question for college educated people older than 25: if you had it to do over again, and you could go back to school and pursue a career in academia, what field or fields would you go into to have the greatest positive impact (from a Marxist’s point of view), which field would you choose? assuming you can start from the very beginning, i.e., get a new bachelors before moving into a masters and a phd
question for the zoomers: if you could study anything at university without having to worry about whether or not you could make a decent living afterwards, with a view to making the world less shit, what would you study and why?
long story short, my parents have come into some money and i may have this opportunity and i want to choose my field of study wisely. when i went to college at 18 i double majored in french (good choice bc i love languages and the humanities in general, and it expanded my worldview outside of amerikkka) and business (bad choice bc lmao) and i don’t want to make the same mistake again. currently i’m thinking history because a) i’ve always loved history, from literally as long as i can remember and b) history is a weapon and i want to use it to behead the capitalists. im also interested in international relations, but only from a based point of view
note that if i do go back to school, it will be somewhere in europe, bc fuck paying for a university education in america lol worst mistake of my life
basically what i’m saying is, from the ivory tower of academia i will rain hellfire on the upper class until they are utterly destroyed, or i will die trying. tell me what to study in order to accomplish this
Death to America
I'm coming to something of a personal Renaissance of what "greatest positive impact" means. There are things like environmental sustainability which are so clearly very positive. There's also psychology that could help unwrench horrible
that affect society. There's law to stand up to oil companies in court. There's medicine to help the sick. English to change the culture. Biochemical engineering to heal the lame. Neuroscience to learn about ourselves. Zoology to help animals. Plenty of majors get downplayed in importance. Plenty of the humanities are necessary when we're stuck in the ugliest skyscrapers and argue with thought terminating cliches.
Even if your goal is that you want to help, encouragingly, that doesn't make you unique. Your Marxist perspective might, but not the desire for a better tomorrow. This is to say that it still matters what you find interesting. Not all majors are created equal. It might be harder to use IT for good, but with contributions to FOSS not impossible. If you went HAM in making sure Unity felt pain because they ditched their place in the market and Gadot had a free Unity conversion tool, that would send a shiver down a capitalist's spine.
As much as I've seen in the adrenochrome factory, seeing my friends progress in their careers, and my work at the CIA, it matters less what you study and more how you make use of it. A lot of degrees can get you a 9 to 5 at an office, but it's possible™️ to think outside the box and use what you learned in school (and see it crumble and then learn how to repeatedly use bits and pieces of it).
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I don't know why you'd want to know. It's all pretty boring and heady. You can already check out most of what we do at c/announcements and the modlog. I do a little bit behind the scenes checking for posters that are too based to inject them with lib takes and nanochips. Outside of that, I've been doing a passion project to check in on posters who get banned for reactionary/misogyny/racist posts to see whether they want to take free trips to South America to help build democracy.