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College?
 
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EnginGhent
Super Regular
Crack-Powered Capper

P: 05/10/2021 10:47 EST
    Don't get a Masters or a PhD unless you plan on going into academia, or truly just miss the academic environment of learning. Those for sure don't do what they used to.  
gg#4
Super Regular
Killer Scout

P: 05/10/2021 12:36 EST
E: 05/10/2021 12:38 EST
    I r dumb. I went to a trade school. Did college for a semester at UMASS Lowell an realized no one would help me sign for loans and spent the next year working to pay it off.

Oh well.

Ole GG#4 is gonna be alright

I think about going back, but im not sure id get paid anymore money than I do now.

Fortunately I'm in a trade that recognizes experience as being more valuable than some piece of paper
  
Backalleybuttlove
Super Regular
Crack-Powered Capper

P: 05/10/2021 12:46 EST
   
-[IBSC]-iLluSiON- wrote:
I respectfully (sort of) disagree. I just think it's not as valuable as it was 20+ years ago.
I think it depends on what the degree is in and from where. I know someone with a petroleum engineering degree from one of the best geology and petroleum engineering schools in the country and he's making six figures with just a bachelor's degree. My BA in psychology is a joke. In one of the courses, one of the test questions was asking what the four DNA bases are and where they align... that's like a middle school question.

Also, don't put a master degree on a pedestal. What are you thinking of doing it in anyway? I'm glad I'm doing what I'm doing but I can't wait to be back in the private sector. Starting my master degree in science during Covid has been an eye opener for me. In one of my interviews the guy said he hasn't done science in ten years and that he's essentially a bureaucrat trolling for grant money. I also think the zoom class has caused a big loss in respectability for academia at least for me. I feel terrible for people forking over $50k a year to study over zoom. Most of the master degree courses I'm in are essentially an intellectual circle jerk; the lowest grade in some of the courses are like an 85 when you look at the grade distributions. I'm doing interesting stuff but it's shit money but I hope it'll be an investment for a good job after I'm done. I don't know if I'll have the power to do a PhD.

It is sad that it used to be you could drop of high school, join the steel workers union, and be able to afford a house and two cars and have a stay at home wife with beer and pot roast ready when you came home.
  
straightcashhomie
P: 05/10/2021 13:06 EST
   
gg#4 wrote:
I r dumb. I went to a trade school. Did college for a semester at UMASS Lowell an realized no one would help me sign for loans and spent the next year working to pay it off.

Oh well.

Ole GG#4 is gonna be alright

I think about going back, but im not sure id get paid anymore money than I do now.

Fortunately I'm in a trade that recognizes experience as being more valuable than some piece of paper
the only thing that matters in this world is having 6 pack abs.
  
Help
Super Regular
Crack-Powered Capper

P: 05/10/2021 14:21 EST
   
Backalleybuttlove wrote:
-[IBSC]-iLluSiON- wrote:
I respectfully (sort of) disagree. I just think it's not as valuable as it was 20+ years ago.
I think it depends on what the degree is in and from where. I know someone with a petroleum engineering degree from one of the best geology and petroleum engineering schools in the country and he's making six figures with just a bachelor's degree. My BA in psychology is a joke. In one of the courses, one of the test questions was asking what the four DNA bases are and where they align... that's like a middle school question.

I know I’m dense sometimes but why would you be tested on DNA components? Is it because of genetic conditions of patients? If so, I still don’t see how it’s relevant on treating the patient. Makes me think of the statics class I took for construction management. As if I’d go check the calculations of the engineers that designed the construction project 😂.
  
Mr. Walnuts
Daycare Manager
Pipey FlagCatcher

P: 05/10/2021 14:32 EST
    Muscle heads aside,

Something a headhunter told me some years back about college degrees seemed to have some validity. When I described the positions I was hiring for, she immediately surmised that I would need candidates with a bachelor’s degree. Not necessary, I argued, the positions were not that technical or concentrated in a specific area of expertise. Still, she said, I was asking for a lot of hard work and independent decision-making. She asked about my own education.

I explained I started community college taking full loads and working full time on a graveyard shift. Lucky to end up as a full time student each semester, with less than 2,5 GPA for each. After 3 semesters, I quit school, quit the graveyard gig, and went to work in restaurants, where I chased pussy, smoked dope, and snorted coke for 8 years before going back to school. In a year and a half (full loads, summers included) I graduated cum laude with a BA in American Studies (fuckin awesome degree plan).

Because you were immersed, she says. You had to recognize what they really wanted, learn to research and the best ways to present it. She was also right that I had learned to team up with other students and actually participate in the school itself (steering committees, etc). This would have been almost impossible to accomplish if I had gotten the degree piecemeal over the years, she explained. So not only did I need people with a degree, but degrees that had been achieved without interruption.

I was skeptical since, technically, not even *I* had accomplished that. But she brought me 7 candidates to interview, 5 with degrees, 2 without. I put them all through serious interviews, getting a feel for their personal backgrounds and philosophies, posing hypotheticals for them to resolve, and exploring their work ethic, yadda yadda. You know which ones I picked?

THE ONES WITH THE BIGGEST TITS!

Kidding. Kind of. I hired one with (fresh outta school) and one without a degree (a smidgen of experience), thinking the latter would likely prove equally or better suited to the job as the other. I assigned them their own projects and did expect a little teamwork from them, but Mr. No Degree became increasingly reliant on Ms. Degree to get his shit done. In the meantime, Ms. Degree was not only handling her own shit but continually coming up with better methods. I’m not necessarily saying that the degree made the difference, but I could see how she was employing some things I had learned later in college.

I may be biased because I’ve been there. Of course, my later post-grad schooling was mandatory for my profession and I don’t count that here. Totally different animal and I sucked. But I also think there should be solid institutions for trades. I’m totally jelly of tradesmen. Sad part is, that there is so much scamming of students going on in that area.
  
Backalleybuttlove
Super Regular
Crack-Powered Capper

P: 05/10/2021 15:04 EST
   
Help wrote:
Backalleybuttlove wrote:
-[IBSC]-iLluSiON- wrote:
I respectfully (sort of) disagree. I just think it's not as valuable as it was 20+ years ago.
I think it depends on what the degree is in and from where. I know someone with a petroleum engineering degree from one of the best geology and petroleum engineering schools in the country and he's making six figures with just a bachelor's degree. My BA in psychology is a joke. In one of the courses, one of the test questions was asking what the four DNA bases are and where they align... that's like a middle school question.

I know I’m dense sometimes but why would you be tested on DNA components? Is it because of genetic conditions of patients? If so, I still don’t see how it’s relevant on treating the patient. Makes me think of the statics class I took for construction management. As if I’d go check the calculations of the engineers that designed the construction project 😂.
That course was behavioral genetics. I was on the behavioral track of the psych degree rather than the clinical track. This was also a BA and not a BSc so my transcript is full of liberal farts courses. The teacher was nice and the class was interesting but the level of the test wasn't at the level of the university. The statistics course you took I think that's mainly to weed out people. It's also a way of lending respectability to your construction management degree. It's like with my plant science degree. All the hard courses were in the first year to weed out people. Learning about how much force you need to launch a satellite into orbit 10,000km from the earth's surface has nothing to do with plant science but like hell you're going to get the degree without passing the physics class in the first year. My last year I took a wine tasting class as an elective and the test was a wine tasting.

My molecular genetics course at my second college would be parallel to the behavioral genetics course at my first university and have questions that we're like a paragraph long or a picture of some sort of complicated process. You would have to apply what you learned in the class rather than just regurgitate facts and memorize things.
  
straightcashhomie
P: 05/10/2021 15:33 EST
   
Mr. Walnuts wrote:
Muscle heads aside,

Something a headhunter told me some years back about college degrees seemed to have some validity. When I described the positions I was hiring for, she immediately surmised that I would need candidates with a bachelor’s degree. Not necessary, I argued, the positions were not that technical or concentrated in a specific area of expertise. Still, she said, I was asking for a lot of hard work and independent decision-making. She asked about my own education.

I explained I started community college taking full loads and working full time on a graveyard shift. Lucky to end up as a full time student each semester, with less than 2,5 GPA for each. After 3 semesters, I quit school, quit the graveyard gig, and went to work in restaurants, where I chased pussy, smoked dope, and snorted coke for 8 years before going back to school. In a year and a half (full loads, summers included) I graduated cum laude with a BA in American Studies (fuckin awesome degree plan).

Because you were immersed, she says. You had to recognize what they really wanted, learn to research and the best ways to present it. She was also right that I had learned to team up with other students and actually participate in the school itself (steering committees, etc). This would have been almost impossible to accomplish if I had gotten the degree piecemeal over the years, she explained. So not only did I need people with a degree, but degrees that had been achieved without interruption.

I was skeptical since, technically, not even *I* had accomplished that. But she brought me 7 candidates to interview, 5 with degrees, 2 without. I put them all through serious interviews, getting a feel for their personal backgrounds and philosophies, posing hypotheticals for them to resolve, and exploring their work ethic, yadda yadda. You know which ones I picked?

THE ONES WITH THE BIGGEST TITS!

Kidding. Kind of. I hired one with (fresh outta school) and one without a degree (a smidgen of experience), thinking the latter would likely prove equally or better suited to the job as the other. I assigned them their own projects and did expect a little teamwork from them, but Mr. No Degree became increasingly reliant on Ms. Degree to get his shit done. In the meantime, Ms. Degree was not only handling her own shit but continually coming up with better methods. I’m not necessarily saying that the degree made the difference, but I could see how she was employing some things I had learned later in college.

I may be biased because I’ve been there. Of course, my later post-grad schooling was mandatory for my profession and I don’t count that here. Totally different animal and I sucked. But I also think there should be solid institutions for trades. I’m totally jelly of tradesmen. Sad part is, that there is so much scamming of students going on in that area.
I can't wait to figure out what old folks home you're in. Buy it, evict you, sell it.

All in a days work.
  
Mr. Walnuts
Daycare Manager
Pipey FlagCatcher

P: 05/10/2021 16:57 EST
E: 05/10/2021 16:57 EST
    GED, huh? Nothing wrong with that.

  
angry_salad
Super Regular
Medic Capping
Service

P: 05/10/2021 19:42 EST
    Fun fact: I never graduated high school.  
angry_salad
Super Regular
Medic Capping
Service

P: 05/10/2021 19:43 EST
   
straightcashhomie wrote:
the only thing that matters in this world is having 6 pack abs.
Still waiting for that list......
  
Ignorant_Florist
Daycare Manager
Pipebomb Monkey

P: 05/10/2021 20:45 EST
   
straightcashhomie wrote:
the only thing that matters in this world is having 6 pack abs.
I can do better than that... I have 1/2 keg abs.

Top that, motherfucker!
  
EmotionallyDisturbedParakeet
Super Regular
FatGuy With
A LittleGun

P: 05/11/2021 09:02 EST
   
EnginGhent wrote:
Don't get a Masters or a PhD unless you plan on going into academia, or truly just miss the academic environment of learning. Those for sure don't do what they used to.

Not familiar with the trends in other professions, in engineering the opposite seems to be true: a bachelors is no longer really enough, a masters is kinda the new bare minimum and increasingly engineering jobs in industry, not research, require a PhD to perform adequate design/planning/consulting.

My first job out of college I worked under a professional engineer as a software developer / naval architect developing software to predict the performance of high speed naval vessels and also used a computational fluid dynamics suite called ANSYS for seakeeping analyses of offshore structures.

I was under qualified but got the job after impressing the shit out of a Maine maritime professor with a 3D hovercraft simulator I wrote in high school, who also taught graduate propulsion studies at MIT.

Two associates had masters from MIT, a fellow coder had an undergrad from there, I participated in wave tank testing comparing my simulation results for power take off from surge wave energy converters (alternative energy devices).

The plan was to get me involved in more research projects and use the industry research to take a crack at getting into MIT for a masters so I could be more qualified for the job I already had. I washed out, almost entirely due to drinking and untreated mental health issues, in 2012, quit that job/opportunity went to sea instead but was ultimately replaced at that firm by a fellow who did in fact have a PhD in ocean engineering.

  
gg#4
Super Regular
Killer Scout

P: 05/11/2021 09:10 EST
E: 05/11/2021 09:14 EST
   
Backalleybuttlove wrote:
It is sad that it used to be you could drop of high school, join the steel workers union, and be able to afford a house and two cars and have a stay at home wife with beer and pot roast ready when you came home.
This is still true today.

Union ironworkers make like six figures where I live bruh.

Just gotta be comfortable straddling a W24x162 200ft in the sky. Trusting your life to some metal clips welded on.
  
Murf
Super Regular
Killer Scout
Supreme

P: 05/11/2021 11:23 EST
    Ocean power is pretty fucking cool. Doing it at scale and storing it is an issue. Unlimited resource.

https://oceanpowertechnologies.com/

EmotionallyDisturbedParakeet wrote:
EnginGhent wrote:
Don't get a Masters or a PhD unless you plan on going into academia, or truly just miss the academic environment of learning. Those for sure don't do what they used to.

Not familiar with the trends in other professions, in engineering the opposite seems to be true: a bachelors is no longer really enough, a masters is kinda the new bare minimum and increasingly engineering jobs in industry, not research, require a PhD to perform adequate design/planning/consulting.

My first job out of college I worked under a professional engineer as a software developer / naval architect developing software to predict the performance of high speed naval vessels and also used a computational fluid dynamics suite called ANSYS for seakeeping analyses of offshore structures.

I was under qualified but got the job after impressing the shit out of a Maine maritime professor with a 3D hovercraft simulator I wrote in high school, who also taught graduate propulsion studies at MIT.

Two associates had masters from MIT, a fellow coder had an undergrad from there, I participated in wave tank testing comparing my simulation results for power take off from surge wave energy converters (alternative energy devices).

The plan was to get me involved in more research projects and use the industry research to take a crack at getting into MIT for a masters so I could be more qualified for the job I already had. I washed out, almost entirely due to drinking and untreated mental health issues, in 2012, quit that job/opportunity went to sea instead but was ultimately replaced at that firm by a fellow who did in fact have a PhD in ocean engineering.

  
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