I have often expressed a wish for there to be more physics majors, and more science majors in general. Given the demographic information in the previous post, is this just irresponsible feather-bedding on my part?<\/p>\n
I don’t think so, but that’s because I would make a distinction between science majors<\/strong>, at the undergraduate level, and scientists<\/strong>, by which I mostly mean people with Ph.D.’s. The study mentioned previously concerned the supply of scientists, noting that the job situation is not good for Ph.D. scientists (though I suspect that this may reflect a shortage of academic jobs, not a shortage of jobs overall), but I don’t think that’s a reason to discourage students from majoring in science.<\/p>\n If there aren’t professional-scientist jobs for these students down the line, what will they do with their degrees? Well, pretty much anything would work.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Once again, science is not just a body of facts, it’s a way of looking at the world. Majoring in science teaches students how to think systematically, how to evaluate and draw conclusions from data, and how to solve problems (at least, it does if we’re doing it right). Science majors should be comfortable working with numbers, and have some familiarity with basic statistics.<\/p>\n There aren’t many fields of employment where those skills aren’t<\/strong> in demand. And looking at the unfolding election and the smoking ruins of the American financial system, it’s clear that we as a society would benefit greatly from having them distributed a little more widely.<\/p>\n So, I’d like to see more science majors, and I’d like to see them going into all sorts of fields other than the professional-scientist track. We could start with steering some of them to science teaching, but I think it would be great to see more students majoring in science and going on to, say, law school. Not just because we need patent lawyers (the usual intent of science majors going to law school), but because we could use more lawyers with a grounding in science, to deal with the complexities of things like DNA evidence. We could use more science-savvy students going into the business sector so that decisions about research funding and priorities are made by people who have some idea what research is about. And God knows, we could use more people who understand science in politics, for reasons too numerous to list here.<\/p>\n So, while the numbers don’t necessarily look good for professional scientists, I remain convinced that we need more science majors<\/strong>, across the board. There are obstacles to this goal, obviously, starting with a society that tells kids that science is difficult and alien, and something only nerds do. This is why it’s critically important to improve and expand our efforts to bring science to the wider public.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have often expressed a wish for there to be more physics majors, and more science majors in general. Given the demographic information in the previous post, is this just irresponsible feather-bedding on my part? I don’t think so, but that’s because I would make a distinction between science majors, at the undergraduate level, and… Continue reading Science Majors vs. Scientists<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2946\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}