Ask me about being Valedictorian

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I know several engineers with 3.9X GPAs. Maintaining a 3.9+ in a tough major such as engineering is quite an impressive feat. Bragging about your grades in english is analgous to boasting about winning a race in the special olympics.


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Way too harsh. Most of these engineers would be not be near the top of their class if they had majored in English or literature of any type. And I'm assuming native speakers.

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I know a lot of engineers that were bored in English class. I know I slept through mine. So I have to agree with this one but not for the reasons you assume. Forcing an Engineer to major in English is like putting a former Marine that served in Iraq and is now playing college football in a balley dance class. It just doesn't work.

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You mean ballet, or belly?

If you mean skill sets are different, you're correct of course. If you mean that having one skill set guarantees or even implies having another, you're not.

Having poor to mediocre language skills is extremely common -- no less so among people with notable mathematical ability. It works the same way if you flip it around -- poor mathematical ability is very common among people with very good language skills.

The bias on this board, given its nature as a poker site, leans heavily toward celebrating mathematical ability, and its heroes tend to be people who are great at poker, which certainly leans more toward math than language. When asked the values of one skill set versus another, the self-selected forum members here are usually pretty darn happy to vote for themselves and not just affirm some sort of primacy for and celebrate their own skill sets, but go to war against the talents they may not have and therefore find necessary to denigrate. Egos are surely fragile things, and maybe it's easier over all just to not take chances on them.

In other words, I think most football players would fail miserably as either ballet or belly dancers.

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This discussion reminds me of a couple threads from a while ago with sklansky, pzhon, brucez, and others. The general feeling was that hard science types are more well-rounded in their education than humanities students. Here is a good quote:
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A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: 'Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?'
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question -- such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, 'Can you read?' -- not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.

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Here are the threads:
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I think you have just described the very obvious other side of the coin. Of course most people's spheres of knowledge tend to be narrow. There is little need to be even moderately conversant in high levels of both language skills and knowledge and mathematical/scientific ones. Jobs, especially high-paying ones, on the whole tend to favor specialization. Most people have only limited intellectual curiosity once they settle into their careers. I'd bet most of us have forgotten at least 99% of everything we've ever learned, and certainly not pursued any sort of high level understanding of many fields that are not directly job related.

I do think it peculiar that you characterize humanities students exhibiting the very same lack of rounded abilities that math/science types do as somehow distinguishing themselves for their ignorance, while the math/science types having the very same shortcomings are not noted for doing so.

Also, I don't think Sklansky is any authority on this. There's hardly a post in which he doesn't either flatter himself or set up others to do it for him.

[gumpzilla]

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I do think it peculiar that you characterize humanities students exhibiting the very same lack of rounded abilities that math/science types do as somehow distinguishing themselves for their ignorance, while the math/science types having the very same shortcomings are not noted for doing so.

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Huh? If you're responding to this:

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The general feeling was that hard science types are more well-rounded in their education than humanities students.

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the point seems to be that, on average, the math/science types are less ignorant. Treating the two situations symmetrically presumes that the science types are, on average, comparably ignorant, and the assertion is that they are not.

Also, I find this quote

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There is little need to be even moderately conversant in high levels of both language skills and knowledge and mathematical/scientific ones.

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to be somewhat unlikely. Having crappy language skills seems likely to hinder you in almost any job, whereas crappy mathematical skills are less likely to.

[Blarg]

1. I didn't spot anything that backed up at all the assertion that the mathy types were any better at using language skills particularly well or had much more of them. I mean, sure, we all can talk, but ... I don't think that's what's being "measured" here. The only assertion I saw was that those not in science/math fields had poor knowledge of science and math.

2. "High levels"

[peritonlogon]

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I am graduating today after returning to school after years of doing 'other' things. I have a GPA over 3.9, and I have been elected as the valedictorian in my course of study.

I am concluding a degree in English looking to pursue my Phd in literary studies in order to become a professor. Ask me some questions as to how I did it, or some general questions about school or how I rock.

[img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

-Jay

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Don't mean to but into your life.. but have you looked into the realities of attaining a Phd in literature and then becoming a professor in it? I would advise you to do so. Not only is grad school insanely competitive, but the job hunt is even more so...often 500 Phds applying to 1 mediocre liberal arts college...So, once you've made it this far, you still have 5-10 years till tenure, and untill then you'll just be churning out articles and playing politics and hoping you don't get [censored]-canned for a political reason...then, if you do, you get to be an adjunct at a community college. Read up on the cult of acedemia.

There are plenty of people from the college I graduated from ( Saint John's College ) who are now graduating with their Phds in literature and are begining to regret it.

[gumpzilla]

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1. I didn't spot anything that backed up at all the assertion that the mathy types were any better at using language skills particularly well or had much more of them. I mean, sure, we all can talk, but ... I don't think that's what's being "measured" here. The only assertion I saw was that those not in science/math fields had poor knowledge of science and math.

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It's anecdotal, sure, but I think it's true. The major reason is that nerds frequently still read literature for fun, but humanities types don't tend to bone up on the science.

If you want to push the discussion in a direction where it evens out, you could get into literary theory/criticism. But I don't think that's an apt comparison, because familiarity with lit crit isn't a prerequisite for learning basic language skills in the same way that learning Newton's laws is a prerequisite for learning physics. Going down those roads, I'd say the number of physicists familiar with literary criticism is greater than the number of poets familiar with quantum field theory.

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2. "High levels"

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For pretty much everybody but poets, the only language skill that matters is the ability to clearly convey meaning. I don't consider that to be a very high level of skill. But, if that's the metric for high levels of skill, then I still believe that many more scientists will have high levels of language skill than vice versa.

[Boris]

I hope sup bro stops by to kick your pansy valedictorian ass.

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I give language skills higher cred than you do. I think everyone has found some writers vastly clearer, more colorful, more interesting, and/or more entertaining than others. It's just that everyone can write, so it's common to think that everyone can write well. Most people cannot.

I'll agree that math/and mathematically-based science is more specialized right off the bat. It's not something most people would do for fun or have the slightest interest in if it's not job-related.

I don't think this necessarily ties in to how well-rounded someone is particularly clearly, though it seems it would have to. Everyone has a limited amount of time and even interests, and they spend it as they see fit. Who is to say that someone interested in history, psychology, art, and language is less well rounded than someone interested in history, psychology, art, and math?

I also think it's far easier than most people credit to be really awful in things like history, psychology, art, etc. And again it is deceptive because it's not something easily and quickly measurable by knowing some quickly and easily measurable thing all could agree on. I mean, Asian history may well be crap to westerners, and vice-versa, but math is math. All it takes is a quick listen to at least 90% of American citizens to know that they are not well-read in politics, yet it's a very popular subject that almost everyone thinks they know, maybe even well enough to insult others in comparison. It's a lot easier to know you're ignorant and/or untalented in math than that you're ignorant and/or untalented in the humanities.

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For pretty much everybody but poets, the only language skill that matters is the ability to clearly convey meaning.


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A very important use of language is to persuade. Empires can rise and fall on how well that is done, loves can be born and lost, friendships torn apart and reclaimed again. Language is even often at its most convincing -- even dangerous -- when it appeals to other things than logic. You don't have to be a poet to use or need to use language well.

[Patrick del Poker Grande]

Blarg,
Engineers rule, english majors drool.

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The court is willing to enter this into evidence as Exhibit "A" in the case of <u>Rhyming Awesomeness vs. Drooling</u>.