TromboneChat

OneTon wrote: ↑Wed Sep 07, 2022 9:32 pm

timothy42b wrote: ↑Wed Sep 07, 2022 6:01 pm I think every young person pondering these decisions ought to read:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=shop+class+as+soul+craft

Shop Class as Soul Craft, an Inquiry into the Value of Work, by Matthew Crawford.

Thanks Timothy. I will pick up a copy when I return Saturday and read it.

This book made an impression on me and had direct application to some relatives.

The author is a PhD Philosopher who worked in think tanks then later changed careers to become a motorcycle mechanic. One of his points was that we often send people to college who are unlikely to finish, and who are not going to be happy with the career they end up with if they do.

timothy42b wrote: ↑Thu Sep 08, 2022 5:13 am One of his points was that we often send people to college who are unlikely to finish, and who are not going to be happy with the career they end up with if they do.

Right. This is part of my assertion that you can't just push people into fields. Especially STEM. It takes people with certain skills and a definite mind set to make it through a science, math or engineering degree.

Here are the classes a mechanical engineering student takes in undergrad (and mechanical is probably the simplest of the engineering fields). 50% drop out rate because people can't handle the course load. I had 2 years of music school prior to engineering coursework, so all of my liberal arts and electives were taken care of. Most of my classes were calculus based.

MATH
- calculus 1
- calculus 2
- calculus 3
- calculus 4
- matricies and boundary value problems
- differential equations

SCIENCE
- University physics 1 ("university" means it is calculus based)
- University physics 2
- University physics 3
- University physics 4
- University chemistry 1
- University chemistry 2
- science elective (I took Modern Physics - meaning Relativity and later)

ENGINEERING
- metal shop
- circuits
- design for manufacture
- programming 1
- programming 2
- CAD 1
- CAD 2
- applied statistics
- strength of materials
- statics
- stress analysis/FEA
- dynamics
- fluid dynamics
- thermodynamics
- turbomachinery
- senior design project

It wasn't a vacation.

On the other hand, I have to say that I have very rarely used any of this directly in my daily work. The stuff I use every day are issues like problem solving, organizing ideas, technical writing, material selection, manufacturing processes...

Pushing people into STEM is a waste of resources. Evaluating aptitudes and interests is where it all has to start. Once you know who could succeed, then you can recruit.

Pushing people into STEM is a waste of resources. Evaluating aptitudes and interests is where it all has to start. Once you know who could succeed, then you can recruit.

I know a lot of people who thought this, did a humanities degree, and then later realized that they actually did have the aptitude for STEM. I'm bias of course, because that's exactly my experience. But I'm by no means alone, and that is especially true of some of my female colleagues who have expressed similar stories of their own path to where they are now.

If anything, it highlights how curricula are often misaligned with things that are actually useful for employment and how students are often seeking vocational assistance first and, for lack of a better term, edification second - the opposite of how undergraduate coursework is typically structured. I haven't done any calculus since my final exam for calculus several years ago. I also was not exposed to programming until two years into my coursework. Starting from tasks that people would actually do and moving outward to things that might be tangentially beneficial seems to be a much better approach to getting people into fields they might find interesting and are also in high demand, rather than treating supplemental information not necessary for the job as a pre-requisite.

hyperbolica wrote: ↑Thu Sep 08, 2022 7:32 am It wasn't a vacation.

On the other hand, I have to say that I have very rarely used any of this directly in my daily work. The stuff I use every day are issues like problem solving, organizing ideas, technical writing, material selection, manufacturing processes...

Dang, you didn't have to do heat transfer? Your ME was a lot easier than mine. <smiley>

I'm the only engineer I know that's ever used calculus after graduation, and that was for one problem almost 30 years ago. But we make everybody take it, because we don't want you in our private and decent paying club unless you can pass it.

Of course there are three ways to pass: be smart, work hard, cheat. Being facetious, but with that many options if you don't get through it you're probably not meant for STEM?

In my class, 50% of the people transferred or flunked out in the course of 4 years. This was just the reality. A lot of people are not prepared for what they find. Whether the curriculum matches the actual job is a bigger fight than I want to take on.

I did some work with the University of Virginia, and they were reluctant to have "CAD training" on campus, because "that's trade training stuff, not education". I considered that a very narrow and elitist view. In reality engineers need to be proficient in CAD just to do the daily work.

There is a degree path called "engineering technician" which has most of the same material as the full engineering degree, but without the calculus, so it's very watered down. A lot of people who transfer out of the full engineering program go into this line of study. Graduates are considered technicians rather than engineers. Still STEM. You can't get an engineering license without the calc, though.

I think the calculus prerequisite for programming is a holdover from when Programming was a specialization of Mathematics. Now Programming is its own field. There are some types of programs that make no use of calculus. I used to program a PLC to run a machine. No calculus there. I may have used calculus for other things, like figuring out settings for temperature or time, but for the PLC programming step was unnecessary. Programmers who use statistics often just take the formulae and apply them to data. The calculus needed to derive a statistical formula is unnecessary to the programmer. It might be more important to the person writing the specifications for the program, but not the coder.

Lots of things we study in college are holdovers from an earlier age. Still, a certain amount of Humanities is a good thing for a STEM geek. Makes them easier to work with; especially for non-geeks.

Language skills are useful for everybody. At some time you have to either write a report on what you found, document a program you did, or write a manual on how to use something. You don't have to be Ernest Hemingway, but the ability to write a cogent sentence is always valid.

timothy42b wrote: ↑Thu Sep 08, 2022 9:10 am Dang, you didn't have to do heat transfer? Your ME was a lot easier than mine. <smiley>

Heat transfer was in there, probably with thermo and fluids.

timothy42b wrote: ↑Thu Sep 08, 2022 9:10 am
I'm the only engineer I know that's ever used calculus after graduation, and that was for one problem almost 30 years ago. But we make everybody take it, because we don't want you in our private and decent paying club unless you can pass it.

Of course there are three ways to pass: be smart, work hard, cheat. Being facetious, but with that many options if you don't get through it you're probably not meant for STEM?

I actually did use calc once. I created an impact test rig and had to calculate the impulse on a plastic watch when on the end of a pendulum dropped from various angles, and its equivalent when dropped in a linear fall.

You actually have to understand the concept of calculus in order to understand stuff like acceleration, area under a curve, volume of irregular shapes, and stuff like that. We can't just send people out who don't understand what we program the computers to do. I don't think we can get rid of calculus altogether, but 4 years of it was a bit much.

I worked my way through, alternating quarters of school and internships. Even during school, I was still working a couple of part time jobs. Looking back, I took on too much, and kind of suffered for it.

hyperbolica wrote: ↑Thu Sep 08, 2022 7:32 am

timothy42b wrote: ↑Thu Sep 08, 2022 5:13 am One of his points was that we often send people to college who are unlikely to finish, and who are not going to be happy with the career they end up with if they do.

Right. This is part of my assertion that you can't just push people into fields. Especially STEM. ….
…

Pushing people into STEM is a waste of resources. Evaluating aptitudes and interests is where it all has to start. Once you know who could succeed, then you can recruit.

Good thing that historically there are no racial or gender stereotypes that possibly influence evaluation of aptitudes and interests…

That said, interesting milestone at Michigan Tech, 30% women!
https://www.mlive.com/news/2022/09/mic ... women.html
This includes this gem of a quote:

Kristin Arola grew up in Dollar Bay, just across the Portage Canal from Michigan Tech’s campus in Houghton. When she was a high school senior, she said, the overabundance of college men was “awesome.”

“The saying among women was, ‘The odds are good, but the goods are odd,’” she said.

Cheers,
Andy

My regrets about my uni days are, at age 67, tend towards feeling poorly educated despite 2 uni degrees. I wish I knew a bit more history, biology, science. A bit more French. I wish I knew what a slide rule is for.

But, being retired, I have time to read. I have stack of books on my nightstand, most half read, I must admit. I find the Oxford A Very Short Introduction series very helpful.

hyperbolica wrote: ↑Wed Sep 07, 2022 12:14 pm

spencercarran wrote: ↑Wed Sep 07, 2022 12:00 pm

No, that really is a fact. Unless you're going to argue that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is cooking the books.

Music professor with a doctorate: ~$96k https://www.salary.com/research/salary/ ... sic-salary
My brother with no degree working at a media company: $150k

You know what you can do with your statistics.

I have never understood the mentality that's confronted with measurable, observed facts and just says "Nuh-uh!"

Given such a gulf in approaches to making sense of the world around us, it seems unlikely we would be able to have any sort of a productive conversation.

spencercarran wrote: ↑Thu Sep 08, 2022 1:43 pm Given such a gulf in approaches to making sense of the world around us, it seems unlikely we would be able to have any sort of a productive conversation.

If corona virus has taught us nothing, it shows that "facts" are often mis-stated, or corrected later - employment stats are routinely corrected after they have been used to establish a narrative. Even when correct, statistics are very often mis-interpreted - the stats in the OP include people who have dropped out, which would be significantly different from the stats of people who have finished degree programs, plus, you don't know what the overall range is - are there groups more dissatisfied than people who started arts degrees, or are there groups who are more satisfied than engineers? We don't have any of this information. The head of the article just mentioned people who are dissatisfied, and then talks about engineers, without differentiating. So what do the facts say about that? There isn't enough information to draw any conclusion, and there are enough problems with the facts as stated to use them to form any kind of real conclusion.

If you read academic papers frequently, you know the one thing they love to do is to prove each other wrong. Sometimes with the same data. Try to read academic studies of nutrition or drug effects or even astronomy. If there is questionable study data, all I need is an amateur trombone player to interpret it for me to really give me confidence. So you'll excuse me if I don't trust trombone chat's interpretation of partial information selected to support a bias.

Interesting stuff in this thread. I am an industrial engineer. In HS I was trying to decide between engineering, music ed or music performance. I watched my HS band director for two weeks during marching band season. I kept track of his time at school, and thought perhaps I did not want to do that. My friend, two years older, was the best trombone player I knew. He was at Indiana University, and practicing 3-5 hours a day. When he came home on break he got together and I was blown away by his playing ability. I decided on engineering as my major because I was good at math and science, and I did not know if I could work as hard as would be required for trombone performance, and the potential for no work once complete. (My friend auditioned for 8-9 years before winning a "living wage" position with an orchestra.)

I dislike "STEM" - it is no different than schools encouraging girls to take math and science courses in the 1970's and 80's. But when you put a label on it, that allows "organizations" to solicit/take money from businesses in the name of the activity, rather than the businesses funding numerous things, including music. Has STEM increased the number of women applying for engineering jobs in our area? Not over the past 10-20 years.

College was explained to me back in 1980 as a time for the student to develop independent, rational thought, to understand the "world" and the like. My son is in college, and I can tell you that is not a definition for the 2020's for college.

I play professionally a lot. I play with a number of folks that have advanced music degrees. They all want to be involved with music education or full-time playing, and I *think* all of them would be very good (or better) at it. But there are not enough jobs for them to do that. This contributes heavily to their college degree regret. Some stick with it, some get a job in the field paying a living wage, and some move to splinter fields associated with the arts. And yes, some leave the field and do something unrelated.

The biggest issue with "College Degree Regrets" is if the person has a job, in their field, that they enjoy. That can be the nature of the job, the employer, the pay, or the location as much as anything. College is a business, and they need to keep their pipeline full. This also plays a major role in all of this.

Have a good day!

Doug

Note that a lot of the Education folks are changing the acronym to STEAM, adding Arts to the mix. While I applaud the study of Arts as a minor, the needs of the job market are more STEM oriented. No artists need apply. I think that artists can make a contribution with Web design (fine arts like painting or especially drawing) and maybe we can get more jobs for musicians in the Video Game market (which seems to have supplanted Television as the major entertainment venue).

We could get things moving better if the Government gets into some kind of program like we had in the 1960s (Man on the Moon). We have some areas that could benefit from a major Government push, but they don't have the same cachet as the moon shot.

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University is not a trade school, and not all majors of study lead to “Professional” degrees. Qualified electricians, plumbers, erc… find jobs in their chosen field. Doctors and engineers find jobs in their chosen field. Lawyers usually have a choice to work professionally in their chosen field.

Everything else is a journey to finding meaningful employment. In almost all cases everyone is on a personal journey to find a meaningful life. This regrer of chosen major seems to me to be the grass is always (isn’t always) greener sentiment.

Realize I'm late to this thread, but appreciated the comments. My degree (1966) was in social studies, but with a psychology concentration. I used the psychology every bit as much in the automotive manufacturer sales arena as I did as a social worker/supervisor. One certainly needs good interpersonal skills in virtually any field, and exposure to the Humanities provides perspective. That bigger-world perspective then informs one's ability to grasp larger issues. That said, I just wish I had kept playing my damn trombone!

I’m regularly still using some of the techniques I learnt during my engineering studies 20 years ago. The soft skills and some parts of my job could have been learned vocationally but at some point a solid theoretical grounding in mathematics, system analysis and scientific programming is pretty useful. My only regret is not paying a bit more attention in the mechanical and civil engineering lectures in the first couple of years. My course was two years of all engineering students taking the same modules, then narrowing down in the 3rd and 4th year (I went the electronic eng. route). As it turns out, I often work closely with civil and mechanical engineers and could do with a better understanding of what they’re on about.

If I remember it right around 50% of the graduates from my course went off to work as non-engineers, mainly in the finance sector so although an engineering degree can be a route into the profession, it doesn‘t have to be.

As someone still in college, I thought I would give some thoughts on this whole thread.

Personally, I don’t really regret my education but I regret getting this far into it. For context I did 4 years at a liberal arts school and am now currently finishing up my 2nd year of my masters at a top 10 music conservatory. Music for me was always the fun thing to do and I’m pretty sure it was a beer commercial that said “if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life” and so I’m following that line I went really hard into it and still do. That line, like most fiction has some roots in the truth, but also has a lot of roots in BS.

There seems to be a lot of misconceptions in this group that kids these days are lazy and or, don’t know the hard life skills, sure some don’t, but a lot do and trust me no one is pushing anyone to do a degree field, people are being actively pushed out of them. I watched and see wonderful female musicians get title IX’d, objectified and questioned about their intelligence incredibly often, I know someone who is active just finishing her degree and transitioning into an office job because live in a masterclass a tenured teacher told her she didn’t “have the hips, chest, voice or attitude” to sing opera. And to counterpoint, my roommate in my undergrad studied physics, his favorite teacher and advisor left the field entirely because of sexist remarks made by other professors about them, to students. People aren’t being pushed anywhere, certainly the arts, they’re being pushed away.

And yes, there aren’t a lot of hard skills being taught, but no offense to ya’ll, I don’t need to balance a checkbook, don’t have one and don’t need to know how to file taxes, I’ve got TurboTax or Freetaxusa. Why would I need to learn how to change the tire of a car or change the oil when I can’t even afford to own one, or live in a walkable city where it’s a burden? Also, counterpoint, the free access of information that we as people have today means we don’t need to spend time being taught it, I have in fact changed a car tire on the side of the road and you know how I knew how to do it? YouTube.

I don’t really regret my education or hate the system, other than the fact it is so ungodly expensive and all that money goes into lining the pockets of executives, not renovating buildings to make them more accommodating and fix issues (we have a practice room here with black mold in the ceiling been that way for 2 years, they just repaint it everytime someone complains) or, paying my teacher more. I have also become a pretty well rounded person because of all my degrees, not because they’re focused on getting me a job, but because they’re focused on making me a better person, it’s the classic argument that no one here seems to be mentioning:

Is education for elevation of the self or assimilation into the whole?

Some of you here are using the exact talking points of those who a while back argued for Amazon to start trade schools so “degenerate” and “not promising” students could get a head start on being in a trade. And not to say there aren’t advantages to trade work and having a highly specialized workforce, but, determining the value of someone else is not something we as humans should be doing, everyone should be entitled to the same opportunities, the same chance to go off and be a musician or a poet or plumber or factory worker. The system doesn’t do that and it’s not because it’s fair and just, it is the exact opposite. I knew a great bass trombonist who had to quit because he had a death in the family and all their income was lost, took a gap year to work and make up some money and when he got back to the school, they cut his scholarship by 80% so he could no longer afford it and fully went into the labor force to try again but lost the mojo and the motivation. The system defeated him and said because he had to leave school he was worth less than he was prior. We should all regret we have a system like that.

The system as I hope I’ve provided some insight into is broken, statistics don’t show that, they don’t live the lives we humans do and you can pump numbers all you want all day but it doesn’t do anything. To put it in trombone terms, if you can’t play out of the practice room, you can’t play it.

Getting back to me and regrets, I’ve worked hard at this thing, I work full time, take auditions, classes, school ensembles and all that. For context today on 3/23/23 I have a quartet coaching (1.5 hours), quintet coaching (1 hour), orchestra section coaching (2 hours), rehearsal for a gig (2 hours) and a half shift at work (office admin job) and a class. This usually is my light day, but it all my rehearsals needs to be moved, so here we are. I don’t regret this, it’s exactly what at one point that I wanted and it’s great. My schedule usually on any given day consists of 2-3 hours of class, 3-5 hours of practice, 2 hours of rehearsal and 2-8 hours of work and about 45-60 minutes of commuting via subway. If you’re doing the math right now I’ll save you the trouble, every day except Saturday I am up at 7:30 am on average and going to bed at 1 am. Again, I don’t regret this, I love being busy and I would say being a musician has given me the ability to manage this time well, I had a similar schedule in my undergrad and was also the head RA of a building and ran social media for our music department. it’s great, I’m dreading graduating because I love the structure and the fact I’m always doing something, everything is guided.

What do I regret is that I have to constantly defend all this, especially to people who aren’t in it. Being a student right now sucks, post-covid education is awful, I’ve done some lessons with some really terrible students (personality wise, not playing) and worked with some overworked people who spend all their free time drinking to forget and it seems on a daily basis get asked why the heck I would even go to college and or be a student. I regret that I chose a field and did school at a time where people would rather see me as a cog in the machine than a person, school and such for me was for my humanity to better myself as a person and to set up a structure that would show me how to do me, but better. I’m pretty sure I could pay off my student debt if I had a dollar for every time I hear the statement “well what are you going to do with a degree like that” or “why didn’t you go into Stem? That’s where all the jobs are, you wanna be a waiter for the rest of your life?” The fact that that’s my situation and that I walked into that is something I regret.

I apologize for how much of a tonal nightmare this is to read, my creative writing teacher would have a field day with this, and for all you grammar police that are going to try and tell me I need to write better, thanks. This was a rushed response after reading this thread on the subway this morning and while waiting for my 9 am to start

Yeah, the music education system makes you pay big for a ticket into an oversaturated career field. It's as simple as that.

You can get so much out of an education, it can take you so many places, but at the end of the day, a music degree in trombone performance is ... Well....

You shouldn't defend your education choices or what you're doing. The results will do that for you.