Rich Kids Study English | The Atlantic
Once financial concerns have been covered by their parents, children have more latitude to study less pragmatic things in school. […] …the amount of money a college student’s parents make does correlate with what that person studies. Kids from lower-income families tend toward “useful” majors, such as computer science, math, and physics. Those whose parents make more money flock to history, English, and performing arts.
Jose and I spent a good long while talking about this article the other day. Our backgrounds are pretty different, but neither of us really fit into the category of having had parents who made “a lot” of money. And while both of us are happy enough in our careers after having studied engineering — certainly a “useful” major per the definition of this article — we also agreed that practicality, job prospects, and future salary played at least some sort of role in choosing it. These concerns were somewhat incidental for me since I had been bitten by the space bug, but they were a fairly strong factor for Jose, who has always loved space but was/is also interested in many less “useful” majors.
(This related NPR/Planet Money article is also interesting: Who Had Richer Parents, Doctors or Artists?)
How Do Americans Really Feel About Vacation Days? | Vanity Fair
I’d take 4 extra weeks of vacation over an extra $20K/year. I’d rather get time off for leftover sick days than get paid for them. That seems to put me in the minority. (To be fair, there is probably some point at which I’d rather get money than time off. But I haven’t found it yet.)
A Year in Space | Time
Time is doing a great series of articles and videos on NASA astronaut Scott Kelly’s year in space aboard the International Space Station. Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko is also participating in the year-long stay. The pair have been up there for 110 days already, and won’t head back to Earth until next March. The first two episodes of the video series are worth a watch.
On the second article, some years back, I was on a team that was trying to better improve the division-level awards process. I think that’s the first time I realized how different people’s desires are. There’s lots of sole income earners for a family and people who have the puritan “I don’t like taking vacation because I am afraid to miss something at work” who will take extra compensation over anything else. And then there are people like me where an extra vacation day is worth more than its weight in gold. And then there are still other people who care about neither, but really want public recognition for their efforts. It was the same when I took one of those next-career-step classes and we talked about what we value in work, and almost all the people in the class except me put steady pay check and no risk of getting fired, and those were like my lowest two scored items. I guess this all relates to the first item too. I am spending a lot of time with people who made the non-practical education choices, and I still find understanding their choices weird, I am not going to say I vs. they ended up with a “better” education, but their educational experience was extremely different than mine. A “gentleman’s B” would have been a nice thing to have available to us engineering students.
Yes, I’ve also realized how different people’s desires are for money vs. vacation time. I feel like there may be a generational component to those desires also — it would be interesting if someone looked at that too. In general, I seem to notice that younger people are more likely to want time off than older people.
Did you see Elise’s link to the 32 hour workweek by some startup? I’d take that (and still get paid my usual salary) any time it would be offered. Also, I definitely agree with you on having more time off. At my previous job we also had a healthy dose of separate sick time along with vacation time, so you weren’t dipping into vacation to use sick. It was nice to know you had the option for both and didn’t have to have it all lumped into one PTO, like I have now.
I’ve taken the dip into a life other than a strict 40 hr work week/cubicle life a few years ago and I think if other people even tried it they’d wish there were more options for a work/life balance than there currently are.
Yes, I watched that video and thought it was great! I definitely fall on the side of thinking that the way our culture glorifies work is misguided and not particularly healthy. My current job is 40 hrs/week but it does allow for a pretty large amount of flexibility, and I also work a 9/80 schedule to get every other Friday off which is THE. BEST. (We also have separate sick time and annual leave, which I agree is very very nice.)
Well, you know my position on vacation days vs. pay. 🙂 I’d work a 3-day week for 60% pay if I could.
I wish I could convince more lower income high school students and post-high school students to consider engineering, especially women. It is a path to financial stability for the rest of your life, and I think it is just not something certain groups just don’t tend to consider.
I’d definitely work a 4-day week for 80% pay. I would consider 3-day/60% too.
I also have recently decided engineering has a major marketing problem amongst women. Compare to law: 50% or more law students are women. But they all drop out of the profession in droves while practicing law. Why? Its highly competitive, isolating, and makes ridiculous requests on your hours (“family friendly” usually means a firm is willing to pay for emergency day care during nights and weekends or might not dock you for your maternity leave when they consider you for partner, but they probably will). Compare to engineering: Collaborative, long term projects that can be paused for family leave, generous vacation time, and generally 9-5 hrs (not to say long days aren’t worked, but that its more stable and less midnight responsiveness is expected). And if you compare to law, I just don’t see women who become engineers leaving the profession the way you see it in law. Maybe part of that is devotion to the field (law is certainly a profession people follow because they have no other choice for their degree compared to engineering with, especially among women, people choose to do it out of passion at least in part). With the law pipeline of women so strong, firms have to wonder why they aren’t staying, because its clearly a work place problem. For engineering, we need to fix the pipeline still. Anyway, I clearly have a lot of thoughts on this.