Tell me about getting a degree in philosophy

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Tell me about getting a degree in philosophy

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

A few good philosophy classes will help teach you to consciously and methodically consider your motivations and the best way to optimize your outcomes at least enough to not make mistakes like turning to the forum full of bitter IT workers to ask about pursuing humanities degrees.

A few bad philosophy classes will teach you to hate philosophy, discourse, learning, and life in general and you won't even have a computer science degree to put on your resume at the end of it all.

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 16:04 on Nov 4, 2015

# ¿ Nov 4, 2015 15:53

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 08:09

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

freshman level anything is basically dog training. My intro biology classes I showed up on the first day and exam day and got an A cause I correctly determined that evolution exists and so does DNA.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2015 22:26

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

feedmegin posted:

My brother got a philosophy degree and literally ended up working at Burger King. Would you like fries with that?

this has more to do with your brother than his degree, frankly

# ¿ Nov 9, 2015 17:29

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

oliwan posted:

study what you want and worry about job and the likes later. im a high school teacher and this is what i tell my students.

Highschool kids don't know what the gently caress they want. They typically have barely any exposure to anything outside of high school academia and the kinds of farm-animal work people let teenagers do, so "study what you want" is really "out of stocking shelves, lit class, math class, and becoming your dad, pick which you hate the least" which is both horribly cruel and also a completely worthless decision once you've gotten out of college and those become some of the worst and least viable ways to continue (unless daddy's a millionaire, in which case kid don't need your advice).

It's not an insane thing to tell an adult who already has work experience, they're already capable of supporting themselves even if their credentials aren't optimized and they've got the perspective to choose the courseload that'll enrich their lives outside the classroom. It's a worthless blowoff to a highschool student coming to you for advice on how to start their life beyond the narrow horizons of a high school student's routine, and they'll remember you for it years down the line when the guy who offers to cut their taxes by slashing teacher pensions comes on the ballot.

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Nov 10, 2015

# ¿ Nov 10, 2015 21:46

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Cicero posted:

Right, the "study what you want" isn't necessarily a bad idea, it's the "worry about job and the likes later" that's bad. If you decide to study something that doesn't teach you marketable skills as a part of the regular curriculum, then you need a separate plan for your career. I mean, even if your major does teach marketable skills, you still generally want to supplement your classroom experience with other work, but that kind of thing is especially important if you're majoring in philosophy or medieval lit or what have you.

Sure, some people wing it upon graduation and turn out fine. Others wing it upon graduation and end up working retail for a decade or more. Unless you'd be ok with the latter, you probably don't want to wing it.

Yeah if you're clever (and lucky) you can wing it and land in a decent job that more likely than not has absolutely nothing to do with your degree and pretty much build up from scratch... or you can figure out a career that actually fits you in advance, find out what it entails, get a college degree that'll give you a leg up at it, and have the freedom and spending money to pursue your nonpaying hobby-type interests in any meaningful way sometime before you're 30.

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Nov 11, 2015

# ¿ Nov 11, 2015 01:23

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Jeb Bush 2012 posted:

That sounds great, except for the fact that

(and the fact that for most careers "a college degree that will give you a leg up on it" is basically "a college degree that you won't suck at and isn't some horrible university of phoenix like ripoff")

the system is hosed rn but it's possible for individual kids to get an internship or field-relevant summer job without a BA and try before they buy, which IMO is the kind of thing adults who know better should be encouraging kids to do instead of 'chase your lit-crit dreams' or 'programming jobs are paying idiots well this year you must optimize your build, major in COBOL'.

There's very few lines of work where you really need any kind of post-secondary education to get a crappy short-term entry-level job in the field and see what it looks like up close, what your coworkers do etc., at least better than you would get from a hundred years in academia; it's if you want to get paid grownup money doing something other than the idiot work nobody else wants that a more developed specialization comes into play and that absolutely depends on where you went to school and in what. ofc if you're a kid trying to figure this poo poo out and every adult in your life goes �\_(ツ)_/� then yeah you're stuck drifting aimlessly through your young adult life getting a BA in College and hoping it all works out in the end, but odds are it won't.

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 09:34 on Nov 11, 2015

# ¿ Nov 11, 2015 09:25

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

oliwan posted:

my five closest friends with philosophy degrees, all early thirties:

One is a journalist at a major newspaper
One works as a policy advisor for the department of environment
One works for Shell (this is the big sellout boo)
One is finishing a paid traineeship in public policy at various Dutch state departments
One works at an independent publisher reading cool books all day and getting paid for it.

all really enjoy their work which is full of cool people and are happy they don't work in a corporate environment and/or being surrounded by engineers. except the shell one I guess, but he gets to travel around the world 1st class so that's also cool.

at what refined level of metaphysics is government bureaucracy a better environment than corporate

# ¿ Nov 12, 2015 17:56

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Tequila Sunrise posted:

Possible unpopular opinion incoming, but college doesn't have to be about getting a piece of paper that helps you get This Specific Job. I went to college knowing I wanted to study English Lit, fully aware that that I would get asked "What are you going to do with that?" five times a week. And I would tell people I didn't know. But I enjoyed studying it, I enjoyed my classes and my professors, and that helped me keep motivated to finish my degree in 4 years. It also was the program that got me started doing volunteer work, which led me to apply to the Peace Corps, and that experience helped me grow as a person and shaped my career path. It also is the reason I got the job I have now, and will all be valuable with me moving forward career-wise.

So yeah, maybe if I think "I put myself 20k in debt for a degree that many employers see as not very useful" it looks bad. But I choose to see it as just another step in my life, one that has helped me to the point where I'm at. I made some of my closest friends, met my favorite teachers, had some great experiences, and figured out myself more because of it. Maybe an Accounting degree would have helped me get a nice job at 22, maybe I would have dropped out because I hated it. All I know if that I've never regretted choosing to study English.

It doesn't have to be but unless you are so remote from the very possibility of financial hardship that you can just casually blow tens of thousands of dollars on a fun hobby at 20 it should at least be a significant concern, and you should strive to have a concrete plan for your post-college life that doesn't involve you making money. Peace Corps isn't a bad one, though it's getting a lot harder to get into from what I can tell

you can make friends and have great experiences and grow as a person lots of ways, that's not something that can only be achieved through going 20K in the hole on an English degree. For folks who have to be self-supporting after college that's taking a real gamble that you'll get lucky and find something totally unrelated to what you've been doing with your life thus far that'll pay you like skilled labor or else you'll be capping off your four years of fun literary summer camp with a decade of drone work and loan companies owning everything you make past rent and ramen

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 07:32 on Dec 1, 2015

# ¿ Dec 1, 2015 07:26

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

I graduated with a lit BA and it actually seriously loving sucked, killed all joy to be found in the topic, and wasted years of my life I'll never get back. I spent some time at a top-tier college before running out of money and that was cool as hell, but it was cool as hell no matter what subject I tried there because good teachers and a good academic environment can make any subject thrilling and enriching to someone who has a little intellectual curiosity. The important thing here is 'go to a good school', not whether the name of your major is flowery and poetic enough to soothe your artist's soul.

You will not be chained up in the salt mines forced to labor 70 hours a day for choosing a focus you'll actually be able to get paid to apply every day for the rest of your life, that is a thing that happens to people who want to live that way (and people who are forced to live that way because they took on unsustainable debt to buy frivolous things at the most financially insecure stage of their life). For all other lit guys talk up their communication skills I've seen MBAs and high school dropouts equally well spoken who actually apply those successfully at about the same rate. If the coursework is rigorous enough and your fellow classmates sharp enough you can sharpen your critical thinking to a fine point studying sociology or architectural engineering or the cultural impact of ancient Scythian ball-scratchers; all of these things have more depth of complexity involved in their attendant problem-solving than applying Lacanian analysis to the fucken Great Gatsby. A lit or philosophy or theater degree isn't inherently worthless, but to hear you talk about it you specifically did not actually get anything in particular out of your college experience you wouldn't have gotten as a baseline from a quality education in anything but the very most hopelessly nerdy concentrations, and IMO this is the case for most people who aren't going to St. John's or Cornell or the like. Maybe that's not the case and I've just been confused by your superhuman communication skills, IDK.

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 03:19 on Dec 2, 2015

# ¿ Dec 2, 2015 03:10

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Did you minor in internet psychiatry, or is that something you picked up later?

# ¿ Dec 2, 2015 03:49

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

Avalanche posted:

What BAs/BSs nowadays besides engineering (except for civil and chemical), accounting, and degree+military give you a golden ticket to a sweet sweet middle class job all on their own?

(and this is assuming America and not loving Holland where poo poo actually works)

Philosophy is a good degree to get into med school if you have all the pre-req science classes too. It's loving amazing for Law. Good for Education/teaching too if that is your thing. Good for other medical careers like PT/OT/Speech Path/PA/etc. considering you have the pre-req science classes. Good for joining the military cause no one gives a gently caress what the degree is in and it's an instant ticket to officer/2nd Lt. .
Other than that, expect to spend endless amounts of time trying to convince HR managers with degrees from the University of Phoenix that you are not an idiot.

Just get some non-goon friends and ride those loving coattails to mediocrity because no one gives a poo poo what you know 90% of the time unless you are building rocket ships; just that you are Fred's best bud from Uni and are a totally standup chill dude that is a great fit for the company culture or whatever.

CRONY UP (or move to Holland)

i already paid for college why should I have to bother sitting through interviews instead of everyone giving me free money

Tequila Sunrise posted:

Really what most degrees show is that you are someone who is 1.) At least reasonably intelligent 2.) Dedicated enough to study something for multiple years by choice 3.) The kind of person who can be committed and work towards their future.

I will agree that much of these problems are rooted in the college system and not a byproduct of specific majors though.

Over a third of the country has at least a BA at this point so points 2 and 3 are probably a bit more fairly interpreted 'probably started at least roughly middle-class-ish' and 'did not have any life-ruining drug addictions at 18'. You could've graduated from most state-university humanities programs I've seen never having written anything more complex than five-paragraph format essays and never having read anything more involved than Catcher in the Rye (Cliffs Notes acceptable).

I feel like 'a BA in philosophy proves you're a deep critical thinker' is operating on about the level of 'if you get an MBA you will have to work in a cubicle 70 hours a week for the rest of your life'. This is what happens to some people, where their route in life took them to an exceptional noteworthy place, but even if that's what you're after it has just about fuckall to do with your choice in major. What these other concentrations - nursing, business, engineering, underwater basketweaving - distinguish themselves by is a core set of definable, standard competencies vetted to a basic standard of QC, rather than handwavy hot air about just being a better thinker, y'know, at thinky stuff.

A lot of it's pretty basic and nothing a sufficiently motivated person with a library card couldn't have figured out in a lot less than four years, but if you can't read a chart you don't get to be a nurse, if you've got a degree in engineering folks know you can probably figure out how to calculate a radius (unless you're that other, lovely kind of engineer); a philosophy or lit degree reassures people you're probably literate.

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 10:17 on Dec 3, 2015

# ¿ Dec 3, 2015 09:34

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

silence_kit posted:

Uh, that's not really a strong endorsement of a philosophy education as a useful education.

You just ceded the point that liberal arts educations aren't the only way to learn "critical thinking" (a foofy term for the ability to reason). If they don't have that, what kind of argument can you make for the utility of a liberal arts education?

You aren't even putting your money where your mouth is. You yourself aren't even trying to spin a philosophy degree itself into a career--instead, you are getting a useful education and are attending medical school and are training to be a doctor.

i kinda feel like the certified specialist in the field that's all about carefully thinking through your premises and arguing them in a cogent and persuasive manner being unable to describe the unique practical values of his field in a way that sounds like it means anything even to other people with the same background is way, way more damning than anything I was planning to say about philo/lit degrees

# ¿ Dec 13, 2015 05:39

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 08:09

A Wizard of Goatse: Dec 14, 2014

raskalnikov_86 posted:

This may come as a surprise to you, but some people value learning and self-enrichment over economic success.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KTsXHXMkJA

# ¿ Apr 22, 2016 21:38

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Tell me about getting a degree in philosophy