[elabayarde]

(04-04-2012 08:25 PM)dulst Wrote:  

Anyone heard of a book called How to Win at College?

It's by a guy called Cal Newport who runs a blog called Study Hacks. I haven't read the book (yet) but his blog has been really useful to me at uni.

With regard to STEM subjects vs Arts, STEM is only worthwhile if you're fucking good at it.

This is something noone talks about. Everyone harps on about how you should pick X subject over Y, or attend A college or do what you love or whatever. These people don't consider the most important factor - ability.

There's no point picking maths over philosophy if you suck at maths but excel at critical thinking and writing essays.

Don't arbitrarily pick a subject based on whether it's considered good or not.

Don't pick based on doing "what you love" (which will change many times through uni anyway).

Pick what you're good at.

For me this is physics - lucky me right? Wrong, physics has above average unemployment rates in the UK. I don't care, because I'm good at it. Where you fall in your class is more important than which class you take.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11652845

If your good at physics, mechanical engineering is a good way to go... Unlimited employment, and its just the application of physics. Also, there is a book I read, a while back. IT was the guide to advance math, or something like that. The first thing they said(which is true), was virtually no one is good at MATH. A few exceptions come throughout history, and we all read about them. People like Einstein for example. What sets people apart from others (in the other 99.999% of the world) is those who have the most practice at solving and evaluating problems. Basically, those who didn't just do the odd problems in the book but did all of them. A great example was my classmates from china told me that, the reason they were doing so good, in the US, was because they literally took the same exact classes in china first.