I want to highlight some underrated aspects of a career in the STEM disciplines.

When a person decides to study science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), they are embarking on a journey.

Yes, they will gain concrete, employable skills along the way.

Yes, they will most likely find decent jobs with good salaries.

But they will also have opportunities to enrich their lives in numerous other ways. If they so choose, a career in STEM can be the adventure of a lifetime.

In this post I will avoid obnoxious stereotypes:

  • The common STEM student humble-brag about how their schoolwork is harder than everyone else’s
  • Cliches about the unemployability of non-STEM students

My own journey

Before I begin, a quick sketch of my own path through STEM.

In college I started in mechanical engineering, but switched to physics after 1.5 years. Then, after another 1.5 years I switched to mathematics. Despite all this switching around, I managed to get my BS in mathematics after a total of 4.5 years of college.

A couple years later, I went to grad school for computer science. My PhD research focuses on computational biology. I aim to graduate by the end of 2022.

I wouldn’t recommend wandering through the disciplines in this way—specialization has its advantages. But it has been a stimulating journey, and I’ve picked up a diverse set of principles and insights. I feel like I have something to say about it.

Contact with reality

STEM fields are unique in that they are held to account by the universe itself. Their products must withstand the rigors of an unforgiving objective reality that exists independent of human wishes. Notions of success and failure, worth and worthlessness, are well-defined.

  • A theorem must follow from its axioms, or it is false.
  • A theory must agree with experiment, or it is false.
  • A system must carry out its intended function, or it is useless.

The successes are hard-won, but have lasting value.

These rigors can shape a person, if they rise to the challenge. The person who contends with objective reality has the opportunity to learn lessons from it. They may develop the maturity and character that come from doing difficult things. They may learn to appreciate the work required to actually know something.

This “contact with reality” that I’ve described has some correspondence to the idea of “purity” in this classic XKCD.

I would put it this way: the purity of a field results from the rigorousness of its methods.

Mental models

A STEM education populates a person’s mind with cognitive tools that can serve them throughout their life.

The Farnam Street blog refers to these tools as “mental models,” and does a great job describing their value1. Mental models inform a person’s decision-making in life, business, finance, politics, love, etc.

A person who studies the STEM disciplines is uniquely positioned to collect a rich, expressive set of models and incorporate them deeply into their thinking.

Here are some of my favorites:

For example, a person could use the Ising model to think about culture in an organization. If people in an organization are analogous to atoms, and a cultural mindset is like atomic spin, then organizations tend to encourage people to share a single mindset. Individuals who depart from that mindset are penalized; however, if a sufficient number adopt a different mindset then that may cause the remainder to also adopt that mindset. Increasing the temperature may also increase the probability of such a change—this may be analogous to some external disruption. I could flesh out this analogy further, but I think you get the idea.

A lifetime of curiosity and learning

Math, science, and engineering are open-ended fields of inquiry. They always have frontiers to push. There’s always some new concept or skill to learn, and the internet makes it easier than ever to do so.

In fact, from an employment standpoint, continually acquiring new skills is necessary for staying competitive over a decades-long career.

This is the perfect setting for a curious person. If you play your cards right, you will never be bored.

I’m practically never bored. I’m curious about too many topics in computer science, math, and physics for that to ever happen. Even if I were stranded on a desert island, I’d probably spend a lot of time scratching in the sand and puzzling over algorithms or thermodynamics or quantum mechanics (or any of the other myriad topics I only partially understand).

TODO

Gaps and weaknesses in a STEM education

The asymmetry of STEM/liberal arts for work/leisure

\( \blacksquare\)

 

  1. though Farnam Street’s coverage of specific mental models has an MBA-ish glibness or superficiality to it. ↩