Hello everyone,
My name is Matt O’Brien and I am a sophomore enrolled in the Smeal College of Business. I want to major in both accounting and finance while simultaneously pursuing a Master’s degree in accounting (MAcc) through Smeal’s integrated program. I plan on tacking on minors in Spanish and International Business. I am taking this class for a couple of reasons. First, my former roommate, who happened to be this class’s highest scorer last year, insisted that no course he could have possibly taken that year would have been more valuable and worth his time. Secondly, I do not understand why non-science majors would devote an entire course to one specific subset of science. The idea of a course that can draw from all scientific fields that are relevant to our being good “consumers” of science in one semester is very appealing to me. We need not waste time on the nuts and bolts to gain an appreciation for and an understanding of what scientists do and why it is so important.
To be honest, I do enjoy science quite a bit. I like to keep current on the failures and successes of modern day scientific endeavors. I was fascinated by Steven Hawking’s novel “A Brief History of Time” and I often find myself putting a great deal of thought into some of the great unanswered scientific questions. That being said, I do not have a desire or a drive to be the person who makes a scientific breakthrough! The aforementioned “nuts and bolts” make me miserable and destroy my liking for science.
When choosing a major, It comes down to choosing the one that best utilizes your passions and aptitudes, and it comes down to choosing one that will almost certainly lead to a lucrative career with security and opportunity to advance through hard work. For me, business school checks these boxes. In business the sky is the limit. Unfortunately, the hard sciences produce graduates who on average are grossly underpaid and scarily insecure in their employment. There just is not a whole lot to do without a Ph.D. This is why I believe that science lovers would be better off in engineering and technology fields.
Here is an interesting article about why we should drop the “S” from STEM.
Hey Matthew! I love this blog post because it puts exactly how I feel into words. I am also in Smeal, and although the sciences are interesting to me, I just don’t think my future will end up the way I am envisioning it if i took the “science” route.
to me, it is interesting how important statistics are to businessmen and women. That is almost obvious. However, a discussion in my stats class last week consisted of the fact that the medical field is finding statistics more and more useful because it shows patterns in data which can be interpreted and eventually be used to solve problems. For example… maybe statistics can help identify a trend in a certain disease that then helps doctors and researches develop a way to treat the problem. Suppose this problem wasn’t able to be identified in the lab, or if it was able to be identified, maybe it would be very expensive to experiment with. Who knows!
My point is that even though you and I may not be directly responsible for medical breakthroughs or other developments in the scientific fields, there is a way for us and all of our fellow businessmen and women to make contributions through business as well. Just a little bit of knowledge I wanted to share. 🙂
This article I found takes the exact opposite approach and discusses how science is useful in business! T’s always good to consider other people’s point of view, so you may find this interesting.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-scientists-can-leap-business-dan-housman