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Thread: Going to College -- Or Not.

  1. #31
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    • starting strength seminar april 2024
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    Quote Originally Posted by Yngvi View Post
    STEM degrees no longer guarantee the opportunity for gainful employment if you are a white, male American.
    Where did you get this information?

  2. #32
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    Quote Originally Posted by VNV View Post
    I kinda got that. But it reminds me of how professors sometimes said “it’s important to revisit first principles” - but with far more elegance than the first time through. Which, assumes a certain level of competence - the vocabulary has been established, and the conversation is now in small society amongst near-peers.
    Yeah, but usually they’re generalizing the results (like Calculus on Manifolds) or embedding them into some larger program (like Kevin Buzzard formalizing it to be checkable by computers). Bernstein just explains the same concepts more economically. And not just by being terse: he eliminates unnecessary dependencies and uses a less fancy integral.

    Quote Originally Posted by Yngvi View Post
    How do we define what it means to have "learned" calculus?
    This limit does not exist.

  3. #33
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    Quote Originally Posted by mkm5 View Post
    Or read the first 12 pages of Starting Strength and a novice can suddenly pull 405? Gotta put the work in brother!
    An inquisitive, interested pmind can accumulate knowledge faster than the muscles can accumulate strength, even at novice rates.

  4. #34
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    Quote Originally Posted by skid View Post
    My eldest son just got his bachelor's degree in chemistry. He was considering getting a PhD. I talked with a couple PhD chemists from work and they both said to tell him not to waste his time. He had the same feeling as well and got a good job with a fuel cell company with the degree he had.

    Spending another 4+ years in school would have cost $100k for little financial return benefit and the loss of $260k/4 years of earnings. So more than $350k. That's a lot of money to make up. Interestingly he competed with PhD chemists for his role and still got the job before them because he had some real mechanical and trade skills from growing up on a farm.
    This is just a bunch of cope to justify your son's decision. Any reasonable chemistry program has at least teaching/research positions that cover a stipend and tuition. Better candidates can apply for fellowships. That is, if you're not getting paid to do a STEM PhD, you're fucking up. There are tons of roles that both PhDs and people with just an undergraduate degree can apply for, but there many roles that only PhDs or people with significant research experience are qualified for. The skills you learn as an undergraduate are almost entirely disjoint from those that you learn as a PhD student.

    Calculus I and II and the pre-reqs for it. Make sure your instructor knows how to actually teach this material, since faculty members hired for their mathematical ability probably can't explain it to people who don't already know it, in precisely the same way natural athletes make terrible coaches. You will probably never use calculus – the purpose is to teach you to think logically and mathematically; differentials and integrals are loaded cerebral movement patterns that develop these thinking skills.
    Why calculus? You're lauding the benefits of thinking logically/mathematically and then apparently arbitrarily choose courses that lack rigor (a.k.a, principled logical thinking) where you just learn to do problems instead of actually develop these skills. Why not discrete math? Or mathematical logic? Or analysis (a.k.a. calculus with proofs)? Or algebra? Or number theory?

    Maybe you chose calculus because you also mention physics (and, to a lesser extent, chemistry) and calculus is needed for physics, but this point is never made--in fact, the opposite point is made: "You will probably never use calculus".

  5. #35
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    Quote Originally Posted by asm44 View Post
    This is not going to be useful for someone who is not an autistic savant or has never touched calculus or more rigorous math before.
    I would not be quite so tranchant, but in the main I share this impression.
    The information in those twelve pages is impeccably concise, but at the end of it the reader will probably have troubles computing the derivative of X^2.
    Worse, he will not have much of an idea as to the physical significance of computing a derivative.
    Not that a physical approach is necessary to master the concept, but I think that for most people understanding the physical meaning (or, which is basically the same thing, the history of the concept) will greatly help.

    The approach might work for some, but it's unlikely to work for everyone, or even most.

    All imho, of course.

    IPB

  6. #36
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    Quote Originally Posted by zft View Post
    Why calculus? You're lauding the benefits of thinking logically/mathematically and then apparently arbitrarily choose courses that lack rigor (a.k.a, principled logical thinking) where you just learn to do problems instead of actually develop these skills. Why not discrete math? Or mathematical logic? Or analysis (a.k.a. calculus with proofs)? Or algebra? Or number theory?
    In less popular courses, there is dramatic variation in the quality of instruction. And Rip is suggesting coursework primarily for the instruction.

    Quote Originally Posted by IlPrincipeBrutto View Post
    The information in those twelve pages is impeccably concise, but at the end of it the reader will probably have troubles computing the derivative of X^2.
    Worse, he will not have much of an idea as to the physical significance of computing a derivative.
    Not that a physical approach is necessary to master the concept, but I think that for most people understanding the physical meaning (or, which is basically the same thing, the history of the concept) will greatly help.
    Have them learn calculus in tandem with (or following some exposure to) a calc-level topic they actually care about. Most students are not actually interested in computing the volumes of solids.

  7. #37
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    Quote Originally Posted by francesco.decaro View Post
    Where did you get this information?
    I am a STEM graduate from a well-respected university and have observed among my peers that less than 50% were able to find gainful employment in a related field if they were White, American and Male; of the 50% who did get a job in the field, it took, on average, 6 months to a year to get that job.
    On the other hand, nearly all of my non-white, foreign or female peers found work quickly and easily; I saw them employed in the field on average about 1-3 months after they began seeking employment.

    As to PhD students, my observation was that it took them a long time to find a job, the salaries were not much different from Bachelor's degree holders and the vast majority of them were employed with a job that did not desire a PhD holder.
    In a small number of instances, if they got the right job, the PhD allowed them to climb the corporate ladder more easily.

  8. #38
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    On the topic of going to University, I've been having this argument for a long time. The idea that people should be expected to do some sort of research to establish if the course they're going to spend 3 - 4 years of their life doing has reasonable prospects on completion is met with such hostility. I believe it's push back against the notion that university is for the higher classes and the elite. if anyone can walk into a sociology class and start learning, is it really higher education? The STEM subjects require a reasonable level of prerequisite knowledge to even understand what is being discussed which is why they are what I would consider higher education. Don't waste your time and money on doing what amounts to little more than a hobby.

    While that 11 page document is relevant, it's a hard read for most. I like to help people by building on concepts they will be familiar with, something like a car moving over a certain distance is displacement (miles - s), this happens over a certain amount of time (hours - t). Plot these on a graph and show using some trigonometry that you can calculate the rate of change (d), specifically in this example the rate of displacement with respect to time (ds/dt) or the miles per hour and that this is the velocity. The time it takes to reach a given velocity is the rate of change of velocity with respect to time (dv/dt or ds^2/dt^2) and this is the acceleration. With a simple example of a car moving someone can understand the basic concepts of calculus that can be built on very quickly.

    Having completed an engineering apprenticeship I'm probably a little biased but I've always found this idea of applying education to a relatable example to be really helpful.

  9. #39
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    Quote Originally Posted by francesco.decaro View Post
    Where did you get this information?
    I got it from trying to get work in a tech field with a STEM degree, and having my resume go right into the trash for every single entry level job I applied for.

  10. #40
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    Quote Originally Posted by Roobo View Post
    ...
    While that 11 page document is relevant, it's a hard read for most. I like to help people by building on concepts they will be familiar with, something like a car moving over a certain distance is displacement (miles - s), this happens over a certain amount of time (hours - t). Plot these on a graph and show using some trigonometry that you can calculate the rate of change (d), specifically in this example the rate of displacement with respect to time (ds/dt) or the miles per hour and that this is the velocity. The time it takes to reach a given velocity is the rate of change of velocity with respect to time (dv/dt or ds^2/dt^2) and this is the acceleration. With a simple example of a car moving someone can understand the basic concepts of calculus that can be built on very quickly...
    And we may be protesting too much about Shiva's reference. It was meant to illuminate a point, which it did. But it's fun to spool it out.

    Richard Hamming writes well on the subject of, say, intuition behind math. From his "The Art of Probability for Scientists and Engineers", section 8.5 starts with:

    "Idealists believe that the postulates determine the subject;
    realists believe that the subject determines the postulates."

    and continues with:


    ... I have long said, "If whether an airplane will fly or not depends on some function that arose in the design being Lebesgue integrable but not Riemann integrable, then I would not fly in that plane."


    All of section 8.5 is worth reading.

    If I recall correctly, he was known to be a bit of a crab. I find him refreshing.

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