a j Posted August 22, 2007 Share Posted August 22, 2007 You could say that for a lot of folks on degree courses. Someone mentioned maths and physics as real degrees earlier in the thread... then commented that they nearly all ended up as programmers. Maybe maths and physics are the new mickey mouse degrees as they don't really lead anywhere and people taking them then need to retrain. I have met some very good people from outside the field of IT but I've also met some of the worst hackers with no grounding in ideas of software engineering. A degree is really what you make it. I think the difference between a maths or physics degree from a decent university and a Micky Mouse certificate is that the subjects demand ability and effort, and develop skills in people with an ability to be developed. Thus graduates in harder subjects have a wider range of careers to chose from and seem to finish up with much better jobs. I think people drift into maths and physics degrees for motives which are not altogether dissimilar to mickey mouse degrees. They were good at "geeky" subjects at school, got As at A level and kind of drifted into the degree course without a clear idea of why they were taking that particular degree. That must be the case as most of them end up in jobs outside the discipline. Perhaps they are able to get jobs outside the discipline as their skills are in demand (unlike the majority of recent graduates)? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
misfit Posted August 23, 2007 Share Posted August 23, 2007 £20 an hour for proper music tuition isn't bad if you can do enough of it, play in a covers/wedding band, do a bit of this and that. You can get a decent income. The trouble is the kids who've done Music Technology with DJ studies for a doss about yet have no actual talent or skills at the end of it.One person I knew who did some sort of Media Production course found there was snowball's chance in hell of actually landing a career in the TV industry unless you could do masses of free work experience so they started making wedding and then corporate videos and makes a packet. I think too many kids comes out with degrees in all sorts of things expecting they can apply to jobs/companies they fancy and get interviews. It's a rude awakening when they're just one of hundreds or thousands trying to get land the same few openings and many just slip fatalistically into McWork. At my workplace we have many graduates earning no money in low-end jobs. One chap doing some £11k job had a degree in photography and I asked why he wasn't making the coffee at a studio or setting up as a family or wedding photographer or building a commercial photography portfolio? He just sort of shrugged. He'd sent a few dozen CVs with some of his degree portfolio and got no response so that was that. I think the problem that you can now go from GCSE to A-Level to Degree having never had to slog, graft, innovative or think. So all these kids think finding a job's going to be the same. I do not disagree £20 for a teacher can be good value for the student. The problem for the teacher is getting the numbers through the door and do not forget that £20 is taxable. Also in a town there will be a handful of teachers who are extremely talented so trying to break through is also very difficult due to the competition so depending upon your musical background (which bands you have played with) you have to drop your money accordingly. London is even more competitive where I have noticed drummers in local covers bands in Fulham play like Stewart Copeland (no mean feat when he is probably one of the best drummers in the world and yes I do include Bonham and Paice in that) I have a lot of friends who teach music, some still live at home and apart from one they are extremly reliant upon their partners and the one that can hold his own works in TV, is probably the number one teacher in his town and also plays 3-4 nights in covers bands. Not everyone can reach these heights so I would say most teachers struggle. They also struggle within their marriage as they are either out or locked away in their little room. It certainly is not an easy route. I tried it myself when living at home and then at University but I went to University and found out I was being cased so had to stop. I think the media problem is not limited to media. I know a number of people who worked for free in audit or management consultancy to get their foot in the door. I myself followed this route and it has been extremely rewarding. Ah Mcjob, Douglas Copeland's entry into the OED. I think more students should think about what they want to do when they graduate before they go to University and choose their course and University accordingly. I chose a University which required 24-26 points and had a reputation for students gaining employment within 6 months of graduation. I also chose a course where I could swap at the end of the first year if I wanted to specialise. I utilised this option and it layed the groundwork for my current career. Sounds like your photography chap is a little lazy. I used to have an IT chap manufacturing who kept pestering for an IT position, the company grew and he could be accommodated and he is now a sucessful IT consultant. It is all about being proactive and not giving up and doing what one has to do to get on. Students I am sure have to think to pass their GCSE's and A Levels so why they do not apply this when choosing a degree course I have no idea. Maybe Brian Heap is no longer available with his tuition books to assist. Maybe the price of a pint, the nightlife and the amount of boys:girls ratio is more important to some. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
talksalot81 Posted August 23, 2007 Share Posted August 23, 2007 That must be the case as most of them end up in jobs outside the discipline. Unfortunately your reason for maths and physics graduates ending up elsewhere is totally wrong. With a simple undergraduate degree, the specialised jobs are out of reach - most jobs which directly use physics (for example) require a Ph.D. A large proportion of the students will be aware of this and will likely have gone into the subject with the aim of learning how to think analytically - this is the real skill taught by these degrees and industry knows it. These graduates thus come out and IT/finance/law are all dying to get their hands on these people because they are problem solvers who have skills that cannot simply be obtained by someone off the street. For these graduates, they now have the choice of a low level specialised job (below the doctors) with very poor pay or they go into another area where they can apply their skills, get paid quite well and have good advancement opportunities. Even with a Ph.D., you find people leaving their specialised area. Why? Availability of good jobs. These guys will likely have worked hard and been dedicated for 6-8 years, they feel they deserve reward. They go and look for a job and find they have to relocate and can expect a salary little more than £25k with a slow advancement. They then have the option of IT/finance/law and the firms are only too keen to get them - they will pay them much better, they will have a lot more choice and will probably have more security. So it is very easy to be persuaded outside of your specialised area. Do not make the mistake that maths/physics graduates in IT are there wasting their skills - they are most definitely not. It does have to be admitted that physics (my area) can get drifters who come in not having any idea. That is a result of the grades necessary being low. BCC at A-level does not really take all that intelligent an individual. That said, anyone not wanting to work but starts a physics degree is an idiot, plain and simple. Unlike the real mickey mouse degrees, you cannot drift through - it is simply too difficult. Even intelligent people will struggle on a good degree course. Those who have no desire to learn the skills simply drop out or are failed. That is distinct from the mickey mouse degrees where it is actually very hard to fail! Ultimately, our country should be reliant on scientists/mathematicians - but we are currently very badly off as far as R&D is concerned, hence why you find so many, seemingly, outside their expert areas. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sossij Posted August 23, 2007 Share Posted August 23, 2007 (edited) Unfortunately your reason for maths and physics graduates ending up elsewhere is totally wrong. With a simple undergraduate degree, the specialised jobs are out of reach - most jobs which directly use physics (for example) require a Ph.D. A large proportion of the students will be aware of this and will likely have gone into the subject with the aim of learning how to think analytically - this is the real skill taught by these degrees and industry knows it. These graduates thus come out and IT/finance/law are all dying to get their hands on these people because they are problem solvers who have skills that cannot simply be obtained by someone off the street. For these graduates, they now have the choice of a low level specialised job (below the doctors) with very poor pay or they go into another area where they can apply their skills, get paid quite well and have good advancement opportunities. Even with a Ph.D., you find people leaving their specialised area. Why? Availability of good jobs. These guys will likely have worked hard and been dedicated for 6-8 years, they feel they deserve reward. They go and look for a job and find they have to relocate and can expect a salary little more than £25k with a slow advancement. They then have the option of IT/finance/law and the firms are only too keen to get them - they will pay them much better, they will have a lot more choice and will probably have more security. So it is very easy to be persuaded outside of your specialised area.Do not make the mistake that maths/physics graduates in IT are there wasting their skills - they are most definitely not. It does have to be admitted that physics (my area) can get drifters who come in not having any idea. That is a result of the grades necessary being low. BCC at A-level does not really take all that intelligent an individual. That said, anyone not wanting to work but starts a physics degree is an idiot, plain and simple. Unlike the real mickey mouse degrees, you cannot drift through - it is simply too difficult. Even intelligent people will struggle on a good degree course. Those who have no desire to learn the skills simply drop out or are failed. That is distinct from the mickey mouse degrees where it is actually very hard to fail! Ultimately, our country should be reliant on scientists/mathematicians - but we are currently very badly off as far as R&D is concerned, hence why you find so many, seemingly, outside their expert areas. I completely agree, talksalot. I had to work my **** off to get my undergraduatre degree in Physics. I did my course as a mature student after being out in the real world for 10 years.. it really gives you perspective on how wonderful being able to do nothing but study a fantastic subject like physics can be. I was surprised at just how hard my fellow physics students worked than people on other degrees, alwys 9.00 am - 13.00 lectures, labs and project work in the afternoons and then loads of challenging coursework at night. It was like a scientific boot camp! After graduating with a degree in Physics w/ Astrophysics I went on to do both a masters and a Ph.D. Funnily enough, I think the higher degree courses were "easier", in the sense that they were an opportunity to put into practice everything that I had learned as an undergraduate. You are quite correct, however, when you point out that the opportunities, had I wanted to stay in academia, were thin on the ground (to say the least) and there's massive competition for the jobs... after all you get paid to stare at the stars for a living! Reluctantly I turned my hand to teaching and got a part time job teaching A Level physics and Maths and a further education college. The pay was awful but the students were a delight to teach. Sadly, however I was making so little teaching that it was actually costing me money to get to work! I then decided to step outside my discipline and see whether my so called "transferable skills" would be a marketable commodity in industry. I'm happy to say that I practically had my hand bitten off! I was offerd several jobs in IT, the reasons as you cite above.. "problem solving ability", "analytical"... blah blah. Eventually I ended up working in the semiconductor industry and now have the most wonderful job. A real geek's dream job. It is the perfect combination of Physics, IT, programming, problem solving and intellectual thought.... oh and they pay me about 3 times what I could earn as a lecturer. I guess I have been very lucky. I would certainly recommend to people with physics degrees or similar (maths, engineering) to get out there into industry - you are in demand! (In fact the semi-conductor industry simply cannot get enough decent UK sourced physicists, engineers, mathematicians.. we now source well over 75% of our recruits from China, India, Korea etc.... and, sad to say, we have exactly zero women engineers from the UK in our company (although many from overseas) and that's not for want of looking. Edited August 23, 2007 by sossij Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goonboy Posted August 23, 2007 Share Posted August 23, 2007 (edited) Again a poster mentioned the value of learning smalltalk as a language. I would say it is a good teaching language for OO design. The idea of the degree is not to train people in particularl technologies but to learn the fundementals of the discipline and provide the framework for futher learning and study. The fact that mathmaticians become programmers shows that this is successful. Modula 2 is probably a bit irrelevant as structured programming is dated although it is not a bad teaching environment for the basics of algorithm design - a quicksort in C++ or Modula 2 is much the same beast.. I didn't do computing at uni (they didn't have computers back then) but don't have a major problem with CS, SE etc as disciplines. That was old goonboy! <Boring> True, implementing a quicksort in a structured language is pretty much the same, but why not learn languages that are currently used. You still get the benefit of the theory side, but when you go into the industry you have a chance of being familiar with the toolset used and will not have to relearn. It's a bit like these formal design pseudo langages used to design stuff, why not specify it in the language you intend to implement it in anyway, you will save a fair amount of wasted recoding. Also CS degrees can be based upon whatever is fashionable at the time (or used to be fashionable) for example OOP was once the latest new paradigm. But you don't necessarily require an OOP dedicated language, for instance goonboy was able to implement an OOP based design in pure ANSI C this summer (as part of a generic discrete FSM library implementation). And also OOP is not the solution to many problems... I totally agree that their are very bad coders out there, software engineering has a huge variance of skill between engineers. I would argue a good software engineer requires a good grounding in algorithms, data structures, but also the pratical side, i.e. lots of experience (old goonboy wrote his first program a good quarter of a century ago) and also knowledge about hardware and architecture, i.e. memory systems, endian stuff. Also management politics... </Boring> </Boring> In conclusion: Smalltalk sux PS: To the poster who mentioned the semiconductor industry, goonboy once worked for a small company that produced ASICs, we hired several teachers and trained them from scratch (not totally, some could already code), they turned out to be excellent silicon dudes! Edited August 23, 2007 by goonboy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sossij Posted August 23, 2007 Share Posted August 23, 2007 PS: To the poster who mentioned the semiconductor industry, goonboy once worked for a small company that produced ASICs, we hired several teachers and trained them from scratch (not totally, some could already code), they turned out to be excellent silicon dudes! Heh heh Yes we find it much easier to train someone with a physics background how to program than it is to teach physics to someone who can "only" program Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goonboy Posted August 23, 2007 Share Posted August 23, 2007 Heh heh Yes we find it much easier to train someone with a physics background how to program than it is to teach physics to someone who can "only" program Actually they were P.E. teachers We booted the physics ones out for not being able to tell the difference between a wave and a particle. One such buffon couldn't even measure the position of a particle, said he was uncertain about it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sossij Posted August 23, 2007 Share Posted August 23, 2007 Actually they were P.E. teachers We booted the physics ones out for not being able to tell the difference between a wave and a particle. One such buffon couldn't even measure the position of a particle, said he was uncertain about it. Hmmm... yes, they have nasty thoughts about poisoning cats in boxes too. Bunch of delinquents! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goonboy Posted August 23, 2007 Share Posted August 23, 2007 Hmmm... yes, they have nasty thoughts about poisoning cats in boxes too. Bunch of delinquents! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
talksalot81 Posted August 23, 2007 Share Posted August 23, 2007 I would certainly recommend to people with physics degrees or similar (maths, engineering) to get out there into industry - you are in demand! (In fact the semi-conductor industry simply cannot get enough decent UK sourced physicists, engineers, mathematicians.. we now source well over 75% of our recruits from China, India, Korea etc.... and, sad to say, we have exactly zero women engineers from the UK in our company (although many from overseas) and that's not for want of looking. It should be said though, industry is not very good at advertising! I keep hearing these reports from industrial contacts - "we cannot get the people" - but I have looked before and many of the companies for which these contacts work have no apparent opportunities. Often you cannot even find information specific to the local operation and only global type info which is utterly useless! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Visitor Posted August 23, 2007 Share Posted August 23, 2007 It should be said though, industry is not very good at advertising! I keep hearing these reports from industrial contacts - "we cannot get the people" I too get frustrated by this lament, not just from engineering companies but most business sectors. What they really mean to say is "we cannot get the people for the price we want to pay". which is entirely different. Offer a good engineer £75,000 and they will find plenty. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
meow Posted August 23, 2007 Share Posted August 23, 2007 (edited) A BSc or BA graduate 'Street hygiene technician' perchance? No worse than an EA needing a degree I wouldnt have thought. GAAAAH! It would only be a "BA" in Street hygiene :angry: Actually this whole discussion reminds me of some that my brother has had with friends whereby he gets very annoyed by what the word "Engineer" is attached to these days, especially after he recently saw a sign on a toilet door saying "Out of order, an engineer will attend soon". Anyone with a true background in an engineering discipline would probably be appalled, anyway, I digress... Edit: Granted, if the owner of the premises with said toilet was getting a new one designed from scratch with new technology then fair enough, but actually I think it was broken and it needed a person called a "plumber", whatever they are. Edited August 23, 2007 by meow Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
frozen_out Posted August 23, 2007 Share Posted August 23, 2007 GAAAAH! It would only be a "BA" in Street hygiene Are you aware that the Cambridge natural sciences degree 'only' results in a BA? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Benedict Posted August 23, 2007 Share Posted August 23, 2007 Unfortunately your reason for maths and physics graduates ending up elsewhere is totally wrong. With a simple undergraduate degree, the specialised jobs are out of reach - most jobs which directly use physics (for example) require a Ph.D. A large proportion of the students will be aware of this and will likely have gone into the subject with the aim of learning how to think analytically - this is the real skill taught by these degrees and industry knows it. These graduates thus come out and IT/finance/law are all dying to get their hands on these people because they are problem solvers who have skills that cannot simply be obtained by someone off the street. Agreed. Knowledge is so specialised that there's huge advantages to training skilled generalists. If I want to know something I can google anyway, for anything short of genuine groundbreaking research. Maths & Physics degrees teach you how to think. The subject matter with which you're taught to think may be utterly irrelevant and never used again in your life, but the ability to think stays with you forever. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goonboy Posted August 23, 2007 Share Posted August 23, 2007 Are you aware that the Cambridge natural sciences degree 'only' results in a BA? I pity the fool who doesn't like B.A. Don't do drugs and stay away from MR T's BINS!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.