Popular or unpopular departments

This is actually an old question, but there are still people who occasionally jump up and quarrel, but it ultimately comes back to how you see learning, how national policies view higher education, and how society imagines degrees.

Let me talk about my own situation first. I am studying in the Department of Occupational Therapy. Please raise your hand if you have heard it, and if you have heard it but don’t know that occupational therapy is dry, please put it down.

I don’t think there will be too many people left, but you all know that occupational therapy has been on the list of the top ten most popular occupations in the United States for many years, but it is very popular, especially in this era of long-term care, workplace environment and quality of life, because This is the most professional part of formal occupational therapy.

Do you understand the quality of life?

But I didn't think much of it when I was studying thirty years ago.

Even in modern times, not many people know about the occupational therapy department, and there are not many departments to study, so whether it is popular or unpopular.

After all, the score I got in that year was enough to get into the dentistry department of another school! ! If you want to look at the income after graduation, it is really not worth it!

How do you feel about learning? That is to say, although I have left the medical system now, I have long since stopped working as an occupational therapist, but the professional training of the year has not disappeared, it has just been used in a different workplace.

Learning is like this, we actually don’t know what things will be used in the future, so the school basically gives you everything in the early stage. First, these are called “basic knowledge”, and second, we hope to find something you are good at or interested in ( Being good is not necessarily the same as being interested, and if the two are different, you end up with a problem of having to choose).

There is no problem here, but other considerations will be added in the future, such as the expected income of the exit career, the national industrial policy (and it will change), family factors, the environment... These are mostly unsatisfactory parts, and they are often related to Personal wishes conflict, and your abilities may not be able to keep up with the requirements around you. If the social environment emphasizes competition again, it is very realistic that "most people will not be happy in their studies."

Yes, it is very realistic, in fact most people's learning is unhappy.

The so-called happiness does not mean that you will be happy if you are strong, but that your learning can match what you want.

At least my own study process is happy (but not all good, I will talk about it later), because basically I can "easily" meet my family's requirements for my grades (it's not that I'm strong, but the requirements are not high, in fact, I'm not good at it. My own requirements are higher than my parents), so I have more time to look for other things I want to learn, which is very important, because I have been a self-learner since I was a child, anyway, the requirements in the class are up to the standard. .

But there are still problems, because even if I can study freely, there is still no one to guide me, because the whole environment and national policy is to ask you to follow the system line. In my time, it was the score that determined the future.

The only thing I can be happy about is that my score allows me to have the freedom of choice (simply put, all the departments in the nature group except the medical department, as long as I don’t choose a school, I can fill in what I miss.), but in fact the nature group Is it really what I miss?

Of course, all of my subjects in the nature group have high scores, and I like them very much. In fact, until now I still like to solve math problems and read popular science books, but my favorite is actually drawing...

But drawing has always been considered to have no future... Even now, it's only a little better. Basically, society still has a strong prejudice on art subjects.

As a result, we can see that many on-the-job classes have begun to be set up. Although many people look down on the research institutes of on-the-job classes, and there are indeed many schools that sell degrees (for example, the mayor of Kaohsiung was elected before), in fact, many people are adults. If you know what you want to study, it is actually the most suitable time to study for a master's degree, because the motivation to study is the strongest, and most of them have sufficient background knowledge, especially inter-professional background knowledge.

Of course you don't have to read it! We have seen that there are many non-undergraduate but obviously more professional people in the society, especially in professional projects outside the scientific field, let alone any major to a certain level, the most important ability will become problem solving, organization and management, communication and coordination, etc. There are projects such as educational inheritance, and even the development of philosophical theory.

In other words, the ability to "cross-domain" has instead become a key ability. What major you studied in the past is one thing, and whether you have the ability to transfer your major to other fields for application will be more effective.

Therefore, it is not what you have learned in the past, but whether what you have learned in the past is useful in the present.

As long as there is, everything you learn will be useful, and there will be no useless knowledge in the world.

Of course, it is more realistic to involve licenses. Therefore, it is gradually becoming the era of licenses. On the one hand, the industry has to use this to establish a threshold to prevent others from entering, so that no matter how much you study by yourself, it is useless...

But, in fact, many new professions are born in this way. In this era when new professions have been popping up, it is really more important to read what you like. You should be greedy, you should learn something else.

What you need to learn is to learn to love learning.

As for what department you study, it really doesn't matter that much.