You know you go to a prestigious university when..

lol!

Oh, the coveted check plus.

The pride of middle school math tests and English comp classes everywhere.

I laugh at your liberal arts educations.

Seriously, I would already have graduated if I'd just decided to study history.

I used to have a prof that would give out stickers on exams.  I loved it.

Gatyr wrote: ParielIsBack wrote: I laugh at your liberal arts educations. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand you're suddenly like every engineer major I've talked to. Way to be a pretentious douche.

My apologies for understanding abstract concepts.

Also, I can has job pleez?


Edited by ParielIsBack - 03 November 2010 at 4:09pm

My issue is not with LA majors in general, to be honest.

It's with LA majors here, who can essentially skate by and get a 3.5 while engineers have to complete 50% more credits and don't have the ridiculously low standards for work that I've encountered in my writing and history classes.  Four credits in engineering is 6-8 hours a week of class, with a similar number of hours outside, but four credits in history is 3-4 hours of class and an hour or two of reading (which is just so hard) a week.

I can't really speak for anything outside the history department, because that's the only one I've taken 300 level classes in, but it seems to me that the reason people are struggling to find jobs with their LA degrees is because they failed to apply themselves and actually learn something.

ParielIsBack wrote: My issue is not with LA majors in general, to be honest. It's with LA majors here, who can essentially skate by and get a 3.5 while engineers have to complete 50% more credits and don't have the ridiculously low standards for work that I've encountered in my writing and history classes.  Four credits in engineering is 6-8 hours a week of class, with a similar number of hours outside, but four credits in history is 3-4 hours of class and an hour or two of reading (which is just so hard) a week. I can't really speak for anything outside the history department, because that's the only one I've taken 300 level classes in, but it seems to me that the reason people are struggling to find jobs with their LA degrees is because they failed to apply themselves and actually learn something.

ParielIsBack wrote: My apologies for understanding abstract concepts. Also, I can has job pleez?

ParielIsBack wrote: It's with LA majors here, who can essentially skate by and get a 3.5 while engineers have to complete 50% more credits and don't have the ridiculously low standards for work that I've encountered in my writing and history classes. ...but it seems to me that the reason people are struggling to find jobs with their LA degrees is because they failed to apply themselves and actually learn something.

First, I never realized you were so arrogant. This is slightly disconcerting. You're smart, for sure, but apparently not smart enough to realize that getting into and doing well in a competitive major/school doesn't entitle you to be so condescending.

Second, you jest, but the last line in your first post pretty accurately reflects the grasp engineering students around me have on the English language. That doesn't really mean anything, it's just an aside that annoys the hell out of me given how they treat me when they learn my major.

The problem, though, isn't the degree or course material itself (I guarantee you a course on the British Empiricists could be made to be just as hard as any heat transfer or ---dynamics class), it's the fact that so many people fall back on liberal arts majors. This happens for two reasons: 1) more people want to enroll in in the school of engineering and business, so the schools put in place measures to weed out the weak/non-committed by making everything much harder than it needs to be, which causes 2) the kids who don't want to face going into the real world to fall back onto a major that isn't as competitive.

These students wind up being noncommittal and don't apply themselves. However, these students would have been the same way if universities didn't make entry into engineering programs so hard. Their study habits aren't indicative of anything except their will or desire to apply themselves, and don't reflect anything about those of us who work hard.

The jobs thing doesn't have to do with learning anything, though. Engineering students are taught to DO something, and it's a something that always needs to be done; liberal arts courses typically just teach something (though that would be different if schools needed to decrease enrollment in a program), and it's a something that can be found in a book (some majors within LA schools actually teach how to think critically/reason, but that's not usually conducive to doing well in a bureaucracy unless you are at the top...something you won't be with just a BA in Philosophy).

All my friends are photography majors and i'm a publication design major