Lets Boast about our College Majors for Fun

[Yvaelle]

I envy you :P... I wish I took philosophy formally.

I just jumped into Computer Science, and have been there since... hmm... 16 or so.

You obviously put in a lot of personal study, I don't think you would gain much of anything out of an undergrad philosophy degree at this point - but it was definitely an excellent place for me to be mentally out of highschool.

Buddhism is maybe the best philosophic basis of them all, and you're more expert in it than I am. If there are two things I walked away from philosophy with that I would recommend - it's formal logic, and Nietzsche. You're a programmer, so I suspect your logic is at least as good as my undergraduate philosophy experience - logic gates versus deductive logic are pretty much just different perspectives on the same thing. Still, that was very influential on me.

If there is one philosopher though I would recommend - it has to be Nietzsche - whether you love, hate, agree or disagree with his assertions - he is the most influential philosopher in the modern Western world without rival. Virtually every major geopolitical event in the last 100 years in the Western world is traceable back to - if not Nietzsche directly - other authors who were clearly trying to interpret and apply his ideology.

If I were the head of a philosophy department, I would spend the entire first year on critical thinking and logic. Not only do I think those are essential skills and wasting any time on anything else is only going to slow the rest of the program - but putting all of the hard/boring stuff upfront will weed out anyone who can't cut it - let's them get out early - because all the philosophy dropouts/major switchers I saw were due to 3rd and 4th year logic.

With subsequent years, I would pretty much ignore all the old Greeks except Aristotle (maybe lump the rest into one week of one class at the start for context, but that's about it), maybe have to touch on like Descartes for a week or two - but skip Kant entirely he's a waste of everyone's time. Then get right into French Enlightenment with Voltaire and friends (which leads into Scottish Enlightenment, etc), slap some Schopenhauer in there, lead that into Nietzsche. There probably needs to be an Eastern traditions parallel set of classes going on, with Lao Tzu, Confucius, Nanak Dev, Rumi etc early on - that all lead into Buddhism.

The entire 4th year would just be Nietzsche and Buddhism.

There is lots of good stuff to learn in there - but really by having the basis in logic that you do - and by skipping directly to your adapted version of Buddhism - you for the most part saved yourself four years of study that I had to go through the long way

[twiddler]

I was a CSE major and we give more boners to MMO-C GOT users than the best of incest hentai.

[fooliuscaesar13]

I dropped out after getting into an argument with my C++ professor! Saved a lot of money in the long run...

I'm your C++ professor.


Kidding, of course. I have a shitty 2-year programming degree from a shitty for-profit tech school in Pittsburgh (PTI when I got it, now called PTC). I gripe about a piece of paper from a 2-yr school, but it got me to where I am (a database admin / software dev) and for that I am grateful.

[Rezhial]

No snowfall yet. Gonna save up and get a whole new set of "snow wheels". I figure that it snows so little here that one set of tires will last most of this car's life, if taken care of well enough. Even with winter tires, a high powered RWD seems scary, haha. That and the lack of clearance will still hinder me. Anything more than 4" high and I can't drive over it.

Oh that's true. Didn't even think of the clearance... I have like 200 pounds of sand in the trunk for added support too. Should be a good winter! I'll just tell my boss I can't come in and then "work" from home lol.

[Reinhard von Lohengramm]

If there is one philosopher though I would recommend - it has to be Nietzsche - whether you love, hate, agree or disagree with his assertions - he is the most influential philosopher in the modern Western world without rival. Virtually every major geopolitical event in the last 100 years in the Western world is traceable back to - if not Nietzsche directly - other authors who were clearly trying to interpret and apply his ideology.

That's actually a really interesting perspective. Last summer I emailed the Professor (a major Russell fan) who had taught me a symbolic logic elective about what order to read a list of books I had bought, ranging from the collections of Nietzsche, Hume, Descartes and Kant to The Communist Manifesto, Art of War, The Prince, etc as I wanted something to study myself outside of my Bach. materials.

The response I got was, to paraphrase "Nietzsche was evil. I had a hard time teaching his material because I had to sympathize with it and I genuinely believed it was evil." and was then told to read Descartes and then Hume, the former for the sake of understanding the latter's prose. Nevertheless if I search up random quotes from the philosophers whose works I bought, I find myself more readily agreeing with Nietzsche than anyone else.

OT: Electrical Engineering/Computer Science. Part of me wishes I had gone full EE and ditched CS entirely, mainly because the CS department at my Uni has a stick up it's ass, empowering it's motto to be "we're miserable and we love company".

[Kellhound]

I majored in Political Science-International Conflict Resolution. When people tell you to go to school for what you like, never never listen to them unless you like things that make money. Thankfully I also am trained in electronics so I have had a job....

[Kellhound]

You obviously put in a lot of personal study, I don't think you would gain much of anything out of an undergrad philosophy degree at this point - but it was definitely an excellent place for me to be mentally out of highschool.

Buddhism is maybe the best philosophic basis of them all, and you're more expert in it than I am. If there are two things I walked away from philosophy with that I would recommend - it's formal logic, and Nietzsche. You're a programmer, so I suspect your logic is at least as good as my undergraduate philosophy experience - logic gates versus deductive logic are pretty much just different perspectives on the same thing. Still, that was very influential on me.

If there is one philosopher though I would recommend - it has to be Nietzsche - whether you love, hate, agree or disagree with his assertions - he is the most influential philosopher in the modern Western world without rival. Virtually every major geopolitical event in the last 100 years in the Western world is traceable back to - if not Nietzsche directly - other authors who were clearly trying to interpret and apply his ideology.

If I were the head of a philosophy department, I would spend the entire first year on critical thinking and logic. Not only do I think those are essential skills and wasting any time on anything else is only going to slow the rest of the program - but putting all of the hard/boring stuff upfront will weed out anyone who can't cut it - let's them get out early - because all the philosophy dropouts/major switchers I saw were due to 3rd and 4th year logic.

With subsequent years, I would pretty much ignore all the old Greeks except Aristotle (maybe lump the rest into one week of one class at the start for context, but that's about it), maybe have to touch on like Descartes for a week or two - but skip Kant entirely he's a waste of everyone's time. Then get right into French Enlightenment with Voltaire and friends (which leads into Scottish Enlightenment, etc), slap some Schopenhauer in there, lead that into Nietzsche. There probably needs to be an Eastern traditions parallel set of classes going on, with Lao Tzu, Confucius, Nanak Dev, Rumi etc early on - that all lead into Buddhism.

The entire 4th year would just be Nietzsche and Buddhism.

There is lots of good stuff to learn in there - but really by having the basis in logic that you do - and by skipping directly to your adapted version of Buddhism - you for the most part saved yourself four years of study that I had to go through the long way

I loved my Philosophy classes, so easy to pass, and so much fun to warp people's minds with.

[The Dwarf]

Currently going for a Masters in Library Science. It's the most comfy job in the universe.

[Grimbold21]

Bachelors in Archaeology & History and doing a masters in Heritage Management.

[Zoldor]

Started Comp Science in the late 90s early 2ks hated programming. Went History and Philosophy with a minor in Modern Lit and Sociology. Then went on to get a Juris Doctorate (proper name for graduting law school) from a T1 school. Hated most of the people I went to school with, started a small private practice, which is struggling because of over crowding in my area and no government jobs here. Going back for an accounting degree so I can sit for the CPA exam. Break into Tax law, accounting, and more bankruptcy. Then hopefully get a CFP cert after spending a few years doing wealth counseling.

Basically, a long and expensive way, that doesn't pay out early, but long term pays out very well.

Want my personal opinion on what you should go to school for if you want to get paid. Pharmacy or Health Information Management. For what you put in the payout is big and comes quickly.

[Logwyn]

Majored in partying and crushing hot girls on a sports scholarship in my brief tenure. Dropped out because I wanted to be paid for my time and not pay someone for it.

Tis cool. I always wonder what people end up when they do this and what major they left for and then what field they ended up in or doing.

The college is only road to success myth needs to be squished.

- - - Updated - - -

Well, I have a handful of friends doing trades without degrees making 6 figures. My dad made 6 figures without having a HS diploma.

As I said in the other reply. I'm on the side of squishing the myth that college is the only way to success.

Someone college and a degree isn't the right path. And there is so much more to do that you can be a "success" at.

[Skippy88]

Went to do computer programming and while I graduated I really haven't used what I learned to good use.

[Yvaelle]

That's actually a really interesting perspective. Last summer I emailed the Professor (a major Russell fan) who had taught me a symbolic logic elective about what order to read a list of books I had bought, ranging from the collections of Nietzsche, Hume, Descartes and Kant to The Communist Manifesto, Art of War, The Prince, etc as I wanted something to study myself outside of my Bach. materials.

The response I got was, to paraphrase "Nietzsche was evil. I had a hard time teaching his material because I had to sympathize with it and I genuinely believed it was evil." and was then told to read Descartes and then Hume, the former for the sake of understanding the latter's prose. Nevertheless if I search up random quotes from the philosophers whose works I bought, I find myself more readily agreeing with Nietzsche than anyone else.

OT: Electrical Engineering/Computer Science. Part of me wishes I had gone full EE and ditched CS entirely, mainly because the CS department at my Uni has a stick up it's ass, empowering it's motto to be "we're miserable and we love company".

There is nothing evil in Nietzsche. He's prone to controversial rhetoric at times, or concluding with positions that are wildly opposite from the popular perception - he has zero fear about critiquing things people find sacrosanct - so he's heretical/blasphemic - but he's not in any way 'evil'.

Honestly I have no idea why a philosophy professor would characterize him that way - he did obviously influence the Nazi party - but that was mostly due to the heavy re-writing of his work the party did to adapt it. Nietzsche likely would have regarded the Nazis are perhaps the highest degree of a slave morality. That their demonizing of the Jews as being powerful money-handlers who were usurping the country from the Volk (white christian) community - ultimately arose from a deep-seeded sense of inferiority - and the ideological collapse of Nazism came when they finally saw a measure of success (in war) and had to recognize themselves as being the new masters: an ideology their entire morality was fundamentally incongrous with - that they represent the masses in Third Reich Germany, but also that they are all the underdogs.

Particularly ironic, because Nietzsche actually used Judean peoples (Jewish) as a synonym for slave morality in his examples on the Ancient Roman empire. I think Nietzsche's first and foremost comment on the topic of the Nazis though would be that while religions can be used to talk about ideologies in general - interpretation of ideology matters more than the source material - so using religious affliation (Christian, Jewish, etc - as the Nazis did) as a shorthand for his master/slave morality is a criminally poor interpretation of his work. Further, Nietzsche was actually one of the major influences of Jewish Zionism too - which doesn't mean he agreed with or was aligned with them either - but I think it's funny how both factions took from him a very different interpretation.

Let me know why he thought he was evil - I'm honestly at a loss here.

Ahh, good to know...

I do think understanding Nietzsche's ideas on the Ubermensch, and using self discipline founded on morality based on reason is a good step to the later, modern philosophies, especially when you start talking about "meaning". And I agree that Buddhism or Contemplative Taoism, in regards to the philosophy of the "self", helps you get there once you understand the basics.

And as nerdy as this will sound, before I actually started reading all of that, Spock and Data (when I was young) were my role models... I think both, in a way, represent the Ubermensch of Nietzsche. Spock from a disciplinary perspective, and Data by virtue of him being a conscious machine that transcends genetic and cultural pre-programing. They are also why I got into Computer Science... heh...

I agree about Spock / Data as symbolic Ubermensch, and we definitely shared rolemodels there

I loved my Philosophy classes, so easy to pass, and so much fun to warp people's minds with.

So when I first got out of highschool I initially wanted to go into an accelerated nanotech program that was brand new - as was nanotech - and sounded really exciting. At some point during the summer before the program I realized I had a lot of life shit to figure out - and I wasn't sure I wanted to end up in a science-focused program (though I love science) where I would have little time to consider life direction for the next four years. Instead, I swapped to a general arts program - seems foolish to most but I actually really enjoyed it.

In my first term I had a course on microeconomics that so infuriated me (because microeconomics is nonsensical bullshit! ) which sparked an interest in me that ultimately resulted in the focus of my masters (macroeconomics, where economics makes sense). In my second term, I had a Philosophy of Ethics course. The professor was this old crone battle axe of a lady - Oxford-educated but had clearly lost and recovered her mind at some point, and ended up teaching undergraduate philosophy.

Every week, she would introduce a topic, explain it for half the class length, then send us off to research and write a paper about it for the next class. With the first half of the next class, she would pick someone to stand at the front of the class, and either read their paper or verbally present their evidence and position. She would then publicly eviscerate this poor fresh-from-highschool Ethics 101 student for the entire class to see. Everything they said, she would systematically dissect into assumptions, then audibly snap each assumption of their belief - until their artistically constructed belief - once a petite little house of twigs and half-baked thoughts, now lay in ruin on the floor. If an art teacher smashed your art and called it shit at the start of every class, it would not have hurt as much as this woman's savage yet logical sleights, her pointed questions piercing flesh, her carefully selected words flaying little highschool-minds.

I have never seen anyone so adept at making other people cry on command.

Predictably, another kid - whose opinion better aligned with the position the professor had just taken, would proudly raise their hand - march to the front of the class - and present their position - embellishing where necessary to better suck-up to the professors purported perspective. Then something beautiful happened - the professors opinion would flip, on the spot, and with equal tact as the last - she would annihilate the poor keener's position: left dumbfounded and brutalized before the entire class - wondering how this could be the same professor who just a moment before had so brilliantly countered the opposing argument. Tears flowed for the entire duration of her two hour class. Kids would literally pick up their things and walk out of her class regularly, to go cry in the hall, and then drop her class, and then go complain to the dean about her. She did this every, single, class - all term long.

By the end of the term she had reduced a 35 person class room to around 10 regular participants. Every single one of us had cried more than once in her classroom (and I'm not at all quick to cry), we were all just too stubborn to give up. By then she had lightened up a bit - we all saw her game for what it was - we all had long ago accepted we were wrong about everything - and she had achieved her objective: forget teaching 35 little assholes some drawing board nonsense about what old philosophers once said - she wanted to pick a handful of students and really get through to them - show them the power of philosophy - make them spend the rest of their lives questioning every tenet of every belief they would ever again hold. Her voice still rings in my ears, her lessons never forgotten.

She had also achieved something else with that group - of the 10ish students who had remained in her general arts 101 Ethics course, at least 8 of us went on to study philosophy or a related field - and over half of them ended up on university debate teams. She'd imparted herself into all of us, like horcrux's - her insane approach to philosophy like a lightning-scar carved into all our foreheads. The other students in my grade tried to have her kicked out, but a bunch of us stood up for her - and the school board was entirely on her side. Apparently she did tone it down considerably after those early years - I heard she was still a bit of a troll circa 2013 - but apparently she's stopped making people cry quite so much (though she doesn't teach Philosophy of Religion anymore, because that class was perhaps even funnier).

[Machismo]

Finished my B.S. in chemical engineering, then got drunk and enlisted in the Marines the next week.

[Reinhard von Lohengramm]

There is nothing evil in Nietzsche...

I had a feeling it had something to do with his own beliefs on morality. He hinted at believing in absolute morality but wasn't necessarily religious. After the term had ended I went to him and asked him about a the Kalam Cosmological Argument and he more or less laughed at it, as well as the Philosopher who repeats it ad nauseam; William Lane Craig.

He did say that he felt that Nietzsche was a terrible precursor to the Nazi ideology, but from my experience his dislike can be boiled down to a fundamental disagreement with this statement: "You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist." - Nietzsche.

[twiddler]

Finished my B.S. in chemical engineering, then got drunk and enlisted in the Marines the next week.

That thing is tedious. Our school had labs for calculus so people in chem-e were virtually taking 5 classes all with labs for a year and 4 classes with labs for another year. I'm happy I wasn't one of them, but you guys have some discipline. Probably why it's the best medical school feeder.

[WskyDK]

Nursing. I finish my BSN on Wednesday.

[Rolow]

History/Sociology double major. Currently a firefighter. Going back to school in January to become a paramedic.

[Mehrunes]

Major/minor system isn't really a thing where I live.

[Skroe]

Computer Science B.S / M.S., Cognitive Science Minor. I work in robotics.

Basically I'm trying to build the Terminator.