What's the one thing you feel your education lacked?
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I have a disconnect but it’s the opposite. I don’t run around preaching the importance of education yet I’m a textbook example of an autodidact, whether it’s the
32 languages I learned as an adult (1 didn’t take), the piano which I picked up as an adult, the graduate work in international relations at The New School, the biostatistics program, and of course history and polysci, neither of which I studied formally besides the basic requirements. Economics and philosophy I did study formally as would-be minors (Purdue didn’t recognize minors). My formal education was basically applied math though they called it electrical engineering. -
@89th said in What's the one thing you feel your education lacked?:
We had an absolutely great professor, so that makes a big difference.
Isn't that the case? I took a good many chemistry courses, but I had one guy who was just outstanding. The ability to make the complicated seem easy, is a God-given talent.
Which is why I think universities should place a high premium on people who can really teach.
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My education lacked the 26-32 year old hot female teacher that was bored with her marriage, and was eager to educate an earnest young man..
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That was certainly the biggest gap subjectively in the moment.
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I may be the one person who didn't miss out on statistics. I had classes in it as an undergrad- and the benefit of teaching statistics as an undergrad to other undergrads. That was very helpful for me - as teaching it meant i really had to learn it. This was before calculators were permitted so it was an ugly time. Later in grad school at the U of Chicago, I took statistics classes when the personal computer was being used. This was a joy as rather than spending 85% of the time in the methodology, we now spent 100% of the time in application. I also studied statistical process control - Deming and Juran's work that later was
misappliedmarketed as TQM and Six Sigma. I worked for a time in analytics - which now, is a big thing. AI may obliterate that profession.Things I wish I'd gotten earlier - as in high school level or first semester of college would include personal finance and effective career counseling. Neither existed back then. If I were re-living my life, I probably would also likely diversify my undergraduate studies to include accounting and finance. I got them later - but earlier would have been prudent.
Watching some online videos where people are quizzed on basic facts, I'm amazed at how poorly young adults do with geography and numerical skills - "what countries border the US?" and "if a car is traveling 60 miles per hour, how far would the car travel in one hour?" There are US citizens who I've seen can't name the Capitol of the US - yet seem to be able to dress themselves and have some method of supporting themselves much to my surprise.
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That’s great. In my probability class we would do things like derive the probability mass function of a Poisson distribution. But nothing that’s going to directly help you interpret economic stats, for example.
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The best thing I did in my education - was taking a typing class between middle school and high school. A counselor said that the best advice he could give us - and that none of us would follow-up on, was to take typing.
I remember taking typing during the summer in a stifling hot classroom with 40 high school girls. It was rough - somehow I survived. I then worked on the high school newspaper - typing for 4 years. In college, I got a job working for a sleep researcher typing transcriptions of dream reports. When the PC came along a few years later - I was as proficient at typing as anyone - while most managers were hunting and pecking at the keyboard.
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I took typing too. At my parents insistence. By the time I took it home PCs were at least a hobbyists tool and everyone took an electric typewriter to college. It wasn’t just budding secretaries in the class.
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I loved those manual typewriters. It was a practically mindless hour after lunch.. I remember my friend Margaret who always won at our local piano festival. She was super fast on the typewriter. It was like a speed game to her. She got her PhD teaching Math.
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I second the money financial stuff. I had to be self taught and even today i really don’t know shit. Just lucky the stock market has been so powerful over the past thirty years or so. Anyone in the long term market couldn’t lose.
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I think many in my parents generation viewed the stock market like betting on horses, looking for someone to give them a "tip" that something big was about to happen - and to jump in. The idea of a portfolio and weighting risks in that portfolio weren't part of their lexicon.
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@kluurs said in What's the one thing you feel your education lacked?:
I think many in my parents generation viewed the stock market like betting on horses, looking for someone to give them a "tip" that something big was about to happen - and to jump in.
Good observation. Mrs. George had at least one uncle who took a huge financial hit by speculating - poorly.
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@kluurs said in What's the one thing you feel your education lacked?:
I think many in my parents generation viewed the stock market like betting on horses, looking for someone to give them a "tip" that something big was about to happen - and to jump in. The idea of a portfolio and weighting risks in that portfolio weren't part of their lexicon.
I see this now with Mayla’s Peruvian friends that live here. Left to their own devices they’ll invest only in real estate, which they understand. (That’s also what they’d invest in were they still in Peru).
Then they find out my background and want to pick my brain. When I start talking about asset allocation and diversification and stay the course, etc, they lose interest. They really think there’s this one weird trick….
When you shake someone's deep sense of self-worth, leaving a scar in their ego, they will persistently try to diminish you through petty arguments & obsessive captious criticism of your actions, just to soothe the wound.
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
