Re: College advisors?

On 2/06/2024 10:35 pm, Don Y wrote:

Are there advisors in schools, nowadays, to provide guidance
for kids?
 In the past several weeks, I've spoken to a lot of kids "just
graduating" or "in a year or so".  Many complain about a BAD
job market.
 But, when I drill down into their qualifications, most have
taken "impractical" majors:  english lit, psychology, history,
art, etc.
 Didn't anyone advise them as to the marketability of these
educations before they invested 4 years of their time/money?
 "And, where did you THINK you were going to work?  Do you
LOVE kids -- cuz you're likely only qualified to be a teacher..."

Psychology can a very marketable major - my wife did a double major in German and psychology, expecting to end up teaching German in a secondary school, but discovered psycholinguistics in the process, got a Ph.D. in that and ended up as a very well paid and world famous (amongst psycholinguists) professor.
It would have been a clever advisor that foresaw that.
You capacity to "drill down into their qualification" is somewhat suspect.
No advisor would have told me to take up electronics - and my Ph.D. advisor (unlike Winfield Hill's) certainly didn't. Curuously, the guy who got his job after he retired had written an electronics paper with me.
Ghiggino, K.P., Phillips, D., and Sloman, A.W. "Nanosecond pulse stretcher",Journal of Physics E: Scientific Instruments, 12, 686-687 (1979).
Which is to say Ken wrote the first draft of the paper, and I rewrote in a way that made it publishable (if still trivial).
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney