What is the hardest degree to get?

mitchell271

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Mechanical engineering or pure software engineering

Why? Because of the sheer amount of hours required to become good at it. Let's say you go through school for those things and then start working a 9-5 job in that field. You're not going to get ahead just by working those hours, most employers expect you to become proficient at something related to your job on your own time as well. The idea is that if something is interesting, you should want to learn about it and do it on your own because you have to be working on the company's projects while you're on the clock.

Most people in the industry think it's dumb except for the business types in charge. Why hire someone that just works while you're paying them when you can hire someone that's going to work well and get better for free? This is why we comp sci guys and the business people don't get along very well.
 

thiosk

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[quote="Esotera" post="18.849624.20981994"That said, the stereotype in the sciences is that biology is easiest, then chemistry, then physics, then maths...and sociology/psychology don't even count.[/quote]

As a research scientist by profession, its important to note a couple things about this. From a classroom standpoint, its easy to argue that biology is the easiest. However, the research can be really hard, so a doctoral degree in biology is going to be rather insane compared to most chemistry doctoral degrees. From an academic career standpoint, it is typical for cell biologists to do more than one postdoctoral appointment, with duration from 3-6 years EACH, prior to starting their own laboratory as an academic research scientist.

On the engineering and chemistry side, where I reside, we tend to sneak by with a 2-3 year postdoctoral appointment.

Point is, theres different levels of challenge and difficulty that are all related to what it is you actually want to do with that knowledge.
 

theboombody

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shootthebandit said:
theboombody said:
shootthebandit said:
theboombody said:
I guarantee you if I asked somebody, "What blowoff class did you take in high school?" nine out of ten people would not say, "chemistry." Instead they'd probably say something like, "art." In fact if chemistry wasn't required, I bet a lot of people would try to avoid it.
If you are genuinely into art then its not a "blow off". One of my "blow off" subjects was woodwork and its actually proved to be pretty useful around the house and apart from maths id say ive put it to use more often than any other subject I studied and chemistry I dont think ive ever really put that to practical use
No one's denying woodwork is useful. It's useful as heck. I use it lots more than I use chemistry too. It's just not as intellectually challenging as chemistry. Bottom line.
This is my problem with school. You are forced down an academical route and everything else is considered a "blow off". The very reason for this thread is testament to that

Id much rather schools prepared children for life and learning chemistry, biology etc is certainly not going to me any use to me what so ever. Barring maths and some elements of physics and electronics what i learned at school has had no practical use in my life

Just because something is hard it doesnt automatically give it more weight than something else.

If you can consider art a blow off then go and draw me a painting as beautiful as one of van gogh's. If you consider music to be a blow off then go write me a symphony

The truth is we cannot measure one subject against another. Its like comparing chalk with cheese
Art is an example of tacit knowledge, which is different from intellectual knowledge. Painting isn't as much of an intellectual activity as deriving and solving equations. No one's saying it's easy. It's just not intellectual. Vermeer and Dali painted some amazing works, and that talent is irreplaceable, but still, it's not as intellectual as electrical engineering. I think art is probably more important than electrical engineering. But it's just not as intellectual.

Speaking of painting, that's a whole other issue there. Da Vinci's work was much more impressive than Rothko's. There are many artists out there who toss something up there a kid could do in 30 seconds. And even though I like some of those primitive styles (particularly Kandinsky), I can tell they're not as hard to do as Da Vinci's. In fact, I've done some replicas of Picasso's Guernica that bear some decent resemblance to the original but if I tried to pass off a replica of Raphael's School of Athens, it would fall so far below the original it would be embarrassing.
 

Nomad

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theboombody said:
Yeah, but my undergraduate is in math, not in sociology. However, if I would have taken all math classes, I would have drowned in the difficulty. I padded it out with sociology classes to make achieving a math degree, much, much easier. Because math is hard, and sociology is not. And that's probably how it is for 99% of people.

If I would have taken all sociology classes, it would have been much easier for me, and I would have gotten a sociology degree, but I wanted something that was more of a challenge. Something that I had to work much harder for.
I have no issues with what you've written, except for the bolded part - you just conjured that number out of thin air. However, it only describes how difficult these things were for you. Your experiences do not necessarily mirror everyone else's. They do not mirror mine, for instance.

It's great that you want to challenge yourself, and I totally understand your motives. I share them - that's why I turned to the social sciences. They provide intellectual challenge for me at a level that the natural sciences do not. Statistics is a grey area for me, where the actual mathematics of it is routine and discussing the theoretical implications of the results is what I find challenging and rewarding.

I've studied law, economics, statistics, theology, history, political science, philosophy, sociology and social work at an academic level. Of these, I have studied statistics, political science, philosophy, sociology and social work at an advanced level (2nd cycle according to the bologna process, i.e. master's level). The clear trend for me is that the more marginal the quantitative component, the more intellectually challenged I feel, because the qualitiative component requires a greater deal of abstract thinking from me. This does not mean that I think qualitative analysis is intellectually superior to quantitative analysis, only that my talents are more suited for the latter, making the former more intellectually challenging for me.
theboombody said:
There are times I think, man, I should have studied engineering instead, where I'd have a career all set, but looking back on it, I'm not sure I could have handled the course load there. I did as much as I could handle at the time. I suppose if I would have stayed in college longer and padded out my schedule some I guess it might have been possible, but who knows. That would have cost a lot of extra money too.
Again, I take no issue with this. You find engineering hard. This is entirely in the realm of possibility. As is not finding engineering hard.
theboombody said:
But to suggest an biochemist wouldn't have the "skillset" to obtain a sociology degree is beyond laughable to me. Whether it's rude of me to say so or not. Now there may be more than a few sociologists out there who very well could have been biochemists. I'm not saying they're incapable. But I AM saying EVERY single person with a biochemistry degree could have easily, EASILY obtained a sociology degree. Every one of them. Biochemistry is much more difficult to study than sociology.
I wish you would stop making definitive statements about reality when these statements have no clear empirical grounding - anecdotal evidence is not acceptable evidence. Your experiences do not mirror the experiences of the rest of humanity. You have absolutely no basis for the claim that every single biochemist could have easily obtained a sociology degree.

I do not dispute that every biochemist could have gotten a sociology degree. Just like I do not dispute that every sociologist could have gotten a biochemistry degree. It's all a matter of effort, and hence I do dispute the "easily" part. Being skilled at one sort of intellectual activity does not automatically confer skill at another sort - on this, there is very firm empirical grounding. Both Spearman's G-factor [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)] and Gardner's multiple intelligences [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences] have (on very separate grounds) provided good evidence for this, for instance. If we're sticking with anecdotal evidence (which is actually acceptable when disputing a categorical claim about "everyone". Even one deviant case will sink that ship.), I could personally name a few examples of people with degrees in the natural sciences (although not specifically biochemistry) and engineering that seemed to have a very hard time grasping fundamental concepts of political analysis.
 

K12

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This feels like an excuse for one group of academics to be snobbish to another group.

This seems completely arbitrary to me. I for one would put Foreign languages on the "very difficult" end with Maths and Philosophy on the "easier end" but I know many people who would be the complete opposite.

Maybe a more meaningful way could be to do this based on entry requirements or average number of hours spent on study but even that won't really give you more than a general idea of what is expected.


It's also worth saying that if you want to base your choice of degree on how much it will allow you to swing your intellectual penis around rather than on your future plans and what interests you then you really need to grow the fuck up!
 

Nomad

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K12 said:
This feels like an excuse for one group of academics to be snobbish to another group.

This seems completely arbitrary to me. I for one would put Foreign languages on the "very difficult" end with Maths and Philosophy on the "easier end" but I know many people who would be the complete opposite.

Maybe a more meaningful way could be to do this based on entry requirements or average number of hours spent on study but even that won't really give you more than a general idea of what is expected.


It's also worth saying that if you want to base your choice of degree on how much it will allow you to swing your intellectual penis around rather than on your future plans and what interests you then you really need to grow the fuck up!
I don't think entry requirements would be a good way to measure this - that would be more of a supply/demand or shape of prior education thing. Average number of hours spent on study would vary significantly simply by virtue of what it actually is you do in a certain course. Courses that require heavy reading would skyrocket in that scale, for instance, simply because reading vast amounts of text will always take time regardless of the level of difficulty.

The best measurement I can think of would probably be student throughput, i.e. how many of the enrolled students that manage to get their degrees in the end. Even this would provide very shaky grounds for comparison, however, since this can be affected by everything from the state of the labour market to the pedagogical and didactical skills of individual teachers. There are simply too many potential sources of error for an external measurement to be remotely reliable.

The fundamental issue here is that the comparison is meaningless to begin with, because there isn't sufficient common ground between the fields to form a basis for it - which makes any internal measurements impossible. I reiterate: you cannot judge whether 5mph is faster than 60kg.

That said, I agree with the basic gist of what you wrote (although I wouldn't phrase it quite like you did). As someone said earlier, a more meaningful question would be "What is generally perceived to be the hardest degree to get?". This could tell us something about social norms, educational systems, academic culture and the distribution of skills among the populace.
 

Nickolai77

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I think there's too many variables which influense how challenging a degree is that the OP's list isn't really all that useful. Some people have already correctly said that the difficulty of a certain course depends a lot on the institution and the teachers, and I think a equally significant factor is one's own abilities and interests. A mathmatically minded person's going to find a degree like aeronautical engineering easier than English Literature, and vice versa for those who have a way with words and expression rather than numbers.

You could say the OP's list simply details how hard it is to get a degree from some unknown instituition for somebody who struggles with maths but has a talent social studies.


Btw, the subject content of a subject like marketing varies a lot, it can be very maths heavy (i.e- market research) depending on how the subject is taught. If we're grading subjects in terms of mathmatical ability here marketing should be higher up.
 

gunny1993

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Any idiot can get a degree if they put enough hours into it, intelligence is using that knowledge in the correct ways.

Besides its way too variable, I know people who can pick up a language in months but couldn't do anything I've done at uni. It's a simple matter of brain structure variation between people, some people are good at this, some at that.

We all get along because foolish people like you don't ask these questions which are just bait for the supercilious.
 

Keystone

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I think you really need to separate out undergraduate degrees from graduate degrees. A college major is going to take four years (or so) to complete no matter what, and, while there are some general rules as to the difficulty of a major, the difficulty is going to primarily come down to the requirements set by the school and the professor, as well what classes a particular person studying in that major chooses to take. For example, at the school that I went to, there was only a very small physics program that primarily existed to satisfy pre-med reqs, and majoring in physics was generally considered pretty easy at the school.

Ph.D. and professional degree programs are different in some ways, and I think in this context it's fairer to try to compare the difficulty of different disciplines from a macro perspective. First of all, you usually have to take another standardized test even to get in. For many professional degrees, there's some kind of board certification required, often involving some test you have to take after graduating from professional school. For doctoral programs, you usually have to create some original piece of work. In all of these cases, I think the level of difficulty is more consistent in any particular field than it is for college majors.
 

Padwolf

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Well, it would depend on the university, the person and the field they want to go into after university. I can vouch that English Literature and Sociology can be very difficult at times. Especially if your degree is a double honour and you have to do both at the same time. Seriously, trying picking apart several books in one week while trying to write a sociology essay was difficult. Good fun, but difficult and damn tiring. I never want to see a copy of Ulysses again. Ever. Nor do I ever want to see or hear What Maisie Knew, because Maisie knew nothing and that book was painful to read and painful to pick apart. But Ulysses... I don't even... I just can't handle any of it. Just looking at the name of it makes me feel tired and frustrated. Great book and incredibly fascinating. I spent so many hours, weeks, it turned into months, trying to dig into that thing. In the end I scrapped it all to write on a different book I could actually work with.
 

wrightguy0

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Architecture is the hardest out of all engineering related degrees, you have to be equal parts mathematician, physicist, artist, engineer and businessman, it's a lot of hats to wear, and a lot of study for a career that you'll probably never get to retire from.
 

theboombody

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Nomad said:
I wish you would stop making definitive statements about reality when these statements have no clear empirical grounding - anecdotal evidence is not acceptable evidence. Your experiences do not mirror the experiences of the rest of humanity. You have absolutely no basis for the claim that every single biochemist could have easily obtained a sociology degree.

I do not dispute that every biochemist could have gotten a sociology degree. Just like I do not dispute that every sociologist could have gotten a biochemistry degree. It's all a matter of effort, and hence I do dispute the "easily" part. Being skilled at one sort of intellectual activity does not automatically confer skill at another sort - on this, there is very firm empirical grounding. Both Spearman's G-factor [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)] and Gardner's multiple intelligences [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences] have (on very separate grounds) provided good evidence for this, for instance. If we're sticking with anecdotal evidence (which is actually acceptable when disputing a categorical claim about "everyone". Even one deviant case will sink that ship.), I could personally name a few examples of people with degrees in the natural sciences (although not specifically biochemistry) and engineering that seemed to have a very hard time grasping fundamental concepts of political analysis.
Well if I stopped making statements like that I would be politically correct, and that's not going to happen.

There are oftentimes I will accept the authority of somebody who is recognized in their field, and oftentimes I will not. I've read "The Ego and the Id" by Freud, and after that reading, I agreed with another psychiatrist who said, "Out of Freud's body of work, what's correct is not original, and what's original is not correct." Did I get the words of that quote exactly right? No. But I absolutely nailed the spirit of the quote. And that's the idea behind political incorrectness, ignoring the letter of something, but nailing the spirit of it. Which I believe needs to happen much more often.

So anyway, I value the opinion regarding psychiatry from a man off the street more than I value the opinion regarding psychiatry by the renowned Freud.

Next you'll tell me that golf is just as an athletic of a sport as football, or that a person working at an office at age 23 is just as prone to injury as a person playing football at age 23 because they may get carpal tunnel syndrome.

Just as some sports are more athletic than others, some degrees are more intellectual than others. Now are there gray areas? Of course. But marathon running is going to be near the top of the list and golf is going to be near the bottom.
 

theboombody

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DANGER- MUST SILENCE said:
what blowoff classes did you take in high school?
Why are you suddenly shifting the topic to high school, when we were before talking about university? High school is an irrelevant distraction to this conversation because students have far less choice in what they can study there. Also, I don't know terribly many high schools with a quantum mechanics elective.
This was merely to show that someone can hypocritically on one day say, "Yeah, that's a blow off class," and on another day say, "Yeah, all classes are equal."

I may be rude, but at least I'm consistently rude. I'm not going to go and say all degrees are equal. Better than someone on this forum saying all classes are equally challenging then going out into the actual world saying, "Oh yeah, I remember such and such was really a blow off class."

Let's just say, did you ever take any kind of blow off class EVER or are there no blow off classes for you?
 

Nomad

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theboombody said:
Well if I stopped making statements like that I would be politically correct, and that's not going to happen.
So what you're saying is that arguing from evidence and empirical grounding (and not making unsupported definitive claims about reality) makes you politically correct? Alright, then. What's bad about that, exactly? It sounds to me like you could just scrap the word "politically" and just call it "correct", then.

theboombody said:
There are oftentimes I will accept the authority of somebody who is recognized in their field, and oftentimes I will not. I've read "The Ego and the Id" by Freud, and after that reading, I agreed with another psychiatrist who said, "Out of Freud's body of work, what's correct is not original, and what's original is not correct." Did I get the words of that quote exactly right? No. But I absolutely nailed the spirit of the quote. And that's the idea behind political incorrectness, ignoring the letter of something, but nailing the spirit of it. Which I believe needs to happen much more often.

So anyway, I value the opinion regarding psychiatry from a man off the street more than I value the opinion regarding psychiatry by the renowned Freud.
See, this is a prime example of why I don't think you're equipped to rate the intellectual hierarchy of different fields - you seem to be under the impression that Freud is an authority in psychiatry. He's not, as that "other psychiatrist" you mentioned implied. Not only was Freud's work primarily in the field of psychology rather than psychiatry, but Freud's work has been largely discredited. His psychoanalysis is widely considered a pseudoscience at this point. It's just that his name is recognizable for the general public with no intimate knowledge of the field - like Einstein and Stephen Hawking. Because people know about him, when you want to make a character seem smart in a sitcom, you have the character quote Freud. His supposed scientific "renown" is a self-perpetuating myth.

theboombody said:
Next you'll tell me that golf is just as an athletic of a sport as football, or that a person working at an office at age 23 is just as prone to injury as a person playing football at age 23 because they may get carpal tunnel syndrome.

Just as some sports are more athletic than others, some degrees are more intellectual than others. Now are there gray areas? Of course. But marathon running is going to be near the top of the list and golf is going to be near the bottom.
Not only have we suddenly left academia, but you're still not getting it. No, I will not claim that golf is as "athletic" as football, whatever that means. I might claim that they're not comparable, since they might utilize different skillsets (I wouldn't know, though. I know nothing about sports). Again - establishing equality is also a comparison. For two things to be equal, they need to share a common scale. 5mph is not equal to 60kg, but this does not make one greater than the other.

As for work-related injuries, you'd need to specify a country. Some countries include psychological injuries in their statistics, and some do not. Some countries have far-reaching regulations regarding physical work safety, and some do not. A country might display a low amount of work-related injuries simply because of a very strict definition of what a work-related injury is, while another country might display a low amount of work-related injuries because of strict regulations that prevent such injuries. In some countries, work-related injuries will be skewed towards certain kinds of jobs because of how the safety regulations or the working culture and tradition is shaped. This is all a sidetrack, however - I fail to see how it relates to relative academic difficulty in any meaningful way.
 

Eliam_Dar

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I don't think you can categorize that. For some people learning history might be a challenge because they cannot remember all facts, while for others mathematics may be more complicated. It depends on the person.
 

theboombody

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Nomad said:
As for work-related injuries, you'd need to specify a country. Some countries include psychological injuries in their statistics, and some do not. Some countries have far-reaching regulations regarding physical work safety, and some do not. A country might display a low amount of work-related injuries simply because of a very strict definition of what a work-related injury is, while another country might display a low amount of work-related injuries because of strict regulations that prevent such injuries. In some countries, work-related injuries will be skewed towards certain kinds of jobs because of how the safety regulations or the working culture and tradition is shaped. This is all a sidetrack, however - I fail to see how it relates to relative academic difficulty in any meaningful way.
"You need to specify this, you need to specify that, you need to prove this, etc. etc." That's all I ever hear on these forums. What you all really mean is, "You have to go by what the current authority calls proof. Any other proof is not acceptable." And this proof is based on the letter of the law (scientific, legal, etc.). I got to admit, you guys are great at following the letter of the law, but for the most part are truly awful at following the spirit of it. You never look at why the law was created. You just look at what it says, and go by it so exactly that common sense is forsaken in order to obey that letter. It is the defining characteristic trait of our generation, and it's beyond embarrassing. That's why a judge can say it's okay for the government to take someone's house because their property tax bill payment was six bucks short due to an oversight.

At some point, somebody somewhere is deciding what is legitimate and what is not. I question what is established as legitimate. You do not. If universities actually had a degree for video gaming, would you question that? No. Because you were told it was a legitimate degree by your authorities. Many existing degree programs should never have been created, but they already have been. Someone on a yahoo article today was like, "There's a PHD program in human resources? That sounds a little ridiculous." I would have to agree.

Our society has totally lost its spirit of intuitive sense. No common sense anymore. Because the instant it's mentioned, someone has to say, "And what makes that sense so common? Can you prove it?" No I can't, and furthermore, I shouldn't have to. I will make no further effort to speak your language than the effort I already make.

I bet somewhere at some point, I could construct a degree program that would finally make you say, "Yeah, okay, if that were a real degree, that would definitely be much easier than the existing ones."
 

Stasisesque

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theboombody said:
"You need to specify this, you need to specify that, you need to prove this, etc. etc." That's all I ever hear on these forums. What you all really mean is, "You have to go by what the current authority calls proof. Any other proof is not acceptable." And this proof is based on the letter of the law (scientific, legal, etc.).
You're arguing in a thread about degrees, and criticising the fact that many of the other posters are sticklers for citations, proof, primary sources etc.?