What the fuck did you just say? [Student Thread]

[jordancoles]

I believe one of the requirements of the final paper most people submit as part of their degree, although it may only be for masters I'm not sure, is that it be on a topic or theme which has never been discussed before. Unfortunately with the emphasis of education being the making of money this results in a quantity over quality situation and the ensuing papers filled with long-worded fluff in order to meet the minimum word requirement.

I talked about this in the first few pages

Idk what it's like elsewhere, but to get into a masters program here you have to basically be the best and have an amazing GPA along with many extra curriculars and related experience. When you meet the criteria you can apply, and every year if 300 were to apply, maybe 10 would get in. Then, your doctorate is a similar process. Best in your area, and you need to contribute new ideas or build on to current ideas. I think that this is where we get all of the stupid jargon and it is the main reason for why there are 5 different words for the same shit. Everyone wants to reinvent the wheel for their thesis.

Everyone wants to 'coin a term' and get their name slapped on to a textbook. The end result is students being forced to learn jargon that will never be used outside of their learning circles and we end up being tested on literal theories that other people have had in the past, disproven or not (hello, Freud). In developmental theory land, many of the theories that are used weren't exactly scientifically tested using multiple subjects either, many were simply based on their own children and that's it.

@Arvin
That basically sums it up, yep. I could do the job that's at the end of this degree today with my college diploma and my practicum experience, but good luck getting hired.
University degrees do a few things, and education is a very small part of it.

A degree validates your work ethic and your dedication to your field, it increases your pay grade from the very beginning and it allows you to skip a few rungs in terms of moving up in position, regardless of if you're more qualified or not.
I knew an employer that had 3 piles of resumes. University degrees, college degrees, and both. She technically had 4 piles, but that one went in the garbage bin

[loftar]

No it doesn't. Took CS, and honestly, you're waaaay better off just problem-solving/programming on your own time if you actually want to learn anything.

Unfortunately, I can only agree. The main reason I didn't stay with university courses (apart from doing Haven, of course) was because I really just didn't learn much at all. From what I've seen of CS education first-hand, if we were in such a fortunate position as to hire people for Haven or whatever, I wouldn't take university degrees much into account at all.

It all starts out with employers. When they want to hire someone, they lack information about which prospective employees would be the most productive, so they're forced to go on whatever information they do have. Given a choice between a person without a degree, and a person with a degree, the employer will always choose the person with a degree, all else being equal. Not because the degree necessarily imbues the person with all the necessary skills needed to do a great job, but simply because education filters some people out, and the people who get filtered out are in general less productive as employees.

To be fair, though, doing stuff on your own may just have the same effect. I am not too seldom getting more and less serious mails from recruiters and stuff just from having public GitHub/StackOverflow accounts with activity. I haven't actually tried pursuing them, so I wouldn't know to what extent having a degree helps further down the road, of course.

[Jesus_Smith_Nandez]

@Arvin
If you think about it from the standpoint of an economy, though, nothing is wasted. Students are charged money to scale with the resources used to educate them. This not only includes the service, but also includes the potential labour and skills lost within the 4-6 years you were caught up in school.

Whether you pay for school yourself upfront, your parents pay it for you, or you take a loan, the 4-6 years during which you are providing nothing to society is already being payed for through past input or future input. Maybe your loans prevent you from living in a bigger house for a few years. This is one way you're giving back to the economy for what you took out of it by choosing to become educated, and it all evens out.

There are of course cases of scholarships, and companies investing in certain students, but that's a different story.

If education were free, though, then yeah it would be a complete waste. #bernie2016 heh

I do agree with you about the objective knowledge people are actually gaining in school, the hoop jumping an the like.

[ChildhoodObesity]

haha my teachers often write whats said in the titles at the end of my papers because my english is so weak XD my pullout game aint weak tho hmu ladies

[jordancoles]

wat xD

[jordancoles]

What the fuck

[MagicManICT]

Hard to interpret that without the relating abbreviations, but looks like a typical statistical problem to me. You're just not white and nerdy enough.

[jordancoles]

Hard to interpret that without the relating abbreviations, but looks like a typical statistical problem to me. You're just not white and nerdy enough.

They offered the abbreviations somewhere in the like 30 page paper but who actually goes through the whole thing with a fine toothed comb every other line to know what the fuck is being said?
I'm pretty sure it's also possible to do a search at the end of your paper for the abbreviations that you used so that you can substitute each instance with the full term... I really wish people would do that

[Potjeh]

Of course all this psychology stuff is going to be full of convoluted meaningless bullshit, because psychology isn't a real science. At least I've never seen it make non-obvious predictions with any degree of accuracy.

[sMartins]

Psychology isn't a science and will never be. The humans being and their mind are totally irrational, and they will never submit to the rigid rational mentality of science.
But this doesn't mean they are bullshits.
Sadly we can just say that psychology, like many other humanistic disciplines, are going to die soon ... cause tecnique rules the world nowdays, and everything that doesn't follow the rigid mentality of science will die soon .... cause this stuff nowadays has become our unconscious, the science, or better the tecnique principle is pretty easy:
max results with the less effort.
However take in mind this very important stuff: when the quantity of a phenomenon keep growing, it change also the quality of the scenery!
example: if a earthquake with low intesity hit us, we don't care at all .... but if a high intensity one hit us it also change the landscape around us .... more the quantity, more it change the quality also ( sorry my english i hope you can understand).
Said that, moneys: moneys originally served to produce goods and meet needs ... but if everything become moneys (quantitive grow up) ..... moneys are not a medium anymore but they become themselves the end goal, so first produce money and then we'll see if to produce goods and to meet needs.

Also for fun ... in our small H&H world we can already see how the tecnique mentality rule the minds. A guy like JordanColes, that studies Psychology, recently answered me that he refuse to play this game with the Official client, why? the answer is very simple, cause is not efficient, cause the official client doesn't follow the tecnique mentality ... and so we are not even able anymore to see what is beutifull, what emotions, etc... but only what is efficient. The tecnique is in our unconscious.

All of this will cause the end of the western civilization, sooner of what we can think. We are the weakest population in the world nowadays, and we will be extinct soon.