You Major in What?

Autumn is a flowery season and flowers embrace the campus from the main entrance to the square. An accounting graduate bounced to my office for photo-taking and I congratulated her. She is now working in one of the Big Four. Good for her. After wishing her luck for the coming examination in Christmas I withdrew to the office and picked up again Katherine Brooks's You Majored in What? Mapping your Path from Chaos to Career (NY: Viking, 2009) by my side.

Brooks addresses the key challenges faced by many uni students. An English major does not necessarily translate into a job in the publishing sector. Linear-path thinking usually applies only to pre-occupational majors like accounting and medicine. Non-specific liberal arts majors like English or foreign languages are open to more possibilities.

As a commentator said Brooks's work "is truly a great guide for the soon-to-be-launched students" and "has provided liberal arts grads with exactly what they need to compete and succeed." A university career counsellor suggests the book "should be sent to all students with their letters of admission or given to every first-year student at the start of orientation." Unfortunately, the book is no available in our own library (I borrowed this book through interlibrary loan) and I hope the library and the career centre would make the book available soon.

Since I am teaching compulsory liberal arts courses, which are widely seen as a pointless chore, for non-liberal-arts students, some discussion in the book attracted my eyeballs. Brooks provide a common scenario for students: you required to take class you really don't want to take. She provides two tracks of thinking, i.e. negative and right-mind, a student might have.

THOUGHTS:

Negative thinking (NT): "I have to take this required class I'm going to hate."

Right-mind thinking (RT): "I have to take this required class. I don't think I'm going to like it, but because I want to do well I'm going to see what I can do to make it a good experience."

BELIEF:

NT: "I shouldn't have to take this class. I'll never need this information. This is ridiculous. It's a complete waste of time and a stupid requirement."

RT: "I can't control the class, but I can control my experience of it."

EXPECTATION:

NT: "This class will be boring and useless."

RT: "I'm going to see what I can learn from this class."

ATTITUDE:

NT: "There's no point in putting much effort into it. I'm just going to do the minimal amount of work to survive and suffer through the semester until it's over."
RT: "I'm going to make this a personal challenge. Because it's a required class, someone must think it's valuable. And the professor must think there's something valuable in what we're studying. I'm going to find out why. If nothing else, I'll have a great story for an interview about how I survived a difficult class."

BEHAVIOUR:

NT: "Cut class. Sit in the back row. Use the time to instant-message friends or play a game on your laptop. Do minimal work on assignments."

RT: "Attend class. Take good notes. Study for the tests. Keep looking for something interesting about the course - even if it's just the professor's bad wardrobe!"

PERFORMANCE:

NT: "Get a C or worse."

RT: "Get an A or the best possible grade in the situation."

WHAT YOU'VE LEARNED:

NT: "I'm helpless and at the mercy of ridiculous rules."

RT: "I'm in control. I can make the best of a bad situation. I can challenge myself." (p. 51-2)

Is it very hard not to come up with some choice adjectives to describe these classes: useless, boring, awful, wasteland, and so on?