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发表于 2008-2-5 20:40:23| 字数 3,882| - 中国–陕西–宝鸡 电信
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【ZT】
Major in English if you want
Published November 16th, 2007 in Making Money.
While I was perusing the different iGoogle financial gadgets I ran across a Tip of the Day gadget. There were two comments, and one was not complimentary at all (emphasis mine):
For the most part, these are some of the worst “Financial Tips” I have read. I am removing this gadget after today’s tip “Don’t major in English”. It goes on to say that English majors don’t make much, and how the highest salaries are from engineering majors. That might be true, but I doubt someone who loves English, literature, writing, or anything along that line is going to enjoy being an engineer of any sort. I’m sorry, but if you don’t enjoy your line of work, you likely won’t have a job for long (thus making these financial tips even more worthless) or you’ll wish you had shot yourself rather than majoring in something you don’t care about. This isn’t the only bad tip I’ve seen on here, but it’s the last one I’m going to see and I hope other viewers will save their time and iGoogle page space and not suffer through them. Do what you’re passionate about, and the wealth will take care of itself. […]
It is true that jobs within some majors will pay more out of the gate, on average, than jobs within other majors, and English is probably one of those low-paying choices (CNN Money article). But to extend this statistic to a statement like “Don’t major in English” is a bit narrow-minded, especially if you did major in English and are doing just fine, thank you very much. While I also don’t think that “wealth will take care of itself” if you do what you’re passionate about, there is a higher chance of succeeding in that field if you really can’t wait to go to it each morning.
So there’s nothing wrong with majoring in English. Or physics. Or biology, sociology, civil engineering, or anything else. Nor is there anything wrong with majoring in nothing and starting a business or apprenticing yourself.
What might lead to regret, though, is choosing any of the above without doing a cost-benefit analysis and without clarifying what your #1 goal is. If your reason for choosing English as a major is to teach Chaucer to college students in New England, that’s fine, but knowing that the odds for actually being able to do this and make a decent living at it are heavily stacked against you, even after several more years of school. If your reason for choosing English is because you like it and expect that you’ll do well enough to get your foot in the door with a business that emphasizes a lot of written communication, that’s also fine, and it might be a good investment. If, instead, your reason for choosing English is to hone your skills in writing sales copy, that’s fine too, but you might find out that you could have learned everything by apprenticing with a master copywriter and been every bit as successful without the college degree.
Some other cost-benefit analyses that are definitely worth going through:
Choosing one major vs. another
Going on to get a master’s degree or beyond vs. taking a job and learning more there
Choosing a two-year degree vs. a four year degree
Choosing a state school (with less debt) vs. a private school (with more debt)
Taking a year off (to gain experience, pay down debt) vs. plowing through (to get it done earlier but with more debt)
Choosing to take fewer credits per year (or risk a lower GPA) in order to build up a side business
These decisions, and others, will help to clarify whether a particular path is worth it or not, but what does “worth it or not” mean? If you know you have your answer to this question and you know that it’s the right answer for you, then making all of the other decisions is a lot easier. But if you haven’t asked yourself what you really want in life, then the decisions you make may or may not lead you to success. You’ll end up somewhere, but it may not be where you want.
So if you really want to be an English teacher, and if you have a good handle on the big pluses/minuses that come with being an English teacher and you’re still OK with that, then by all means major in English! You’re going into it with your eyes open. But if something important is lacking in this scenario, then think twice about it or take a different road.
Advice is almost never one-size-fits-all, and certainly choosing a major is not one-size-fits-all. But there certainly are better choices for us individually, and it’s up to us to figure them out for ourselves.
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每次看熊熊的帖子都能学到很多的东西，今天也不例外。这次转贴也是出自yogibear的【转帖】工资和专业http://www.thinkpad.cn/forum/thread-638375-1-1.html
正好看到有相关的文章，顺便转来与大家分享.
再次感谢熊熊,并祝大家新年快乐！ |
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