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Drink-Mix Man posted:Anyone want to tell me the real deal with this major? Literally all I've ever heard about it are the played-out jokes about how it's a bullshit degree for burn-outs, smuggos, and live-at-home manchildren. While I don't doubt there is some reality to this, I'd like to know if there is another side to the story. I majored in philosophy when I went to college. I heard all the jokes and was like "these are just jokes, right?" It turns out the word "joke" means "tell the brutal truth and then laugh about it." - I found that generally, the people who major in philosophy tend to actually be pretty bright and outgoing, if a bit stuck up intellectually - but they like to do a lot of drugs and party. - The major itself was cool and intellectually stimulating and you get to read a bunch of interesting books and write a lot of papers. The reading can be really dense and difficult. So the actual experience of going to college and getting an undergrad philosophy degree was not that bad. Where the experience falls apart is the part where you get a job afterwards. Getting a tenure track position as a college philosophy professor is not a sure thing - first you need a phD, and that doesn't even guarantee a job, most people with philosophy phD's don't end up as professors. An alternative to that is law school, but the bottom has fallen out of law school and that's another 150,000 dollars of degree, and even that won't be that useful unless you do really well on the LSAT and end up going to like a T15 law school and do everything right. So realistically, you have the same shot as anyone with a generic degree (like communications, biology, etc) of getting some random corporate job. I ended up getting a job in software QA and became a software developer later (went back to school part time and did a master's in CS.) Realistically though, if I had to do it again, I would not just major in philosophy. I would double major with math or computer science. It seems like there are a lot more entry level jobs available to someone with a CS/Math degree than a generic degree, and while I think people with generic degrees end up OK in the end, the transition between college/real world is much less pleasant than it could be.
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Nov 12, 2015 14:27
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Magnetic North posted:Quoted for truth. I am literally doing the same thing except a few years behind and without drugs (which come to think of it was probably why I don't have any remaining philosophy friends). Philosophy of science and epistemology were my big areas. That was a lot of fun to study and I wish that stuff was in philosophy 100 rather than "how the the Matrix is like Plato's allegory of the Cave and Descartes."
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Nov 13, 2015 03:25
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