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Why Science Majors Change Their Minds

If they find any science whatsoever "too damn hard", then they don't belong in the first place. Reason I went into IEOR was that I found it fun, regardless of whether it was hard or not.
 
That's all well and good but when students have their parents on their backs about grades and see friends in other departments getting 3.5's for half the work it is pretty frustrating. I'm not sure how it is in other states but in florida you also have to take the state scholarship (bright futures) into account, where 75% of tuition is paid for if students maintain a 3.5 and it doesn't give any regard for declaring a far more time consuming major.

If the country wants more engineers mathematicians and scientists then they should be treated at least equally at worst.
 
There's scant guidance and encouragement during the freshman and sophomore years, when students are having to work through relatively unstructured and poorly-motivated 1000-page texts on calculus and basic physics, and attending classes filled with 100+ students.
 
the reason that it's so hard is that these kids have graduated from a public education system where it's more important that they feel good about spelling dog "c-a-t" than actually spelling the word correctly. it's no wonder.
 
... and private schools are any better in this respect? If anything they pamper even more. You're their client, and noone wants their kid told that they are an idiot. Especially if you pay $50k a year for it.

I don't know if I mentioned this previously, but when I graduated from my public, small-town high school, I had accumulated over a year's worth of university credits already. Your hate is misguided.

oh, hey alexei! that post you put up on the OWS thread in response to one of mine never came through, even though i received an email with the text. perhaps you wisely took it down? but you can stalk me here, too <3

congrats on getting lots of college credits from your public school. that school seems to have failed, though, in regards to teaching you not to jump to conclusions. riddle me this: what percentage of students in the us attend public schools? what percentage attend private schools?

my comment had little to do with the public vs. private debate as it did with sheer numbers (and, while we're at it, top boarding schools haven't quite hit the 50k a year mark in tuition, but facts haven't seemed to get in the way of your posting yet). your shrillness is misguided.
 
These points are pretty moot. If there was money and prestige in these stem majors then I can assure you more people would be doing them. Can you seriously blame someone for studying business even if they have the capacity to do mathematics when the latter is more difficult and generally insulted?

I can fully understand this since I am the student who was a good mathematician and decided I would study economics without even questioning my decision. Now of course I'm older and enjoy rigorous coursework but I could never blame an 18 year old for choosing the easier, more respected, more rewarding path when it is their decision. Someone who has started in the stem undergrad system clearly had some interest in it but like anything else, the more ladders you have to climb and hoops you have to jump through, the more natural selection will run its course.
 
Ok so you found one niche, are you seriously going to argue that the number of high paying and well regarded jobs in stem majors are equal to business right now?
And just to end your argument altogether, can you say that the higher paying stem jobs are at a level that would justify why I have to put in much more time than my business school counterparts?

As an economist first I would say people will always follow the money, and the easy money logically is more sought after. Look at the aspiring quants, they are just as much sell outs to the stem community as any who drop out in undergrad. So people like Alexei and mfegrad should stop glorifying themselves and get real. Granted you may be smarter than the average college student who just makes the 3.0 but you only stayed a little longer in the game before you joined the business clique.
 
Ah I apologize if I misread your earlier statement, I thought you were agreeing with mfegrad that the reason students don't pursue stem degrees is a result of their affinity towards spelling dog "c-a-t".
 
These points are pretty moot. If there was money and prestige in these stem majors then I can assure you more people would be doing them. Can you seriously blame someone for studying business even if they have the capacity to do mathematics when the latter is more difficult and generally insulted?

On top of lack of money and lack of status, there isn't even any security in a job as scientist. This is why Americans don't go for scientific careers and American academic departments are full of Asian graduate students. I don't know if science and engineering are dead in the USA but certainly they're not in good health and some worthless bum of a politician saying there need to be more scientists doesn't change anything.
 
These points are pretty moot. If there was money and prestige in these stem majors then I can assure you more people would be doing them. Can you seriously blame someone for studying business even if they have the capacity to do mathematics when the latter is more difficult and generally insulted?

I can fully understand this since I am the student who was a good mathematician and decided I would study economics without even questioning my decision. Now of course I'm older and enjoy rigorous coursework but I could never blame an 18 year old for choosing the easier, more respected, more rewarding path when it is their decision. Someone who has started in the stem undergrad system clearly had some interest in it but like anything else, the more ladders you have to climb and hoops you have to jump through, the more natural selection will run its course.

I agree, on a personal note, I think I made the wrong choice going into engineering.Studying Stats & Economics or something similar as a B.A can be just as hard , mind opening and not less important, financially rewarding.

The high tech industry employees are simply the new age blue color workers , instead of working in a factory next to some machine you sit near a computer and code, most high tech industry jobs aren't more intellectually rewarding than other fields.

Real scientists are very rare, I assume less than 1% of Science and Engineering graduates do proper research , the rest are doing relatively regular jobs hence there is no reason not to do a similar job which pays more in the financial sector.
 
So people like Alexei and mfegrad should stop glorifying themselves and get real. Granted you may be smarter than the average college student who just makes the 3.0 but you only stayed a little longer in the game before you joined the business clique.

oh, i'm totally real, jesse. and i also know how to properly use the word "affinity."

less projection and better reading comprehension. thanks!
 
I love this thread and will include some of my thoughts as a middle class, public school, domestic student.....I entered college as a biotech major and wanted to go to grad school and develop products for sport nutrition companies. Freshman Bio and Chemistry were very very time consuming and required a lot of dictionary like memorization, but were not challenging or stimulating on an intellectual front. Calculus, Physics, Statistics, and Economics for much more intellectually stimulating, fulfilling and the first two were also decently challenging. Economics, originally my intended minor, became my major after not enjoying biology and chemistry, and loving intermediate macro, intermediate micro, and econometrics. I continued to take the "tough" courses and minored in math, statistics, and computer science.

Here are my thoughts:

1. The difference between high school and college is the requirement to understand material. The tests in high school are less intensive and grades are inflated through easy "busy work" type of daily assignments. Also, attending class everyday means that most of the material is presented during class hours. College requires outside of class prep work, and the motivation to actually understand the material to succeed on tests as opposed to memorizing concepts.

2. The "Open Door" college policy: every youth should go to college. The push by seemingly everyone to increase college attendance without keeping any decent standards has drastically reduced the level of instruction in the "soft" subject areas. So while management and political science majors have been dumbed down to accommodate mediocrity, curricula in "hard" subjects are less flexible (integrating a function is and will always be integrating a function). A huge gap in difficulty between subjects is a result.

3. In most highschools there are two ways to succeed academically: One- Being naturally intellegent and not needing to put forth much effort to make A's. Two- Not having any intellectual advantage and putting forth a significant effort to make A's. Because of the aforementioned occurance in my #2 the same type of gpa success can be acheived at the college level by either of these two ways in the "soft" subjects. Howver, the STEM subjects actually require intellect and discipline, a combination rare in modern America, and the reason why the majority of graduate programs in these subjects are filled with international students.

We need to combat grade inflation starting in primary school, prepare children to stay disciplined even after moving out of mommy and daddys house for college, allow foreign students who complete a STEM degree and pass a background check to become permanent residents, and instead of cutting the SMART grant to pay for more Pell Grants, the opposite should have occurred. My guess is that the percentage of international and first generation citizens who start out in a STEM program and finish the STEM program is much higher than that of typical American students. Also, students should be free to study whatever they please, but if universities mandated passing Calc II before taking upper level coursework and Calc III and a calc based statistics course to graduate with a bachelors degree regardless of subject, America would be much better off!
 
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