SckizoBoy said:
The issue isn't so much the subject as the institution. Tertiary education institutions are so widespread that employers usually don't care that much what you study and are more concerned over where you study. For those fools who think that a STEM degree is the be all and end all of post-graduate employment, to be frank, a degree in ANY subject from Oxbridge is (on average) more likely to lead to high-salary employment in almost ANY field than a STEM degree from an out-in-the-sticks third-tier uni. As they say, it's not what you know, it's who you know... :/
That is true. My AM is UNSW and it has always prided itself on being research intensive and its pathways into private and public sector industries across the Asia Pacific. I think only UQ and Melbourne IT actually rivals it in terms of Australian universities' direct public and private industry focus that helps improve the evolution from student to researcher and being paid for it.
So much so the unofficial credo of "New South's" rivalry with Sydney is that; "You go to Sydney for the courtyards and prestige, you go to 'New South' for a career..."
That being said, research specifically (science or no) is usually badly treated and paid. Scientists don't typically live all that well even with 10+ years of academia behind them. It's always been that way for as long as I've been alive. The university itself merely acts as a predictor of employment and how good the labs will be, not how well you'll be paid or treated.
The hours and the company you keep is why you go into science, not the pay cheque. Engineering, applied mathematics, tech implementation, that's the money in STEM. Not usually research. It's the most expensive part of the process, requiring the most honest people to be useful, requiring good praxis to be useful, and often replete with failures to find meaningful solutions or answers to why or how something is. And that is reflective in how much you actually get paid.
Only when the profit margins are so thoroughly divorced from the production costs of implementation, where there is a vested interest in manufacturing a solution, is where the money is. Like basically adding an extended release formula of an existing active agent in a drug... manufacturing a reason why it should be evergreened, and pretending like capitalism won't kill us all if this practice was applied to everything and anything.
Thaluikhain said:
I must admit that never occurred to me. I did ancient Graeco-Roman stuff, one of the teachers there said we'd end up teaching history in high schools, which seemed rather pointless, as if the only point in learning history was to pass it on to someone else for it's own sake.
Oh... well, as someone for whom had history as part of their first trip major I always came at it with the idea of historiography, not history itself, was important. The tools to analyze, come at new understandinfs, painting a complete picture due to the inability to truly understand what the metaphysical state of the universe was... and thus approach history with an eye of a philosopher testing hypotheticals ... that was the true gift of history.
Ancient history is a truly different beast in those terms ... as the closer you are to the present, the greater the means to employ different historiographical methods to try to define an idea of 'truth' or at least its closest depiction of it.
Which is probably why I would fail any concerted effort to look at the ancient past. I'm much more in my element of debating how structuralism is to history.
That being said, I'm absolutely fascinated by the Bronze Age collapse. Hatshepsut is to the ancient world, what neoliberalism is to global markets. And even if a fevered dream I always felt like there were strings of fate as to what happened by the time of Ramesses III and what we are about to face in the 21st century. What ecological and geological catastrophes might mean for us and world markets, what warfare and gross iniquity might mean for the homefront.
Like an Ugarit era village ... they noticed that Canaanite structured temple with their gods with noses and arms cut off? One archaeologist says; "Ah huh! Proof of the Sea Peoples were foreigners, no one would do this to their own gods ..." only for their co-researcher to (amicably) disagree...
To look at the fact that there are scorch marks at the temple itself, not the ruins of villagers' homes ... to look at the low regional carbon-dated pollen count in soil stratum that would be exposed at the time and measure one of the worst droughts in historical record... and come to the dark realization that it was actually a popular uprising, and that people's faith itself had been stripped away in the calamity of a frenzy of mass violence born of starvation, terror from within and without.
A picture of swift madness at the tail end of the collapse of entire civilizations in but a handful of years.
Stuff like that initially piqued my interest as a kid looking at ancient history .... but I was always more attracted to the historiography, not digging up
physical evidence.
Well, yes, but I struggled with learning Latin (though, in large part because, I lacked motivation. One of the teachers told us about the people who'd they'd taught Latin to, and the great careers they went on to have once they'd stopped mucking about with Latin and got a job doing something else, which was less motivating than intended), learning another script is a headache. Abandoned Egyptian hieroglyphics very early on.
Ughh... I know how that feels. Even in terms of modern history. Like breaking down Maoist era communist materials, folklores and how communist bards trying to attract peasant volunteers and build an idea of national unity and symbolism... the myriad of pre-Mandarin standardization of Chinese characters?
And at least many Chinese characters have radical particulates in their format that makes them easier to look up in dictionaries. But do you know how hard it is to translate a big arse poster hand scribbled, often by people who themselves weren't often totally literate, to examine the microhistorical foot print of just one or two people travelling around the country?
So I feel you.
So, you'd be one bad bus crash from being the world's premier assyriologist? Hmmm...
That's twisted, dude.
