Originally Posted by ultramarina
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I am totally recommending an engineering degree for DD. I don't care what she ends up doing. You can use that degree for anything.

Anything? How much time do you spend honing your writing skills when you get an engineering degree? (I don't actually know this. I'm just guessing that it isn't that much time.)

It's a huge problem. I would never recommend an engineering degree over the corresponding science degree. Never.

The science programs teach broader skills-- and if you choose well, you get the hands-on components that engineering degrees generally deliver.

My DH and I are far more employable than if we had the corresponding engineering degrees. Both of us can (and have) been hired to do engineering jobs... but engineers are generally NOT employable as scientists.

For my money, the best degree is the one that can be turned into the greatest variety of different disciplines, and is RAREST. So if you have a student interested in sociology, chemistry, and math... encourage the math major, or maybe chemistry. Fine to DOUBLE major, certainly.

I also disagree that the world doesn't need "average" scientists.

It most emphatically DOES need them. Not everyone can be a superstar, but those superstars need a lot of able hands and collaborators willing to share the limelight with them. Where do those people come from, hmm? People who win Nobel Prizes and multi-million dollar grants aren't doing it by sitting alone in their offices and thinking really hard.

Re: my logic regarding undergrad institutions and not graduate ones-- this is largely a function of having a child who is fairly reserved and introverted. She would be completely lost at my DH's undergrad institution (one of the jewels of the US system-- but LARGE). I also do NOT want my daughter being taught in small classes run by graduate students and not professors. I want her professors to know who she is, and I want her to develop relationships with them. This is critical for her personally, and it trumps the eventual hypothetical problem of her outstripping the math offered. The other thing that I know (and many parents don't) is that even mostly-undergrad institutions have collaborative possibilities with larger institutions with grad programs, and that technology has made those things even easier. So if she needs to have a mentor outside the institution, she can-- and that person can work in partnership with an on-campus advisor while she works on a 4-6hr independent study elective of her own devising.

Personally, the holy grail there is a program that is TINY, but has a small graduate component at the master's level. That way, pretty high level coursework is available, but the focus is still on the undergrad majors and not on grad students bringing in grant money.


Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.