Science Majors vs. Scientists

I think that's a horrible idea.
Do you not remember what choosing a science major meant in undergrad? For me, it meant focusing on a more difficult foreign language, almost no electives, long hours in the lab, commuting to another schoool to get a particularly good lab, an extra-semester with acompanying extra loans, summer school each year, and no time for study-abroad/alternative spring break/volunteering for habitat for humanity/insert other worthy ways of spending time.

It's not that science is incredibly hard (though maybe it is) but my impression is that STEM majors tend to be much more regimented than other majors (the sequential nature of courses, the heavy co-requisites, and so forth).

The investment of time and money, the sacrifices and suffering of a scientific career begin before people even enter grad school.

It's too much to ask of people who like science but don't want to do science; and way too much to ask to get a scientifically literate college-educated population.

I'll happily agree that we should have fewer humanities students who come out of college with only one science course; but maybe also we need fewer scientists who come out of college with dozens of humanities courses in the name of Liberal Arts. Not because those things aren't worth studying, but because there's only four (or five) years we're talking about here.
Science as a common way of thinking? Sure. Science as a common major? Not unless that means something very different than it did for me.

I suspect I'm older than Becca, but my experience as a physics major was not nearly that regimented. I originally started as an Electrical Engineering major, and switched to physics because I found the EE curriculum way too regimented with no time for electives and just not that fun. I enjoyed my physics classes, had time for interesting electives, and got to work on my professor's research project in the summers. Then I went off to grad school in computer science, and worked as a software developer. Most of my classmates went on to get a Ph.D. in physics, though one went to grad school in math and another computational linguistics. With that kind of experience, I could easily recommend more people major in physics. Of course, this was back in the early 80's, so I wouldn't be surprised if things have changed dramatically.

I agree with Chad. I majored in physics, and it has served me well. I now work in engineering, and the extra focus on things like thermodynamics and electromagnetism that the typical engineer hasn't had that much exposure to, has helped me specialize a bit. Like Sherri, I went through school back in the 80s, so maybe it isn't like that any longer, or maybe Becca's experience is unusual. I hope it's the latter.

-mark.

If it makes you feel any better, I'm a math major heading into law school, with absolutely no desire to do patent work [privacy online, most likely] - off the top of my head I know a math minor going into law to do elections, and a chem major in law, not sure what he's doing.

Especially in math, it's a reasonable common phenomenon, going to law school.

I finished undergrad in physics in 2003, and I didn't have nearly that hard a time of it either. I studied abroad for a full year and still finished in four. (AP credit helped). I enjoyed all my liberal arts classes and a few extra-curriculars. And I worked part time. Then again, I went to a small liberal arts college, which wasn't about all physics all the time, even for the majors. Some of my classes had only five students. So I endorse the idea of more physics majors who don't necessarily intend to become physicists, if they are at small liberal arts colleges...

I went to undergrad in the late 90s, and my experience was nothing like Becca's. I (and all the other science majors I knew) had a heavy course load, yes, but no heavier than many other students--for example, I did not have to take any extra semesters (or summer/winter courses) to complete my degree and still take a reasonable number of electives (although I would have had much less "free" time if I had done a double major). On the other hand, I did not do any truly hard-core undergraduate research (didn't have to do a thesis, for example, and didn't work in a true research lab, although I did do part-time work for professors), and my degree was in geology, rather than physics or chemistry.

I think the difficulty/rigor/regimentedness of a science major depends more upon the school and the student than on the fact that it's a science major. I went to a large state school. Perhaps Becca attended a smaller, more "rigorous" school that requires all students to complete undergraduate research? Or perhaps she was very interested in research, and knew that she wanted to go to a good graduate school and get good post-docs, and that the only way to do that was to have good undergrad research credentials. Either of those situations could lead to a very high-stress undergraduate career. But I can say with certainty that, at my school at least, it was perfectly possible to get a very good science degree without having to kill oneself with work and ignore all fun (although it was also possible to work like crazy).

Perhaps B.A. degrees, rather than B.S. degrees, might be in line with Chad's idea...

Ahhh. Maybe it is more major and school specific than general-field specific. I finished in 2003.
I was actually in microbiology, and I picked up a minor in chem (which is what really tacked on the extra semester). If anything, that's less regimented than some options.
For example, physics would have been more of a challenge, since I started college needing algebra. My undergrad roommates were all EE folks- they had very structured coursework.
I also did work-study and was a transfer student, starting at a community college and going on to a large land-grant state uni. Maybe some of it really depends on whether you have certain resources available (how many AP courses you took, whether money to go to a more expensive small college, the option to not work or work less).

I think it has about everything to do with how many AP credits you come in with. I know some people who are going to take at least five years to finish their physics major, because they brought no AP credits to school with them. And forget being a secondary ed/physics person if you have no APs - it would take someone 5-6 years to do it, unless they took a ridiculous number of credits per semester (which is a surefire way to get straight Cs). I went off to college with 30 credits worth of APs, which translated into at least a full semester's worth of liberal arts classes I got to skip (probably more), not to mention the foreign language requirement. I was able to take ~12-15 credits my last 3 semesters, and get the grades I needed to get into grad school (and study for the GRE). The differences I saw between the two situations is really staggering.

And on the topic of the post, one of my physics friends (who was a varsity hockey player too!) graduated and is getting an MBA now. Do you think you could trust that guy to get a project done? Damn right! He's going to make everyone else look stupid!

And looking at the unfolding election and the smoking ruins of the American financial system, it's clear that we as a society would benefit greatly from having them distributed a little more widely.

On the contrary,
some argue that the financial crisis is the result of the physics world view being foisted upon other fields.

More on topic, a cousin of mine majored in physics (at a SLAC) with a minor in art and now he's a successful architect.

Here here! The departments where I did my math and physics degrees for undergrad both had three different levels of degree ranging from a basic BA where you came out with a reasonable grounding to the "I am an insane creature who will be shipped to gradschool in a box with my diploma tacked to the outside."

On the other hand, neither department really managed to grow much beyond a 1:1 major:faculty ratio despite this, and despite a very protective attitude towards their students (a big help at a state university). The real issue appeared to be preparation. Both departments assumed you could read and write English fluently, were reasonably comfortable with trigonometry, algebra, and plane geometry upon arrival, and were willing to put in about forty hours of hard work every week. This disqualified ninety percent of the university as far as I could tell.

Years ago, maybe late 70's - early 80's, there was an article in Bioscience which looked at science from a population biology point of view. As I recall, spending on science doubled a couple of times in the past, and there was the log phase of the logistic growth curve. The article argued that science spending would never double again. Thus science is in the carrying capacity or zero growth phase. There is intense competition for limited resources. Some areas of science would lose out and disappear, particularly as new areas deveoped. The article also argued that the number of PhD programs was excessive and that easy funding of big labs would be a thing of the past.

Becca: It definitely is school and field dependent. I did my undergrad work in the 1980s at a school with a heavy science/engineering emphasis, and physics was definitely one of the less regimented majors. Chemistry (because of the lab requirements) and EECS were among the most heavily regimented. Coming in with AP credits, especially in calculus (which my school required even for liberal arts majors, and which anyone who didn't place out was expected to take as a first term freshman), helped a little, but not as much as was DG's experience.

The Incoherent Ponderer's post (linked to by thm) sounds like he's quoting some liberal arts type Wall Street Masters of the Universe in CYA mode. It's actually an argument for more science/math literacy on Wall Street: if the MotU had understood the limitations of the models their "rocket scientists" were cooking up, or even understood that the models had limitations, I would expect them to have been much more cautious about their derivatives trading than was actually the case. And even if this expectation were wrong, it's still a CYA for the MotU to blame their rocket scientists; without the latter the MotU would merely have found some other way to blow themselves up.

Striding into a university, or college, or high school, or middle school classroom, always in suit and tie the first day, I have an advantage.

Good morning[/afternoon/evening] women and men and extraterrestrials in disguise. Unlike your other Science teachers, I am a living, breathing SCIENTIST. If you love science, you will love it more when we're done. If you hate science, you will hate it less. If you are a science major, you will learn more about what happens next in your life. If you are not a science major, you will think about changing majors."

"I am now passing around my tie-clip. It is gold-plated. What is it a model of?"

and away we go...

Chad, it seems to me that for a large portion of undergrads what they study doesn't seem very important, for several reasons: they don't know what they want to do with their lives, their preferred employers require a college degree but don't much care what was studied, or their relevant professional credentials aren't earned until grad school (law, medicine, etc.) I suspect it's these people you have a chance of attracting into science majors, if they aren't already in them.

Why do you think they are studying something else right now?

I agree that regimentation is very school dependent. On the other hand, the school I went to had a pretty well regimented Biology major (required biology courses, two semesters calculus, two semesters physics, four semesters chem). But I still made time to do a second major (in humanities) as well as large numbers of extra-curriculars and a job, and some research during the summers. So you can fit it all in if you have to.

On the other hand, because of my extracurriculars, I came out with a less competitive GPA, so I definitely would have benefited from dedication and focus.

But I agree that more science courses would benefit non-science majors. A lot of the classes are just so general that you wouldn't learn a lot about, say, medicine and human physiology, which were advanced courses. But those subjects are the ones which will affect most people, and the ones where they often end up confused. I think some elementary human physiology and psych would not be amiss in a general curriculum.

I agree with you, but I don't think it's terribly pragmatic. While I didn't look very much after getting my BS (as I planned to go to grad school), the reaction I got when looking for a job is that they wanted someone with a degree in engineering. The fact that I had a degree in physics meant my resume hit the round file as soon as I was out of sight.

What industry wants is people who have backgrounds in particular fields, and the more specific experience they have, the more industry wants them. (You've got some experience with EMC? Oh great! You haven't had electronics? Forget it...) Someone with a background in physics (versus my friends who were engineering physics majors and so had a little of both) would require longer to train which means more money up front for the company. Most aren't interested because they want someone to hit the ground running. It's a very short-sighted perception (as someone who has training in science may be better at innovating and developing long-term solutions to problems), but it fairly common.

(This is also why my husband left industry for an academic research position...)

This idea is great in theory. It sucks in practice for places not like those Chad went to or teaches at.

In Texas, students are legislatively required to take what is essentially 3 semesters of basics to be granted a bachelor's at a state school (2 poli sci, 2 history, 1 fine arts, 2 science other than physics, a prescribed minor in math, etc). The content is certainly not onerous, but the amount is. This means that for large commuter schools, such as my alma mater (~20k students now, not ~2k or less, and it makes a huge f'in difference) graduating in 4 years is extremely uncommon -- the alumni magazine provides a average more like 6 years, for those who can slog through to completion. Going the BA route replaced two classes with a language requirement, nominally 2 classes, but not necessarily so, and all of this is post-remediation in math and english when needed. There is NOT a a couple of semester's worth AP credit going in with these students.

So, you're not doing anyone a favor in that environment by encouraging them to study something that's good for basically 2 things in that social and economic environment: teaching and grad school. You might have more options, but leaving one's family and home is not an option for many, particularly women since they are culturally expected to stay with and care for the family. Based on my dealing with recruiters at my grad alma mater, everyone STEM-inclined needs to be pointed at engineering ASAP, and those who want to do physics will do it no matter what you tell them.

I agree with you, but I don't think it's terribly pragmatic. While I didn't look very much after getting my BS (as I planned to go to grad school), the reaction I got when looking for a job is that they wanted someone with a degree in engineering. The fact that I had a degree in physics meant my resume hit the round file as soon as I was out of sight.

That's a slightly different issue. I'm not overly fond of the idea of extremely specific engineering degrees for undergrads, but I can understand it when people are looking for a very specific qualification.

I'm thinking more in terms of the sort of jobs that people currently major in, say, Political Science of History or English for these days. That's why I was using law school as an example-- it's a profession where the systematic sort of thinking encouraged by a science major can really be a benefit, but very few people who plan to go to law school major in science. And it's not like med school where there are very specific subject requirements for admission that tend to push people toward life science majors.

I'm in my final undergraduate year now, and maybe have a unique (i.e. warped) perspective on things, because at my school everyone is a science major (or math, or CS). I spend my summers as a camp counselor at another school, where my peers are mostly liberal arts people. The differences are truly striking.

Chad's post claims that majoring in science teaches "how to think systematically, how to evaluate and draw conclusions from data, and how to solve problems." I would not phrase things quite that way, because people studying philosophy, law, and literature learn those same skills.

One of my best friends met over the summer was an art major. Artists may have a reputation for being numinous and obscure, the way scientists have a reputation for being dull and dry, but I found this was not the case. Artists develop coherent ways of viewing the world that have a great deal in common with scientific viewpoints. They begin by observing their surroundings, especially by sight, but not excluding other physical senses. Then they try to break that raw data down.

They may try to abstract what they see, reducing a complicated visual scene to a few essential lines of a chalk drawing on paper. This is similar to a physicist imagining a block sliding down a frictionless plane of a mass on a spring. Artists may also search for coherent patterns between disparate phenomenon, and then juxtapose them. They have algorithms for breaking down the world around them, by breaking down complicated forms into simple geometrical shapes put together. They make fist order approximations, rough sketches of little more than ovals and lines, then successively refine these approximations to add more details, shading and value, balancing the picture, etc.

They have aesthetic theories relating to the color wheel, proportions of human bodies, etc. Artists are, for the most part, genuinely involved in searching for meaningful representations of existence. This can mean showing the physical world, the interior mental world, or the relationships and connections between them.

That's not to downplay the differences. There are huge differences between the two cultures. Liberal arts majors are indeed frequently scared of math, for example, although they seem uniformly to respect mathematical aptitude. However, even at a school where every single person who graduates has passed at least five math classes and five physics classes (including quantum mechanics), math is not really considered cool. Many of us view mathematical problems on our homework sets as a pain in the ass. If you, as a physics or chem major, say, suddenly think of a question about something you may have heard about in number theory or algebra, and start asking math majors about it, a few of them will be glad that you're taking an interest in their subject and work through it with you. On the other hand, many will just groan and tell you that they have to think about that crap too much already.

As science majors, when we're sitting around talking, you can indeed see the influence of our science training on our thought processes. If we debate politics, we uniformly have a much greater respect for opinions supported strongly by facts rather than purely emotional or bull-headed arguments. But at the same time, we also spend a great deal of time griping about how hard it is to go to this school, how we have to work all the time and get low GPA's because they don't give everyone A's here like they do at Harvard, etc.

I certainly think about the world differently after five years (yes, five, and I'm not quite done yet) of physics classes. But there are a lot of things I miss out on, too. There's very little respect for the humanities here. We're required to take an average of one humanities/social science course per quarter, but the general consensus is that you should take the easiest class with the least work, take it on pass/fail rather than letter grades if you can, and put as little effort into it as possible. Even then, you can take economics classes like "convex analysis" that count towards this credit. Then you don't have to waste your time reading lots of ridiculous novels or learning history or other stupid crap like that.

Because of this anti-fuzziness attitude we science majors have, which mirrors the anti-analytical attitude the fuzzy majors have at other schools, my own personal efforts to learn about creative writing or visual art are solo. Not that many people are interested, although we do have a high percentage of musicians.

So I think that more balance would benefit both sides. Liberal arts people do frequently lack the ability to understand the meaning of statistical data, or appreciate the levels of uncertainty in different areas of scientific knowledge. But science students frequently end up just as elitist, and just as lacking in ability to get pleasure and appreciation from the full gamut of thinking modalities that civilization has to offer.

If there's one thing science has to offer, it's a unified way of viewing the world. The universe isn't just a bunch of very different things all with totally different sets of rules, or worse, totally arbitrary patterns of action. There are deep underlying principles of organization. But as prisoners of our own human psychology, our perceptions of life are not limited to the raw physical facts of existence. We can also perceive order and beauty in our own, personal, uniquely human ways of processing the sensual data we receive, and in our ways of processing that data into philosophical and interpersonal ways of looking at the world. College should give us at least a chance to try on the glasses of a wide range of professions, from scientist to artist, lawyer, businessman... hedonist.

The point is to come of age by finding which ways of thinking are effective and meaningful to you, so that you can then, if you so choose, specialize after college and spend your entire life fleshing out the relationship between yourself and your world.

Finally, as for what we science majors are doing with our degrees, grad school is the default. Most people who go there are doing it because they didn't find anything much better worth doing. The others hit the job market, and their criterion is not normally where their scientific background can bring useful insight to society. It's where they can get the most money.

As a recent graduate and student of chad's I was one of the many in my year who did not continue with physics graduate education, rather I chose law school and have found three engineers, a Ph.D. physicists, a handful of of bio/chem majors, and two with a CS background in a section of roughly 80 individuals. Minding the fact that this is one of the T25 schools in the country and thus the sample might not be as representative, it would seem from the trends that I have seen and from what professors have expressed that it is not as out of the norm for science background individuals to now be attending law school and I would presume that this is similar in other graduate education areas. It may not be common today to find people of science backgrounds in other areas but that is most likely due to fewer people seeking alternate career paths in the past. In order for science background individuals to reach any noticeable saturation level in the market one must wait until the most recent generation X students have had time to become noticed in their respective professions -- and don't worry, we'll try our best to fix everything soon.

I am an example of Chad's wish. I earned a double degree in college: BA in Chemistry, BM in Trumpet Performance. I then went on to earn three more degrees in music, but the grounding in scientific inquiry I got from my undergraduate studies still informs my academic research and my worldview. I never worked as a chemist, beyond two summer internships while still in college, and those were not very "chemistry"ish. But I'm very glad I did the science major (though at times I wished I had majored in Philosophy instead).

#21: Yeah philosophy majors! You definitely shoulda done it. :) We have more angst than anyone. And it's true that things like philosophy teach analytical thinking skills, in the same was that analysis of literature might.

Just as the Executive Director and the Dean came into the 10th grade Biology class that I was teaching earlier this morning, I was explaining a diagram of a CRT, telling them to wiggle a magnet on the screen of their TV at home this weekend, and talking about J. J. Thompson.

"Sir Joseph John 'J.J.' Thomson, OM, FRS (18 December 1856 - 30 August 1940) was a British physicist and Nobel laureate, credited for the discovery of the electron and of isotopes, and the invention of the mass spectrometer. He was awarded the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the electron and his work on the conduction of electricity in gases." I was saying (thank you, Wikipedia) was a professor of what?

"Biology?" No.

"Chemistry"? No.

"Physics?" No.

"Anyone else? Okay, I'll tell you. I think that, when he discovered the electron, he was teaching "Natural Philosophy. The Philosophy of how does Nature work? The paper that made him a superstar? J.J. Thomson (1897), Cathode rays, Philosophical Magazine, 44, 293 -- Discovery of the electron. Philosophical."

Then the Dean talked about how he'd worked his way up to being a paid assistant to Roger Sperry, so I spoke about the Pleasure Center of the brain. "Does homework give you pleasure? Pain?" The administrators gave a mini-lecture on dress code and why I phone the parents of students who consistently fail to hand in homework. And on we went.

So, no disrespect to Philosophers in MY science classroom!

Oh a sidebar on "Mad Scientists" on TV and movies and comic books. And the notion (extra credit: by whom?) that they were preceded by Mad Natural Philosophers...

The time spent on an undergrad degree that will suffice to get you into a good grad school and the kind of support that makes the PhD free (apart from opportunity costs) depends on two factors only touched on here:

1) Math and science preparation from high school. Are you ready to take calculus and chemistry and physics as a freshman? If so, four years is easy to manage. Ditto if you bring in a foreign language or two.

2) Number of general studies (liberal arts, general education, foreign language) courses required. This varies widely, and can subtract a semester from the number of science credits you can take at one school compared to another.

Other factors include whether you can handle 15 hours per semester or need to do 12+12+6, thereby eating up your summers.

Let's look at it from a slightly different angle (not that I disagree with the post); that of a teacher.

I guess I "majored" in science, but I wonder if that's a particularly American worldview. I have an honours science degree in biosciences, which means I did research. Two publish items came our of that from top tiered pubs in our field (benthic macro invertebrates). I spent a season in the field and was aligned to begin PhD.

Alas, with three kids and a wife in school as well, I could not make it work financially. NSERC (our analog to your NSF) simply does not pay well, me being under my prof's wing and all.

And so I became a teacher. Partially because I had to to be gainfully employed, but mostly because I wanted to.

I consider myself a scientist. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for any of my colleagues in my department (um, "learning community"). Sure many have science degrees, but to a person, they see science as a body of knowledge and not much else. Sure understand that science is a process, but some are presenting this process to kids as having been developed by a bunch of old, dead white guys from something called "the enlightenment". "Let's look at holistic (or worse, wholistic) ways of describing the natural world" they say.

Not a clue about Popper, inductivism, Kuhn, peer review, how scientific knowledge is acquired, becomes canon, and is revised in the face of new information. My attempts to present a philosophical view of our discipline merely lead to my being labeled an elitist snob.

And so, to add your your conversation, rather than merely rant about my the state of science education, this:

I think all university undergrad programs should have significant science requirement. And not scopes for dopes, or rocks for jocks either. Even music and fine arts programs. But then again, I am a snob and don't really think those are university programs.

Yes, the numbers (at least the financial ones) do not look good for scientists. I was involved in meaningful work in ecology and would have loved to remain in the field. But PhD and postdoc and a position followed by tenure would have left me ten years in debt. Sure, maybe earning 20 or 40K more than I am now. But only maybe.

And we sure as shit need more "scientists" in middle and high schools. Even in university, much of the garbage in is not being unlearned. If they make it that far.