STEM Major Vs. Humanities

I have recently started teaching 150 level courses in sociology as I pursue my doctorate in Political Science and for the first time I have noticed the much talked about STEM superiority mentality, all the kids who are in the STEM field think that any sort of social or artistic field is stupid or beneath them.

I don't really understand how they could possibly see themselves as superior as opposed to seeing themselves as the other half of what society needs. Yes, we need science and math and doctors but we also need social workers, psychologists, human resource workers, teachers and artists.

Is it because they perceive their courses to be harder? Because it really is different strokes for different folks, most of the STEM majors essays that I grade are essentially trash and they have a pretty hard time expanding past basic literary concepts but at the same time I know math is very easy for them- the same can be said for the other side of the coin.

In order to have a properly functioning society we need pretty much all of the fields offered and taught in academia, yes, even art.

I feel like Sup Forums would be allot of STEM majors so I thought I would ask your opinion on the matter.

>inb4 higher education is a meme
If you really think higher education is stupid then you are flat out retarded and I simply won't respond to you.

>inb4 hur political science
I like it a lot and I am a great speech writer.

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Also im currently grading but I will read all responses later. Thank you in advance.

I'm finishing my English undergrad this sem. Am I completely fucked? Where do I go from here?

Do well on your GRE's and go pursue a doctorate. What a lot of people won't tell you is that if you do well schools will pay you to get a doctorate where with a masters you will have to pay out the ass and after 2 years if you dont like it you can leave and they give you a masters.

>I feel like Sup Forums would be allot of STEM majors

Most Sup Forums users have never stepped foot in college -- they are utter morons with ~60 IQs.

I am a law graduate and from what I can put as a personal example - many STEM people can provided do my job provided they wanted to especially the IT guys as their minds are wired to create logical systems, something law strives and fail to be for few thousand years now

on the other hand I could never ever come near the STEM people field of expertise and in depth understanding

So, I'd understand why they would feel superior, they generally are.

Humanities produces nothing. Period.

What do you feel is a worthwhile masters degree pursuing with a background in English?

As a guy who works with STEM profs, PhDs, and postdocs I will say that a lot of them are completely retarded outside of their particular narrow specialties.

The actually smart ones typically have a strong background in the arts.

That is interesting, but perhaps that is just the Law field, also the law field needs humanitarian aspects to it. Look at the war on drugs, if we had a more humanistic approach to the entire situation- on both sides of the political spectrum- we would not have created the massive prison clusterfuck we are in right now because we waged a make believe war for the purpose of getting votes.

As for my field I do the statistical analysis myself, and when I need help I get economists usually, but speech writing and policy making is largely sampling human feeling.

This. Listening to math grad students/professors/etc. is about the same as listening to your standard women's studies student. I've been unironically told to check my privilege by them before.

It is because social science and political science steal the term science but they are not empirical and do not follow the scientific method. They are not predictive, they are descriptive and you just bull shit what ever opinion your teacher spouts in class as most are just assholes that want to hear their opinion as the correct one. They lack rigor, and is just mental masturbation with no results that can be continuously repeated.

STEM is nothing like that

It created the weekend you are hopefully enjoying.

hmm, that's a tough one. The beauty of a master's degree is that you can go into pretty much any field provided you show basic interest in it so it really revolves around what you want to do. Perhaps teaching, journalism, creative writing? It's your life, live it.

People do respect the other side, just not on the Uni level because 90% of uni courses are utter garbage filled with propaganda. You can't politicise maths, you can always politicise english/non-stem stuff.

Sociology is predictive, so is Poly sci. Good teachers inspire discourse and should encourage it, I always do. Long term studies can also be very empirical. As for mental masterbation your entire post seems to be just that, hard on for stem much?

>If you really think higher education is stupid then you are flat out retarded and I simply won't respond to you.

It's not stupid but it's not as necessary as every liberal arts degree fuck makes it out to be. Just as society needs both sides of this metaphorical coin you mention society also has an equal need for people working in skilled and even unskilled labor. Just because I made the decision not to pursue a degree doesn't make you smarter than me in the slightest, but every uni freshman fuck would seem to disagree.

That's kind of true, but the politicization happens in a slightly more underhanded way. Control of funding drives what kinds of research is done.

How much money and publishing power is there going to be to come up with a study that points out that the hoopla about carbon dioxide is total nonsense?

How much money and publishing power are you going to get if you develop a better methodology that could be used for spying on people?

I agree that it has become politicized but you may be surprised with institutions that are smaller teaching schools, I had an incredibly hard line conservative english teacher whom I loved and I am liberal. We agreed to disagree and we bonded over Hemingway, got a drink with him at the end of the semester, very good man.

No, we don't. Social workers demand makes big government think there needs to more funds for mo programs. Psychology is a fucking meme, teachers can be math majors too, HR is already fucked as it is. Luring cunts onto it makes it worse for STEM/FEMA majors to get a job when these cunts won't hire you because you're a problematic shitlord.

As for artists. Sometimes real artists don't even attend school. Have you ever been to an arts school ? They're filled with spoiled brats, literal retards and hipsters without any sense of cultural history.

These degrees are worthless however they're good to filter the bad weeds out of the labor force.

its because they are butthurt social studies use the term sciences. Thats literally it.

I think society would benefit from many more artists for once. Real artists to make the cities beautiful and not look like factories, none of that sjw shit.

You're right OP, we do need those other people. Just don't complain when you're paid less.

>I have a child development degree and work at a daycare, why don't I make as much as a chemical engineer, WAAAAAA

/thread

This

why are you hanging out with all these literally morons?

this

I agree with you, be in peace worker man. Try and stay ahead of the trends though, green technology is coming and the workforce will adapt to it with or without oil workers or builders etc, just a helpful tip. Also please read as much as possible, for your own good and societies. I try and participate as much as I can in worker class activity, I worked construction all of college so that I could understand that kind of work.

Sounds sweet.
Agreed, I've done both philosophy and Engineering so I know (for AUS anyway) the difference is staggering. But you're not wrong about the funding stuff.

OP here, amen. Art should be respected.

Thank God at least one American on here isn't a complete fucking retard.
God speed OP.

It was, despite my political leanings I love reading stories about strong men being fucking men. I hate all the cuckolds I am surrounded by, be proud of who you are fellow liberal men, dont let people shit on you and just say "yeah lol white men suck". Nobody sucks for things out of their control, you are who you are. Respect yourself.

We really don't need humanity scienses. They are just waste of money.

If you're paying $30k a year or so you might as well get a degree that will make that investment worthwhile. The fact of the matter is the job opportunities you have with a journalism degree or a political science degree or sociology degree or whatever are far lower than the opportunities you'll have with a STEM or finance-related degree. By all means follow your passion and be a liberal arts major, just don't start crying when you're working at Denny's and are in debt for the rest of your life. It's just the way the current system is set up. The arts are needed, but there's far too many graduates with these majors and not enough jobs to go around for them so it's simply not a wise decision.

This. Art isn't degenerate for being art, art is degenerate because it's mostly filled up by sjws which it will continue to be if retard Sup Forums keeps scaring away all the decent people.

>I have recently started teaching 150 level courses in sociology as I pursue my doctorate in Political Science

Oh, Political Science. Yes, Political Science.

Ummmm it's called STEAM you shitlord, stop disavowing the inclusion of arts into the industry they're just as, if not more, important to development and progress, it's 2016 ffs kthanks.

I'm trying my hardest mate, used to be a full on libcuck. Now I am a man, I hate Hillary and donalds equally and almost vomited when I cast my vote for that woman, I take responsibility for her though. After all I endorsed her and will not blindly say she is great.

After I get my doctorate I will be joining the military, I am a bit of a voyeur when it comes to positions and ways of life and I want to experience soldier life, play as many rolls as possible before I die.

People from other boards come here to slum it.

I think you're getting caught up in the belief that there is some sort of STEM/Liberal Arts dichotomy. Virtually all undergraduate programs are a mix of the arts & sciences, in varying proportions. Fact is, some degrees are harder to attain than others, and what I mean by that is 'Rigor.' That's why society places more worth on them. If employment is what you want, you shouldn't seek a major that isn't rewarded on the marketplace. And those tend to be the degrees that virtually any warm body can complete, even while being distracted by extracollegiate activities like drugs, sex, and video games.

Are you flaming gay or what? Plenty of gaysex available in the military I hear. Have fun wearing high heels before being sent to die, probably get lots of strong young hot muscly dudes to cornhole you on your way out.

The humanities are important, Soft science isn't. I'm a visual artist and I hate how I get lumped in with the fucking social sciences for no good reason whatsoever.

Art has historically had more to do with STEM than sociology, and any artist can tell you that Nurture>nature is fucking retarded. We have the entire Modernist period to prove this. Our imagery does not change society. Art is reflective, not prescriptive and only STEM people or other artists have their eyes open to this reality, it seems.

STEM is the proletarianization of the University. It's the upcycling of trades-level training. A lot of STEM training should be done at the apprenticeship or community college level.

University should be about exploring and learning a range of material. If a student just wants to do one thing, they aren't university material.

>t. PhD student who deals with this daily.

?
Yeah system is shit right now, but it doesn't have to be that way. I know I would have never made it as a STEM major, I am not made for math and just doing stats for my job is terrible enough. I have been doing pol analysis for the past three weeks and I hate my life because of it.

We need some sort of expansion of these fields, we will see if the market corrects itself or if government intervention ala the new deal takes place.

Because we are. Most of the engineers I went to school with were smart enough to become lawyers or doctors, and a lot of them did. Most will also quietly admit it was much easier than getting there engineering degree.

When I took communication, design or business courses A's were easy as fuck.

What does 150 level mean? At my school courses were numbered 1, 2, ...

>when I cast my vote for that woman

I wish I was at least bi, why only take 50% of the population when you could have it all man? But nope, straight guy here.
Fair enough.

My Ph.D. is in physical chemistry, and we consider you retards to be a joke. Even my very liberal synthetic chem buds (also Ph.D.) think the social/political sciences are for tards that couldn't hack a real science.

>90% of uni courses are utter garbage filled with propaganda.

That's bullshit written by someone who failed out of a shit-tier school.

Off topic but have you learned a foreign language in the past?

>also the law field needs humanitarian aspects to it.

NO NO NO

morality and law should not be mixed

>social workers, psychologists, human resource workers, teachers and artists.
We need teachers, but we don't need any of those other things.

We will automate your worthless jobs and there is nothing you can do to stop

All the same shit, intro level or general education.
Private catholic school I teach at, who knows why they do anything they do.

yeah I know.

Agreed, (tfw conservative) but still applies. Good luck out there man.

Spanish, well- er- trying? Taken a few years of it, not great at it but im getting there.

k

k

stop guys, im so close to being triggered X (

You actually voted for Hillary? You should be ashamed of yourself, you fucking faggot.

I'm in STEM and don't give a fuck about what people study. Idiots are idiots and exist everywhere.

>sociology is predictive
>there is no one accepted theory in sociology
>my prof literally told us to not use "common sense"

Thanks friend.

Faggot I'm in STEM and I routinely take 600 level Poli sci course to boost my GPA.

Comparing writing an essay to fluid transport or quantitative physiology is being retarded.

There's a reason lib arts majors spend all of their time partying.

>academics are retarded
No shit. Any engineer will tell you the people who end up in academia are the people who couldn't hack it in industry.

psychologists are pointless....what's the point when you have psychiatrists and therapists?

I am, dont worry.
Data collection is pretty cut and dry, sociological philosophy aka theory is not. As for you teacher, anecdotal experiences don't mean much to me.

seems like an American thing.

>an undergrad
>taking grad classes
yeah, okay buddy

Data collection is only cut and dry in certain cases, and the entire school of thought based on interpreting data is useless (as you just stated).

My teacher is an anecdote of course but don't pretend most sociology teachers are smart people.

Go see one and find out. Also Therapy includes psychologists and psychiatrists as well as some social workers.

>He doesn't take grad level courses senior year

Nice meme.

Most people aren't smart, positions don't change that. Ive had smart and dumb teachers in all fields. Theory is not typically used to interpret data buddy, theory can be talked about with data results though. Also, In fact with a pretty good amount of money a well conducted survey is very cut and dry.

One out of seven social science professors self identify as marxist.

If the Social science Professors and art professors were not plagued with far left ideologues you would have a point but that is not the reality of the situation.

Universities need to be purged of marxists

This. I have always said, as a STEMfag, that all stemies should pick up one humanities as a "subspec" they can read on their own time. Even reading something like gender/woman studies is good because then you can have better fuel to fight the marxiest. You need to know your enemy if you want to kill them efficently.

Marxism is dumb, same as far right ideologies.

I am a democratic socialist myself though I believe in more economic policy making then the regular old Bernie supporter.

Were universities always such a haven for left wing ideologies?

This is true. College was originally designed to be a finishing school for the elite. It also trained ministers/priests, who tended to be the elites in the Medieval/Early Modern societies of Europe and Colonial America.

OP here signing out, thank you for all of your responses. It was actually pretty pleasant, have a good election day- stay safe.

It's a never ending cycle OP. People in STEM hate non-STEM people, but when you dive into STEM, you also find a certain hatred. For example, mathematicians usually think every other field (the STE) is trash.
You can literally see that academically. When mathematicians write papers, they make sure only mathematicians can read it.
It's human nature, everyone wants to believe they are a superior special snowflake. Believeing that simply on the basis of ones major/profession is simply... retarded.
Achievements should count.

Well, building a bridge or curing a disease is far more useful to society than writing a poem or Broadway script about doing those things. Liberal Arts produce nothing of value, except what snooty sophisticated elites are willing to pay for, since they feel 'enlightened and worldly' by doing so.

That being said, STEM fields are saturated with under-qualified and unmotivated younger workers as it is, never mind the push for even more. Not a good career path. Engineer myself, it's gotten bad out there career-wise over the ladt 25 years.

>mfw I'm in first year chem eng. and I speak, and write better than all the retarded business and arts plebs

You're a Marxist and you don't even know it. You are confusing Marxism for Classical Marxism, but there are many forms of Marxism and you are almost certainly a Cultural Marxist. You think you are so smart because you are getting a Phd, but you're a retarded loser who has been corrupted by Jewish subversives.

youtube.com/watch?v=G8pPbrbJJQs

And far right ideologies are not dumb. When the West is currently under attack from Marxist ideologies, the only reasonable response is far right ideology

>political "science"

You're in a good position, then. Being able to explain and communicate effectively is in my experience highly correlated with the ones who are legit smart.

You're confusing Marxism with Communism. Marxism is a just theoretical framework for studying society (i.e. the base/superstructure model). There have been conservatives who have adopted elements of Marxian critique. Genovese and Lasch come to mind.

>When mathematicians write papers, they make sure only mathematicians can read it.
what did he mean by this

it means mathematician's are severely autistic, no joke.

Mathematics is explained using mathematical terminology, you can't pick up a linear algebra book and understand it without understanding its foundations before hand. It's the same with philosophy.

Not everyone can go into STEM though.
I for one have zero maths abilities and wouldn't become engineer or IT programmer no matter how hard I would try.

You're not wrong OP, liberal arts are important, I have a deg in LA myself.

>I also have an engineering degree

I'll leave you to ponder which one I use to feed myself.

the fuck shit hole school do you teach at? when i was pursuing a micro bio degree all of the stem teachers i had would only allow 2 grammar errors per page before they started deducting points. literally this post would lose 3% simply from me having not capitalized 6 words that should've been if one of my old profs were grading it. not to mention my second sentence might be a run on sentence, should've isn't a real word etc, and my school was not anything spectacular.

tl;dr, your school sounds like trash.

I wouldn't expect to pick up a paper on any technical subject and understand it without a good foundation.

I see the same shit here at Columbia. Tbh the only worthwhile courses here are STEM courses. I'm taking an econ class and Computer Science Theory at the same time. Econ is fucking retard tier and the level of understand they ask is so low it's laughable. Even in the ivy league the only difficult courses are STEM. Everyone who goes here has to have some liberal arts classes and it is a fucking joke that people think they are worthwhile and prepare them for their future.

Not really, You can pick up any history paper, or economics paper and understand it fairly well with only rudimentary knowledge. You can't do that with maths.

I'm staff. It's not an ivory league university, but it's world-class big name for the college I work in. The entire field is going to hell in terms of standards for writing skills or even copy editing, though. Unsurprisingly, this correlates with a flood of H1Bs.

There aren't even as many signs on the walls these days advertising services to help folks with writing skills. Lack of supply or lack of demand? Either way, it's tanking.

Because STEM people are literally smarter and serve an important function in society. In fact, people in STEM are largely responsible for a country's technological and economic growth, despite being a relatively small proportion of the population.
There's also the fact that STEM requires a certain degree of intelligence, which limits the pool of people who can successfully get a STEM degree. A good chunk of Humanities degrees only require rote memorization and having an opinion.
There's also a problem with the Humanities generating a lot of useless degrees, and degrees that only serve to push left-wing political propaganda. It's dangerous in the sense that getting a degree validates someone to the general public and creates an ignorant class of people who see themselves as "intellectuals", which allows them to spew their idiotic bullshit, no matter how wrong they are.

>all the kids who are in the STEM field think that any sort of social or artistic field is stupid or beneath them.
And they are correct.
The only reason a school has social or artistic courses is that some moron said scientists need to take these classes.

>In order to have a properly functioning society we need pretty much all of the fields offered and taught in academia, yes, even art.
I'd love to see you prove that.

Most mathematics is very basic and obvious stuff. However, in order to express the basic stuff in rigorous logically coherent ways, you need to build up an entire language of rigidly defined mathematical symbols.

That's why all mathematical concepts are expressed in this language: because it is only in that language that they are precisely defined.

If you tried to explain the concepts using plain english, it would be very difficult to express it clearly, even though you could more easily express the "jist" of the statement in plain english.

Yeah, but the whole thing there is that if you want to give a good engaging presentation, or have your paper be accessible cross-domain, or teach, then you need to be able to concisely get the gist across in addition to delving into the language.

Same thing in software. Assembly is not hard at all. But if you have to look at 10 pages of assembly spam with no comments explaining wtf is supposed to be going on then it's going to be pretty slow going.

>Most mathematics is very basic and obvious stuff.

>Is it because they perceive their courses to be harder?
When I have 36 contact hours a week and sociology students have 8, I think that's pretty obvious.

Also the bit where if you fudge your way through an essay you can pick up a few marks. If you try to fudge maths you're going to get a flat zero. If you try to fudge programming then the automarking is going to give you a flat zero. In social sciences and arts 80% of the work goes into getting the last 20% of the marks, in STEM 80% of the work goes into getting any marks.

>Maths is very easy for them
Most sociology degrees have no mathematics requirements; not even statistics. It makes it incredibly hard to trust anything that comes out of there when we cant believe the numbers.

>implying it isn't

I got a degree in a "social sciences" field (media production with a focus in advertising) and now I'm going back to school for a STEM degree (nursing) and I can say, without reservation, STEM courses ARE harder than social and artistic courses. This is not a question of "different strokes for different folks" it is simply a fact. There is more memorization, and said memorization involves far more complex concepts.

STEM essays are "trash" because once youre elbow deep into learning how to make sometime fly or save a human life, flowery language suddenly seems to hold far less import than it once did.

Yes, art and music and poetry are all important. But if Beau Taplin does his job well, in two years time white girls on facebook are going to have a whole new slew of quotable lines to make them feel better about their past breakups.
If I do MY job well, then in two years time I'm going to be working on a team that surgically removes cancer from children.
Go up to anyone, ANYONE, and ask them "if you had to make a choice between one of these two fields suddenly disappearing, which would it be?"

That is why STEM majors look down on non-STEM majors. Yes, you perform a vital and necessary function of society. But for most STEM majors, they go in knowing that their courses are harder, their standards are more exacting, and the stakes are far higher for them if they fuck up. Robert Frost never crashed a space shuttle. Chopin never botched a surgery. No social worker ever designed a car with a faulty accelerator that killed multiple people before a recall could be issued. What you do is beneficial for the ego, soothing for the soul, and joyous for the mind. What STEM majors do is often a matter of life and death.

Without anyone like you, my quality of life goes down.

Without anyone like me, you will have no life at all.

This. Not all social science is predictive but some is. A lot more goes on than what people see in their undergrad electives.

Unfortunately STEM people tend to abandon the scientific method when they try to talk about the social sciences.

t. leaf