[snifty]

> Graduating with a technical degree is like heading out into the real world armed with an assault rifle instead of a dull knife. Don't miss that opportunity because of some fuzzy romanticized view of liberal arts broadening your horizons -- that's a great way to end up wanting to kill yourself when you hit 30 and you realize you still haven't done anything with your life.

Jesus, what a prick.

[neilk]

Unfortunately, he's right.

This isn't so much because engineering is great, or the only way to make your mark on the world. The problem is that today's arts faculties just suck. It's possible to graduate knowing things that only matter within the walls of the university, and you may not realize this until the very last minute.

That said, it's possible to graduate from engineering schools and not have a clue about history, current events, different sorts of people, what matters in life, and the fact that one cannot wear socks with sandals. You may not be starving, and you may be in a sense contributing to society more than many artists, but you may never have really stretched your own mind -- merely let your geek tendencies do their thing.

I think the best possible thing to do in university is to take the hard science courses, and then supplement them with intense and challenging arts courses. The ones where you have to do learn some serious art history, or do some sort of performance. This is the best of both worlds.

[Goladus]

One recommendation I have (in spite of PG's essay) is that if you take a course in Classics or "Western Humanities" as it was called at my college, take it from a Philosophy professor.

I might have just been lucky, but they always had the most interesting discussion and criticism of the stuff we were reading. One of the best discussions about the scientific method I've ever had came from in a Humanities class taught by a philosophy prof. One of the first things we read was Galileo's letters on sunspots. Later in the semester we demonstrated how Freud's theories were completely unscientific (because they were unfalsifiable/untestable). I actually never really understood the difference between axioms and theorems until I took that class. I mean, I knew vaguely that an axiom was a rule and a theorem was a confirmed hypothesis, but the fact that axioms are essentially arbitrary never really sunk in. In actual science classes I was always too busy learning details to think about the abstract stuff.