” to my level after years of “I told you, you should have gone to college” the sheer unmitigated gall of which I clearly still hold a grudge over. I wanted to go to a tech school for welding. I could still have attended my AP science electives before going to welding class. And since nobody ever set a cent aside for college, it would have given me a way to pay for it if I decided to go. And most importantly I would probably have had my own house by now. Welders in this area get paid quite well. Especially if you can get in one of the factories nearby, they’ve got the best medical plan I’ve ever seen but apparently they’re owned by some European company so it makes sense.
Oh for sure. Especially since she’s a conservative Christian.
It’s weird hearing uneducated bullshit coming from an educated person’s mouth, like seeing a deer walking on its hind legs. You know something is wrong and you should probably leave before it notices you.
Seriously. As a biologist, my education was general enough that I learned how little I know about everything, instead giving me an inferiority complex.
To quote an old professor: “there isn’t a lab table dirty enough that a little benzene won’t clean it!” Fortunately for us (and him) ‘they’ wouldn’t let him do that anymore.
He also habitually turned his head sideways when working with, say, ether, because you dont want your pipe to set the fumes on fire.
For real. I made the life mistake of getting a PhD but managed to turn it into an asset by doing fairly straightforward finance programming shit that scares people.
Im an actuarie, so I can’t say that I have problem finding job, but I prefer programming and every task I’m assigned I spend all the time necessary to do it in python.
doing fairly straightforward finance programming shit that scares people.
The reason it’s straightforward to you and scary to others is because you have a PhD. Even if it’s not in finance, you gained abilities in reading documents, extracting useful information, integrating knowledge, teaching yourself skills, building tools, and generating reports. To most people, those are difficult things.
People absolutely can. It’s just a lot easier when you have guidance from an expert advisor, multiple peers to help you out, and an established pathway to focus several years of your life on doing so.
To be clear, my PhD “advisor” was a hindrance to my education, work, life, and career. I succeeded despite my ”advisor” and broke all contact upon my defense.
1/3 of my entering cohort left without degrees. Not atypical.
Get a job programming video codecs. Then you get to feel superior and inferior at the same time. Also eternally frustrated by doing things that help everyone and no one, and that you can never finish. It’s the best of all worlds.
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