October 18, 2004
A Vote Of Confidence For The Dismal Science
Want to get aun undergraduate degree that will arm you with a skill set that can be applied almost anywhere?
Skip Sauer has the answer.
And let me second that emotion. Back when I was an undergrad working at my student newspaper, our university advisor (all campus groups were required to have one) was a national editor at the Washington Post. During my Sophomore year, when I began to feel that my program in Politics might not be challenging enough, my advisor suggested I add Economics as a second major.
Following his advice, I dabbled in a couple of courses (in Econ as well as business), but never made the commitment to add it as a second major. Now, 17 years later, I've learned to regret not taking the time to add it to my studies. As Skip points out:
Economics teaches a method of analysis, one that is quite useful. Its application in sport helps break through conventional wisdom and uncovers more productive approaches to both player management, and the strategic approach to the game itself.
So what are all of you liberal arts majors waiting for? Don't let higher math scare you! Get to the registrars office, and pull out the course catalog for next semester.
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Funny you mention "liberal arts" and "higher math." In my philosophy-major days (I doubled in music, but that's not relevant to the story), I enjoyed my logic class so much that I signed up for "Symbolic Logic." Oops. Even though it was a philosophy class, I was one of only two philosophy majors in the class. The rest of the class? Math majors who needed a credit in philosophy, social science or other areas that math majors and engineers didn't want to contemplate.
The professor breezed through the most abstract math you've ever seen. If logic is one step along the road from reality to abstraction, "symbolic logic" is the other end of the interstate.
Whenever he mentioned a philosopher in passing, he would slow down and ask every 30 seconds if we were keeping up. No such warnings with the math.
He did say one philosopher -- I think it was Kant -- argued that the type of logic we were doing was inherently unsound. That meant I was tempted to walk into the final exam, write "Kant was right" and walk out.
I probably wouldn't have done any worse than I actually did.
(In my defense -- I was a calculus and physics geek in high school.)
I wouldn't trade my actual liberal arts classes for an econ class. I think everyone should take some liberal arts classes because they, too, teach a valuable form of analysis. But if I had it to do over again, I'd take econ and tell Duke to drop that ^()&*# symbolic logic class from the curriculum.
Posted by:
at October 19, 2004 09:30 AM
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12:27 PM