and this was just a joke
This attitude is real, folks. "I want to slog through 4 years of science just so I can go to med school and get really stressed and deal with people who are bleeding and I can't stand blood but I really want to help people" is something we more or less hear on a daily basis in my office.
Yesterday we had a good one: Student comes in because S. wants to drop creative writing. "I really don't like creative writing," S explains. "Then why did you register for the class?" we ask in surprise, though we really shouldn't be. "That was June; this is September." What???!!! So in 3 months the class is magically going to change from being a creative writing class?
The U has a new provost for academic affairs. Apparently he's gung-ho to overhaul the entire system. My unit's administration anticipates that central is going to centralize control and colleges/departments/units will no longer have as much autonomy. Part of what this means is that if a program can't justify its existence in central administration's big picture, that program will be axed. That simple. But what that means for advising units is extreme concentration on recruitment, enrollment management, and improving 4 year graduation rates. The problem is, though, my office in particular sees students coming in with unrealistic job expectations: the various health-care professions seem glamorous, or lucrative, or legitimately helping, but the students themselves are not prepared for the realities of the prerequisite courses and sometimes even the careers themselves. Sometimes they'll repeat math and/or chemistry 3 to 4 times because those are required courses, without a solid understanding of the fact that repeating the course even once diminishes their chances of getting in. Others get to the third or fourth year of their programs and are so miserable they don't even know why they're doing what they're doing.
Does anyone besides me see any particular challenges in these situations? ;-)
Comments
Scary! Bizarro world it would truly be, if Andy were saying that one calculus class caused him to abandon science! Nope, that was me -- before I took calculus, I was considering a major in Math, Chemistry, or Physics. After calculus, I knew I would suffer way more than I wanted to if I pursued any of those fields in depth. Most of the time, it seems to me that was a good decision, but sometimes I wonder...
Posted by: stacie | September 15, 2004 05:15 PM
I was determined to become a doctor when I was in junior high and high school. It evolved from becoming an ob/gyn (6th grade) to a family physician (7th-11th grade) to a psychologist. When I got to college I quickly realized that not only was I better at English, I truly loved it. So I switched.
I wouldn't say that was the only factor in my decision making process. Most of the psych majors were crazy. Not just a little bit - a whole lot. They had become psych majors to figure out their own issues. Informally counseling them, I realized I did not have the compassion to listen to someone who was struggling, but unwilling to change it.
Yet if I were to become an MD, I would feel too much for a seriously ill patient and it could either destroy me emotionally or make me cut off from all emotions to survive. That didn't sound appealing either.
So after much soul searching I switched to English. How was I to know that in the end, all that mattered to the work world was the title "Bachelor of Arts?"
Posted by: Lori | September 15, 2004 09:37 AM
Danielle, it appears that you mistakenly credit a previous comment to me instead of Stacie.
For myself, I had a hard time correlating 1) how much I enjoyed learning about a subject is school with 2) how much I would enjoy working in that field. I started school in computers, and didn't enjoy learning about them much (I later realized this was because I'm a self learner in CS -- and being spoon fed is boring as hell). But I loved learning about science. However, when it came time to work in science, I found that it was soooo boring, tedious and I lost interest in the minutae of what I was working on. And now that I work in computers, I found that I can go as deep, fast and far as I want -- I'm no longer limited by the syllabus, and I love it.
Posted by: Andy | September 15, 2004 09:31 AM
Umm, Andy....but you are a math and sciences geek! Nerd! geeky-nerd! :-) And through nearly three degrees! ;-) And then you went into computers....
Posted by: Danielle | September 15, 2004 08:57 AM
With health care in particular, I wonder if the conventional wisdom that jobs are plentiful and well-paying is part of the allure. I don't understand, though, why a student who has to repeat chemistry three times hasn't figured out that this is not for them. It only took me one semester of calculus -- which I passed -- to know that math and the sciences were not for me!
Posted by: Stacie | September 15, 2004 08:49 AM
Interesting post! I wonder if students are less self-reflective than they used to be - or perhaps they don't have enough deep information (odd, in this age of info overload,but depth is lacking) to make rational decisions for themselves. I see it in departmental advising in CLA too - students learn about a couple of options out of hundreds that are available, and latch on to one of several rather than one of many.
Posted by: Sno Cones | September 15, 2004 07:57 AM