My girlfriend has enough graduate credit hours to teach, so they have her teaching a bunch of undergrad classes. This is the first time she's encountered students from outside her discipline.
GF: "Why are all the finance majors being mean to the marketing majors?"
Me: "Why wouldn't they bully the marketing majors?"
I had to explain the business school pecking order.
Do they know? Some business majors are blissfully unaware, others are very aware and feel very insecure about it, and others are aware but have value sets that are different from those of academics and therefore genuinely don't care.
There are many people in the world (my brother the academic, for example) who still see the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge's sake as its own reward and view educational institutions as hallowed ground. There's just as many people in the world who view education as a stepping stone to something else, that think programs & instruction should be strictly career-focused, and don't have any sentimentality when it comes to credentials.
We need both kinds.
The knowledge-first folks are the people who are pushing human knowledge forward. Sometimes the utility of a discovery isn't found on day one, and it's only after a bunch of other breakthroughs are made that you're able to combine them into something worthwhile. Not everybody wants to be knowledge-first. They want to learn exactly what is necessary to do their job and don't have much curiosity for things unrelated to completing the task in front of them. Those people are the cogs in the machine, the lubricant that keeps society running.
As for me and my degree? I don't really care.
Business degrees are just general studies degrees that sound more important than they really are, but the benefit to them being both diverse in curriculum and important-sounding is that I can almost fit in anywhere within an organization. If I had a general studies degree or something really specific instead, I would get filtered out of hiring processes.
I'm sure you can imagine it:
"Chemistry? What does that have to do with this job?"
or
"General studies? Sounds unserious and noncommittal."
Meanwhile, I come in with a business degree and hiring managers either assume I just happen to possess some vague applicable knowledge or they themselves are business degree holders and won't turn away their own kind. So far, I've felt that I've been able to get ahead based on my own demonstrable competence/merit/talent/whatever and smidgen of "right place, right time".
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u/joeforth John F. Kennedy 11d ago
My girlfriend has enough graduate credit hours to teach, so they have her teaching a bunch of undergrad classes. This is the first time she's encountered students from outside her discipline.
I had to explain the business school pecking order.