Why Science Majors Change Their Minds

I didn't change my mind. I started as a CS major, ended as a CS major, and am finishing up a CS Master's degree. Possibly one day a CS PhD.<p>I have TA'd students and have long had an abiding interest in educational curricula, stemming from my experienced being homeschooled, where as I grew older, I was able to select elective materials to study in cooperation with my parents.<p>There are a few highlighter reasons I believe STEM education has issues, and please remember that these are interlinked, and other issues are present, which also interlink into these issues. I've picked these because I think they are standout.<p>* ROI on engineering vs. ROI on the MBA course. Non-founder engineers cap their salary potential in their career, in general, and spend gruelling hours in classes. MBA's salary cap is higher to non-existent, and can apparently skiv off pretty easy in undergraduate years.<p>* Math education is generally <i>broken</i> in the US. That means that students are not ready for the rigourous thinking and numeracy demanded in STEM. They struggle understanding the basics of mathematics and computational thinking because they never have had it before, so the 'elite' students who do know what they are doing stand out.<p>* Hacker/elite snobs pissing on other classmates. This has happened to a few friends of mine, but not really to me. Some of the freshmen/sophomores really brag on their ability (i.e., they were coder geeks in high school) and this discourages other people. It's toxic.<p>* Gender imbalance and lousy social environment. A bunch of stinky guys geeking out over computers and video games which are outdated in a few years is not... primo.<p>* Young software engineers are expected to spend nearly every waking minute coding, just to have a chance to get a job. They need to get internships, contribute to open source, maybe build a mobile app, etc... and do well in class. This, as near as I can tell, is very rare. Only perhaps musicians have similar expectations. Spending this much time on your field is corrosive to your character and personality (see above two points).<p>* Culture heroes are entertainers and sports stars. Not makers of useful things.<p>* Focus on application instead of theory. Everyone wants to do something real cool right now, preferably yesterday, without any training. This is not realistic when laying the foundations for a solid career. Short-term thinking says, "pleasure now, pay later", which does not work well in STEM.

This article is trying to figure out the solution to a problem that was solved over a decade ago. See: <a href="http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science" rel="nofollow">http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science</a><p>Science majors change their minds once they find out that they will be required to take challenging courses, yes, but it is not this challenge, in and of itself, that causes them to "change their minds". It is that people who are smart enough to be in a position to take these courses, people who the article talks about as having great scores on the SAT etc, people like these are also smart enough to do a quick ROI calculation and realize that a comparatively easier (don't take this as a rip on people with these degrees, many of them are my friends, are very, very smart, and have made this very decision themselves) degree in econ, business, or law will yield vastly greater material dividends.<p>If you want people to stop changing their minds about science, you have to do something to change the ROI calculation that goes "I can work 2x as hard as my peers, graduate and receive 1/2 the monetary compensation or I can....not do that".

The article sounds as though there's a lot of pressure on colleges to lower their standards in order to produce the required number of engineers. I was a math/CS TA for several years, and I don't think the problem is with tough freshman classes, low grades or a focus on theory.<p>Fundamentally, the main problem with students that come from the US educational system is a lack of background in math. The prospective science major who's having trouble with fractions and basic algebra is, unfortunately, a disturbingly common presence on college campuses these days.<p>It's hard to fix K-12 in this regard (especially as everyone wants to fix it in a different way). But if colleges really want to solve the problem, they should put more effort into remedial math classes, instead of lowering the standards (and reducing the theoretical content) for those classes they already have.

I sometimes regret not switching out of my aerospace engineering major. I went to a good undergraduate engineering school (Georgia Tech), and frankly the educational experience was terrible. Professors who weren't engaged, TA's who couldn't speak English well enough to easily convey the material, exams that were unrelated to what was taught in class, etc. I had a few great professors, but they were few and far between.<p>When I left engineering to go to a smallish private law school, I had a totally different experience. Classes taught entirely by professors. Maximum of ~60 students per class and more typically 20-30 in upper-level courses. Professors who would engage the class in hypotheticals rather than just dryly recount the rules. Exams that actually tested the material we learned.<p>The fundamental problem is that engineering schools, especially the big state ones like Berkeley, Michigan, Illinois, and Georgia Tech, are research factories. They crank out certain amount of BS's to meet industry demand for engineers, but their investment in those graduates seems minimal at best.<p>Now, don't get me wrong. I think an undergraduate degree in engineering is still the best way to go (as long as you can hack the math and it won't kill your GPA). Even if you ultimately want to do law, finance, or consulting, people really do take you more seriously. But at the same time, I really can't blame people when they stay away from STEM majors, especially ones that test well and know they will be able to go to a top graduate school with their liberal arts degree.

Previously: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3196377" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3196377</a>

<i>“You’d like to think that since these institutions are getting the best students, the students who go there would have the best chances to succeed,” he says. “But if you take two students who have the same high school grade-point average and SAT scores, and you put one in a highly selective school like Berkeley and the other in a school with lower average scores like Cal State, that Berkeley student is at least 13 percent less likely than the one at Cal State to finish a STEM degree.”</i><p>This is interesting. Could it be that at more selective schools, when students encounter difficulty in STEM courses, they are less hesitant to switch to an easier major because they figure that their degree will still have value due to the name recognition of their university, while their counterparts at less selective schools don't have that luxury? That's one hypothesis...

I went the other direction. After finding math and science easy before college, I avoided science classes in college to avoid being too nerdy.<p>By junior year I realized I loved science too much, overcame being bothered by what other people thought, majored in physics, and got a PhD.<p>My last two years of the PhD I ended up starting a company and became a successful entrepreneur in media, which is, I guess, the payoff to the economy of someone going into math and science.<p>Check out this irony. I've come to create art with my medium and taught a couple art courses at art schools to MFA and BFA candidates. The <i>art students</i> learn programming, circuits, entrepreneurship, design, and such.<p>I'm talking about programs like NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Project and Parsons' Arts, Media, and Technology program.<p>We created these displays, which is pretty techy and beautiful. - <a href="http://joshuaspodek.com/tag/unionsquareinmotion" rel="nofollow">http://joshuaspodek.com/tag/unionsquareinmotion</a> - <a href="http://joshuaspodek.com/new_bryant_park_in_motion_videos" rel="nofollow">http://joshuaspodek.com/new_bryant_park_in_motion_videos</a>

Personally I stepped away from pre-med because I couldn't stand the idea of my major determining my life for the next ten years - graduate programs, internships, residence, all that stuff, it's daunting when you're 21 and all you want to do is STUFF. Going premed would mean what I'd done was just the beginning not an accomplishment in and of itself. That was daunting and a bit demoralizing. The fact is it's not for everyone, and not just because of the difficulty (I never excelled in math or organic chemistry), and people like me who get in because it's interesting often find that the career paths that present themselves are strictly defined and entail a lot of drudgery. I remember perceiving this very clearly in my 3rd year after doing a lot of prep work and it was an easy decision. I ended up majoring in Psych with minors in Neuroscience and Cog Sci, for the record, which was hard as hell anyway, but technically a BA and not applicable to STEM-type employment.

The article certainly identifies an important issue, but seems simplistic in it's assessment of the root causes. As a a bio major, who wavered between pre-med and business aspirations, my main gripe with science education was the theoretical framework it was taught in. It's mostly complete rote memorization of thousands of inane details, without any practical context to understand the relevance or application (no, labs do not fulfill this purpose).<p>If the implications of bio/chem theory were taught in a more practical, problem-solving approach, (a la computer science), I feel people would develop a better passion for science (as they did in High School with science fairs as the article describes), and stick with it longer.

I think the analysis is a little superficial.<p>K-12 education in the US channels a lot of really bright kids onto a highly time consuming and sequential STEM track, and the idea that anything other than a STEM major is for wimps is not uncommon. In addition, STEM majors is where such students are directed by guidance counselors.<p>I went off to college to major in EE. I had a 3 minute conversation with my academic adviser which consisted entirely of him telling me exactly which 15 hours to take. I walked out and changed majors to CHM, where the academic councilor explained the various degree options and discussed electives over the course of about an hour.<p>But it turns out, though I loved the theory, I really fucking hated laboratory sessions. Organic synthesis on paper was an interesting problem - I just didn't care for going through the motions, cleaning glassware and pretending I was conducting a meaningful experiment.<p>It took me several years to decide that there are lots of worthy intellectual endeavors and challenging problems outside of STEM [YMMV]. I believe my choice to pursue a liberal arts degree is among the best decisions I ever made.<p>Personally, I think the problem is that the US educational system narrows the funnel toward the STEM field too early - for all practical purposes it's already narrowing way down into the primary grades...even though the it is obvious that people can find their way into the more "open" STEM areas (such as programming) without being channeled academically toward a STEM career.<p>In other words, the primary reason that a person first exposed to algebra at Junior College is less likely to become a mathematician is lower expectations, both on the part of the academy and on the part of the student.

Why are the students afraid of lower grades? If you don't go to a PhD program, does it matter all that much? I think this emphasis on grades is something we should work to undo. You can learn, you can relearn and get extra help, but if the grades cause you to quit too early then grades are not having the effect we want.

I think this is a valuable alternate perspective. Students will become discouraged from time to time and this will vary by field. Frankly, most professors don't care about undergraduate education. I know this from direct experience. They will typically list their priorities as: research and grants, graduate students, and only then, undergraduate teaching. And teaching is hard enough even when it's a top priority. You always lose some students without dedicated effort put into teaching and that will be worse in harder classes. High school doesn't prepare students for a rigorous college experience and if we don't bridge that gap somehow that will be one more reason someone will get out of a tough curriculum.

I think this in an interesting problem you don't really have in a lot of tertiary education systems else wear (that said, I still think the ability to pick and chose a diverse set of classes is a great model, and better than most).<p>I studied in the UK, so you apply from high school to do, "Computer Science" or, "Physics" or, "English". And that's what you do. You have some choice in terms of the classes and courses you take, but (generally) they're all totally within that sphere. I think having some options to do other courses would be really valuable, but equally it means people don't typically chose to switch from an STEM based degree to something else, and people stick it out (or just drop out).

<i>The bulk of attrition comes in engineering and among pre-med majors, who typically leave STEM fields if their hopes for medical school fade.</i><p>I don't know that including pre-meds in the analysis is worthwhile. While medicine is certainly quite technical, I don't really consider it a STEM field. The economic multipliers from improved medicine (increasing productivity for each of a doctor's patients) is qualitatively different from those for "real" STEM fields (increasing productivity for potentially anyone who can get the discovered knowledge).

I don't think it,the curriculum, is too difficult, but the professors that teach the lower level general curriculum freshman year in most universities. I mean I had professors that were literally out in left field, and don't get me started on the foreign TAs. There was always major communication barriers during my first two quarters in EE. Enthusiasm coming from professors is contagious, but so is boredom.

I thought this was posted a week ago. Don't upvote this!