Most of the last eight years of my life have been trying to figure out what I want to do with it. Getting an education was always a driving force in my decision making. At the end of high school the persistent question was where to go to college. For half of college the big question was what to major in. And after deciding that, where to work when I graduated. Working after graduating was interesting, however it wasn’t settling because it reminded me I had a lot more to learn, and kept me eager to go to grad school. So, during the two years I was working I was also focusing on where to go to law school. Now that I’m in law school, I’ll be looking for a job soon – a continuation of the two-year cycle. And I’m sure it will continue well into my life.
The clip below is from an essay titled “The Power of the Marginal” by Paul Graham. It’s interesting with regard to how to select a major. I think the general principles of the excerpt can be extracted and applied beyond the university setting.
One way to tell whether a field has consistent standards is the overlap between the leading practitioners and the people who teach the subject in universities. At one end of the scale you have fields like math and physics, where nearly all the teachers are among the best practitioners. In the middle are medicine, law, history, architecture, and computer science, where many are. At the bottom are business, literature, and the visual arts, where there’s almost no overlap between the teachers and the leading practitioners. It’s this end that gives rise to phrases like “those who can’t do, teach.”
Incidentally, this scale might be helpful in deciding what to study in college. When I was in college the rule seemed to be that you should study whatever you were most interested in. But in retrospect you’re probably better off studying something moderately interesting with someone who’s good at it than something very interesting with someone who isn’t. You often hear people say that you shouldn’t major in business in college, but this is actually an instance of a more general rule: don’t learn things from teachers who are bad at them.