okay um do you have any advice for college i'm i'm i'm full of advice i'm still a graduate student so
uh-huh well having been there not too long ago and my wife having only recently completed a doctorate i'm fairly full of it of it myself uh
oh
hum
the main point that i have about
choosing where you want to go to school
is that
definitely you have to early on define what it is you want to do
yeah
or at least what area you want to be in
uh i had the unpleasant experience of going through several
schools that were very specialized
i went through a number of them uh undergraduate schools
hm
before i found a a good school that was more general uh to give me time to make up my mind
oh that's interesting
i went to a a liberal arts school actually at first and you weren't really even um
they didn't expect you to choose any sort of major or anything at all until you were
in your second year and then you you know you had i think you had to pick it by the by the by the end of second you had to pick some sort of major but until then they didn't sort of force you they they sort of forced you to run around taking classes in everything until then
certain requirements so that so that you had to sort of get a general feel for everything
so it wasn't that specialized so that
that's wonderful i'm a great proponent of liberal arts education for anybody
yeah
yes
uh being an engineer now i believe in it even more strongly than i did before
um-hum i was just on a committee recently actually sponsored by uh the American Association for the Advancement of Science trying to sort of you know where where they were just trying to figure out how to fit science and liberal arts together you know
because there are people who are getting just wonderful science educations and not getting enough liberal arts and then the other way around as well people are getting just pure technical science educations and not getting very good liberal arts sorts of issues so
well thus far it's working to my advantage uh
the great gap historically has with engineers has been while they may have all this technical information they have no way of imparting it to except to another engineer
um-hum
and i have the ability to listen to them and then translate that into something that non engineers can understand
well that must be helpful
well it's a lot of fun at the moment
that could be very helpful
yeah well i figure that that that that's probably the thing that i would most tell any parent you know to tell to tell their kids i think probably make sure the kid goes to a school where they can get sort of a general education and
save specialization i guess for graduate school unless they're sure they want early on they want to do something like engineering or something or they can
even at that i have a son that who is only nine at the moment but i see him very rapidly becoming
the engineering personality and uh if he decides to pursue that
i'm going to insist that he spend two years at a liberal arts college before i'll even let him go to an engineering college and yes that'll add one year to his education experience
hum
yeah but that's that's a good idea well where i am right now actually i'm at the University of Rochester
and that's a pretty good engineering school i think i think we do some they have a pretty good engineering here they also have a program a fairly large liberal arts college as well a sort of a separate a separate you know college uh arts arts and sciences college um
yes it is
and i believe the engineers are sort of required to take classes in in in everything and i know people i do uh i do work in language processing and and and at least one person who's in my field started off as an engineer
started off as an electrical electrical an electrical engineer student and then switched over at some point into language processing because he found that he enjoyed it more so they do force them people are forced to sort of take all different kinds of classes here which i think is wonderful
oh i agree uh
i have the experience uh the last school that i went to was Mississippi State University which is
historically an engineering and agricultural school
right
uh the typical land grant university every
state's got one
um-hum
anyway it
while it has both engineering and liberal arts the
engineering students tend to cluster together you know they're in classes together even when they're outside of the engineering department
yes
um-hum
and they don't learn the communications they don't learn the thought processes of other fields of of endeavor it's you know it's kind of like
hum
if i were king for a day and got to and got to make one rule
my rule would be no one could get out of high school without an entire year of philosophy
um um-hum
that would be very good actually
and it's
that's not even true in our colleges
right you you don't need any philosophy at all in school
um-hum
or some yeah or or or or some other thought provoking area you know very true we had uh when i went to undergraduate we had uh um
went to Brandeis don't know if you know of it or not um we had uh uh a requirement freshman year of just humanities then you were given a choice of
um you know there were ten or twelve or whatever fifteen or fifteen different courses that that you could take but they all centered they all came out of Philosophy English and Literature departments and they were
they were they were a set of assigned readings everybody had to read you know for so the first year Humanities courses everyone had to read the Iliad and and and so forth and what they did though was they all approached it from
right
from very different you know so so they had you could have one class in the philosophy of something that that the philosophy of Greek mythology or something that actually approached this or um
one literature you know or a literature a literature course or just all sorts of different perspectives on it and people got to
choose pick and choose but but by the end everyone had a good sample of of of sort of how to think about these things non scientifically you know and
and uh and that sort of forced them but i believe that that that that that that you one of the one of the best things to do at least for me in school was was i was sort of forced to take lots of different kinds of courses
um i was forced to take i think you know some sort of art history course
and you we all grumbled about it at first but then afterward we all wound up taking extra art history classes because it just seemed like something we we didn't totally know nothing about but just enjoyed very much doing and something i never would have done if i if if i wasn't forced to take it
yes i really
i remember that experience
hum hum
that and uh extra music classes
yes um-hum and that and that really is something that that i notice like uh i talk to a lot of my friends at schools that are more specialized and they don't have that
they just you know they went in and took their courses that they were expected to take and that was all they never had some of the more fun classes i guess
i feel a little more worldly now
well that will continue to grow
even as you
go beyond graduate school
yes i'm i'm i'm hoping i'm hoping
have have you gone straight through
yes i i graduated um college in eighty seven and i just went straight through
um i'm finishing up next year so yeah i didn't i didn't take any break or anything yet i've been trying actually in graduate school i've been trying to do the same thing take courses outside it's completely outside my area and i'm finding that in graduate school it's a lot harder
because uh i just don't have the time anymore to sort of sit in a course
that i'm not getting graded for whereas before i would just sign up for credit for it now i can't sign up for an art history course for credit necessarily
so i have to try and go myself and i went for like two or three weeks and realized not enough time for the work unfortunately
that's true are you pursuing a Master's or a Doctorate
i'm pursuing a Doctorate in Psychology so i'm just
wind up spending a lot of time doing that instead
uh
what else i i think i oh
well let me let me encourage you to stop stop and experience life along the way
oh
i i first enrolled in college in nineteen sixty six
um-hum
uh
six years and a
and a war later uh i got a degree an undergraduate degree
and then
fifteen years after that
i got the first of a set of master's degrees and four years after that i got another master's degree
hum so you had real world experience in the middle there
oh yes
and that helped you think
or that was
it certainly it certainly makes acceptance of different ideas a lot easier
um-hum
hum yeah i'm getting some of that um i have i have sort of some work experience yet my wife is not an academic at all
my wife is sort of in the real world and i so i sort of hinge halfway out in the real world getting you know real world especially she works in uh um
she works in something i she she works for a temporary agency and and i and i never would have had she's the office supervisor i never would have had any i've i've learned much just sort of by watching her and her and her business as well so yeah so i i can see where that might be a
well vicarious learning is a wonderful thing uh you know it certainly means that we don't have to experience everything but experience is a wonderful teacher also
yeah
that's my oh yeah
yes agreed agreed well i'll i'll take that i'll take that and think that through a little bit um
my wife as as as i may have mentioned just finished a doctorate a couple of years ago and and she pursued her education along the lines that i did
yes
um-hum
with lots of break in between and she feels reasonably comfortable teaching now she has an awful lot of experience to draw on no longer is
