Answer for question 4497.

[sabotabby]

[Error: unknown template qotd]Do what you love and follow your dreams because either way, you're going to be mostly unemployed, and it's cheaper and also less disappointing to be an unemployed artist than an unemployed engineer. There are no jobs for anyone. Welcome to the grimdark post-work future where the majority of you will not quite earn a living in an informal, unstable economy rooting through garbage dumps for scrap metal.

Unless you can luck into a trades apprenticeship, in which case, do that. They haven't quite found a way to replace plumbers yet.

You can guess by my cynicism that I chose what, at the time, was a practical major in university guaranteed to net me a good stable job, just as the dot com bubble burst and left my entire graduating class scrambling for scraps.

(I think this is why they didn't let me give the valedictorian speech in high school.)

Comments

[princealberic.livejournal.com]

I don't know if I 100% agree.

I was given this advice when I graduated and even battled to be able to do it. Nowadays, I have mixed feelings about it. We have to choose general fields before starting high school, and now I really regret not going into the sciences. I see so many ads for tech-related jobs and my sciency friends have been able to get a wider range of work related to their field than I can ever hope to. The worst part is that I wasn't even bad at it, I just didn't care as much as I cared about literature or history.

I don't regret studying something that I wanted to learn more about, but it's also not something I'd recommend to anyone who isn't 100% certain of what they want to do.

Then again, maybe I'm just jaded by how unemployable I am and living in a country struggling with debt-related problems.

[sabotabby]

Here there are so many kids going into STEM that they're now having the same problems as arts grads. All of my kids at my old school wanted to be engineers; for some reason, I don't think that's going to happen.

[princealberic.livejournal.com]

Here that happens too (STEM is probably the most popular stuff to study) but among other things, I think it makes it easier to get work abroad, especially if you speak more than one language (there's probably a surplus in English-speaking countries). It also seems to me like there's more variety with what you can do if you decide that you don't want to be in academia for life.

Obviously, jobs as a whole are scarce. It's just that compared to my field, it seems so much better. It doesn't help that I'm mad jealous of the science students and alumni at my uni for getting better support and guidance on career-related things

[princealberic.livejournal.com]

Also, most of this is probably really country-dependent. For example, I've heard that in other countries, what I studied can actually lead to work. Over here, most people don't even seem to know what it is.