A 17-year-old polo champion is visiting us from Argentina and today was my day to give her the grand tour of Boston. Naturally the MIT campus was on our agenda. MIT’s new president, Susan Hockfield, rather than doing something interesting like starting a medical school, has made her first public action beating up on Larry Summers for his musings on why there aren’t an equal number of women and men in super nerdy academic jobs. Hockfield says that “The question we must ask as a society is not ‘can women excel in math, science and engineering?’ but ‘how can we encourage more women with exceptional abilities to pursue careers in these fields?’” I felt proud to be doing my share. I had brought a 17-year-old girl who can do anything she wants to with her life onto the MIT campus to be inspired. What happened? Just downstairs from Hockfield’s office we ran into a woman who recently completed a Ph.D. in Aero/Astro, probably the most rigorous engineering department at MIT. What did the woman engineer say to the 17-year-old? “I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get any job at all. There are only about 10 universities that hire people in my area and the last one to have a job opening had more than 800 applicants.”
[Spending the day with a young person is fraught with potential for humiliation. She looked at my collection of 2000 LP records and asked “What are those?” When I explained that they were records, she asked “What are records?” It is too bad that the Supreme Court won’t let us execute 17-year-olds anymore…]
What are records indeed! I couldn’t resist remembering Robert Kerns from Symbolics when I read your comment. He had the office across from mine on Vassar Street and it was stacked floor to ceiling with vinyl pillars!
Ah, it’s so nice to hear about new champions in the world who aren’t quite burdened with everything we know about the world! Perhaps, they will be able to create better solutions to some of the problems we’ve introduced into the world. (By we … I mean collectively!)
Hah, that’s hilarious about the records. I find that surprising, since vinyl has been finding a resurgence of sorts due to its popularity with DJs in rave and hip hop culture. I guess it wouldn’t have helped her experience if you told her how impossibly un-hip she was for not knowing about vinyl (not that she would have believed you — never trust anyone over 30, you know).
Next time call them “an early form of audio compression, just like MP3”, indeed, before their invention, before their invention musical entertainment required a big stage.
Hi Phil
Why are you the only one pointing out that, just maybe, women are avoiding PhD’s in engineering because they’re smart enough to know that it’s an extremely difficult path with a poor payout. The mainstream media has a huge blind spot here – they never question whether it would be a good idea to get a PhD in the sciences in the first place. Medical, law, or business degrees (and women are doing the first two in droves) take less time, are a bit easier from start to finish, and pay more (for those few people disagree with the easier part, take a look at the dropout rate for an elite Business, Law, or Medicine program. Then take a look at the percentage of sci/eng Ph.D’s at MIT, Stanford, or Berkeley who don’t finish. Then think about the undergraduate coursework you have to survive before you can even apply to those programs).
By the way, I still think an undergraduate degree in engineering is fiscally sound decision, especially if you follow it up with an MBA. It’s not quite as straightforward as law or medicine, but nothing to steer people away from. And it’s easy enough to recover from a Masters in engineering (I know this from personal experience).
Oh yeah – every time I write a comment like this, I want to reiterate that as an engineering PhD dropout myself, I am incredibly impressed with the people who are able to understand and push the boundaries of these fields on a deep level. I just think that they’re getting a raw deal, and as long as that’s true, it’s stupid to act like we’re confused about why women, or even men for that matter, are avoiding it.
I’m not Phil, but I guess the mainstream media has such a blind spot because they/we still want to be under the delusion of living in a society where hard work and intelligence is rewarded, instead of one where parasites of different kinds (lawyers, MBAs, Donald Trump, etc.) are the ones actually getting the best deal. It’s one of those times when the values that everybody claims to be important conflict with the values that people actually follow in real life.
Philip, your record collection is *awesome* and I would happily trade in the dreams and ambitions of 200 PhDs just for the “B” section.
why did you want to execute her? I don’t get it. Seriously, I don’t.
I think its hard to believe 17 year olds interested in music don’t know what records are. Sure, I could see 17 year olds who don’t frequently listen to music not knowing. But serious music listeners must know what a vinyl record is.
Any used CD store worth its mustard seeds would also carry records. And trendy places like Restoration Hardware have starting selling old school record players. And modern Hipsters have lots of records.
Maybe the women are smarter in their choice of careers. How much did Carly Fiorina get for ruining first Lucent then HP? And how many men under her command would have been summarily fired for designing a calculator or keyboard as clumsy as her management? Yet she walked away with millions upon millions. Who looks dumb in math now?
Reminds me of the time I told my then 10 year old daughter, “you sound like a broken record” and she gave me a dumb look and asked “what does that mean?”