wasting years learning about poll optimization and legal jargon when I want to learn about the organization of society. i guess i assumed the so-called ‘science of politics’ encompassed that more so. it sucks because I’m a senior and at this point I guess I’ll just ride it out
You have nothing to be ashamed of. No one’s career path is linear. You draw on all experiences as you move forward, and I’m confident you can use this knowledge to provide insight that others will not have.
Most people change careers 2-3 times in their life, that doesn’t mean they start over entirely from scratch. I had a coworker who was notoriously the brilliant “numbers” guy — turns out he spent most of his career as a chef, of all things, and had only recently switched.
I studied astrophysics in college but my job is not remotely related to that. Yet it shaped my ability to analyze and problem-solve in a way that a traditional path to this job wouldn’t offer. Not that I love my job or anything, but just underscoring the point that education is always a step forward, even if you can’t yet see where you are heading.
My Advanced sociology professor in college was from the former USSR. It was great and we had very engaging class discussions. I guess the right Wingers were right when they said I would learn about Karl Marx in the woke mind virus universities
I did anthro. It held my attention long enough to graduate lol. Can’t really do anything with a BA in it though, and I didn’t really want to become an anthropologist. Quality of the department will vary greatly from school to school AFAIK. Mine was pretty cool I guess. One of my TAs (grad student) was Jason Hickel.
One of my TAs (grad student) was Jason Hickel.
That’s so cool. How was he?
He was great! I was (still am) older than him, but I really looked up to him and my other TA
You could go to Madagascar and write a bunch of books about it
Lol yeah. I loved reading the books, but the thought of writing them did not interest me at all. Seemed like it would suck all the fun out of meeting people and building relationships. Also, academia did hold some slight appeal for me, overall I don’t think I would have enjoyed it.
Tbf, you’d probably need to get a graduate degree to be able to use those degrees for anything other than a standard office job anyway, and I’m sure you could get into a sociology or anthropology graduate program with a poli sci degree if you’d want to go that route. Grad school is a luxury though, don’t blame you if you just want to make money and be done with school.
I studied chemistry which means I don’t know a single interesting thing and every semester we’d have oil ghouls try to tell us which evil oil company to work at for $12/hour
Every single day I wish I had gone to school for music
i can commiserate as i did computer science and completely and utterly regret it. wish i either avoided STEM entirely or just studied mathematics.
what made you hate it?
just ended up realising I’m not passionate about programming, it was the maths that i liked. plus the industry is horrendous, i had a corporate job for a bit and it left me completely jaded and not wanting to program for a wage ever again. i also felt generally a bit stunted from doing a pure stem education which I’ve been trying to make up for on my own time since.
i relate to the corporate culture thing so much. besides how tired they make me, being locked inside a cubicle all day 5-6days a week having to deal with office culture? lets say i get distressed to put it very gently.
cant blame you, made me want to quit quite a few times throughout the years i spent doing this garbage.
I’m a different person but I personally have really hated how intricately connected all the STEM departments in my uni are to defense companies that come hire here.
not the same here, but similar. we are always coding or managing infrastructure for evil fucking people, thats for sure.
“Math degree, eh? You should probably go into computer or data science to make use of it.”
The upside is you can just learn shit whenever you want to. Poli sci seems like it would look nice on paper. Getting a degree in something isn’t the only way to learn stuff good. If you already know how to do research, just crack some books for fun after you’ve ridden this out
I dropped polysci for philosophy because it was so insurmountably depressing
I hear Geography is good for what you’re after.
All the cool stuff is happening in geography right now
I’m looking to get a PhD in geography right now, there’s so much cool shit going on.
I’m not majoring in either but I can confirm that my polisci courses suuuuucked but sociology has been 100x better. And that’s with lib professors in both. I actually have another general social sciences course atm with a prof who wore a keffiyeh on day 1 so she’ll probably be even better. They don’t make them equally.
