10 Most Worthless College Majors
From Kurt and HolyTaco.comCollege is a great place to learn and have fun. But let’s not kid ourselves, some degrees are as useless as the plot in a Michael Bay film. Here’s a list of 10 degrees that may be interesting, but do jack shit for you in the real world.
10. Art History
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: With an art history degree you could maybe curate an art gallery or work at a museum or….yeah, that’s it. That’s all you can do. And seeing as how every art gallery and museum I’ve ever been to has exactly one dude sitting quietly at a desk reading a New Yorker and eating a food that requires chopsticks, I’m going to go ahead and assume there’s not a lot of positions open in the field.
What Job You’ll End Up With: After your parents boot your ass from your bedroom, you’ll wander towards the nearest coffee shop and get a job there, which will allow you to meet artists who put fliers by the cash register to inform people of their upcoming show featuring “the combination of art and flute.”
9. Philosophy
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: This isn’t ancient Greece: no one is going to pay you money, or allow you to sodomize their attractive son, in exchange for your knowledge of existence. Never has there been an employer who’s said “Man, we’re having all kinds of problems, I wish we had someone on our team who could reference and draw conclusions from the story of Siddhartha that would pull up our fourth quarter numbers.”
What Job You’ll End Up With: Thanks to your extensive knowledge of philosophy, you’re now self-aware enough to know that most jobs out there will make you totally miserable. So most likely you’ll wait tables part time and hope someone starts paying you for the bi-monthly entries on your blog.
7. Music Therapy
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: I didn’t even know this was a major until I found it on the Appalachian State website. According to them, “Music therapy is the scientific application of the art of music within a therapeutic relationship to meet the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual needs of individuals.” Which is a big, fancy way of saying “We’ll teach you how to make a mix tape.”
What Job You’ll End Up With: After realizing that yoga studios and elderly homes don’t pay people just to come in and set mood music, you’re going to end up putting your degree towards burning a fire to keep warm because you are homeless.
5. Dance
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: Despite what “Dancing with the Stars” and “High School Musical” may tell you, there aren’t a lot of dancing jobs out there -- so you better be good, because there really aren’t any gigs for mediocre dancers. Outside of New York or LA there is absolutely nothing you can do with a dance degree that doesn’t involve actually dancing for money. And since the Des Moines interpretive dance movement hasn’t really taken off yet, you have a better chance landing a job as an 8-Track repairman or a member of the Beatles.
What Job You’ll End Up With: After moving to New York and trying out for Hello Dolly! or Damn Yankees or any of the other seven Broadway plays that want dancers and not landing a single one because you got your dance degree from Ball State, you will find ample opportunity to show off your choreographic skills at one of the city’s many strip clubs.
3. Latin
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: Not only does no one speak this language anymore, but we already have all the Latin that exists in the world. There’s no new Latin that’s hot off the presses that needs immediate translating. I’m no business major, but majoring in a language that doesn’t exist anymore doesn’t sound so good for job security.
What Job You’ll End Up With: Since you majored in something that doesn’t exist, you’re going to have two jobs. Your first one will be as the annoying pretentious guy who gives everyone the Latin etymology of every big word he hears at every dinner party he attends. Your second, and most lucrative job, will be as a Subway Sandwich Artist.
2. Film
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: No one in hollywood gives a shit that you made a short film about an alcoholic albino that discovers the meaning of life through the help of a retarded child. Unless that retarded child was played by the son of Harvey Weinstein, your film or degree will be as pointless as the last twelve seasons of "ER."
What Job You’ll End Up With: If you’re lucky, you’ll have an uncle who can get you a job as a production assistant on CSI Miami, where your time will be spent making coffee runs and finding whores who will let David Caruso pee on them.
For the rest, see the full article at HolyTaco.com.
50 Most Annoying Office-Speak Phrases
A great list from Lesley and BBC News Magazine, as submitted by its readers. This is the kind of BS that makes me glad I don't work for a big company."When I worked for Verizon, I found the phrase going forward to be more sinister than annoying. When used by my boss - sorry, team leader - it was understood to mean that the topic of conversation was at an end and not be discussed again." - Vancouver, Canada
"My employers recently informed staff that we are no longer allowed to use the phrase brainstorm because it might have negative connotations associated with fits. We must now take idea showers." – UK"Incentivise is the one that does it for me." - Perth, Scotland
"My favourite which I hear from the managers at the bank I work for is let's touch base about that offline. I think it means have a private chat but I am still not sure." - Wolverhampton, UK
"We used to collect the jargon used in a list and award the person with the most at the end of the year. The winner was a client manager with the classic 'you can't turn a tanker around with a speed boat change.' What? Second was 'we need a holistic, cradle-to-grave approach,' whatever that is." - Manchester, UK
"The business-speak that I abhor is pre-prepare and forward planning. Is there any other kind of preparedness or planning?" – Exeter, UK"I work in one of those humble call centres for a bank. Apparently, what we're doing at the moment is sprinkling our magic along the way. It's a call centre, not Hogwarts." - Ayrshire, UK
"The business phrase I find most irritating is close of play, which is only slightly worse than actioning something." – London, UK
"The expression that drives me nuts is 110%, to express passion/commitment/ support by people who are not very good at math. This has created something of a cliché-inflation, where people are now saying 120%, 200%, or, if you are really REALLY committed, 500%. I remember once the then-chancellor Gordon Brown saying he was 101% behind Tony Blair, to which people reacted 'What? Only 101?'" - London, UK
"My least favourite business-speak term is not enough bandwidth. When an employee used this term to refuse an additional assignment, I realised I was completely out of the loop." - Berkeley, California, USA"In my work environment it's all cascading at the moment. What they really mean is to communicate or disseminate information, usually downwards. What they don't seem to appreciate is that it sounds like we're being wee'd on. Which we usually are." - London, UK
"On the wall of our office we have a large signed certificate, signed by all the senior management team, in which they solemnly promise to leverage their talents, display and inspire unyielding integrity, and lots of other pretentious buzz-phrases like that. Clueless, the lot of them." - Cheltenham UK
"Thanks for the impactful article; I especially appreciated the level of granularity. A high altitude view often misses the siloed thinking typical of most businesses. Absent any scheme for incentivitising clear speech, however, I'm afraid we're stuck with biz-speak." - New York, NY, USA
"The latest that's stuck in my head is we are still optimistic things will feed through the sales and delivery pipeline (i.e.: we actually haven't sold anything to anyone yet but maybe we will one day)." - Southampton, UK"At my old company, anyone involved with a particular product was encouraged to be a product evangelist. And software users these days, so we hear, want to be platform atheists so that their computers will run programs from any manufacturer." – Thailand
"A pet hate is the utterly pointless expression in this space. So instead of the perfectly adequate 'how can I help?' it's 'how can I help in this space?' Or the classic I heard on Friday, 'How can we help our customers in this space going forward?'" – London, UK
For the rest, see the full list at BBC News Magazine.
~lee.
1 comment:
Thanks for the link love, Lee.
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