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A Legendary Scientist Sounds Off on the Trouble with STEM

29 points| clebio | 6 years ago |chronicle.com

14 comments

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failrate|6 years ago

The way I approach STEM with my own child is not preaenting him with a series of challenges but as a set of tools and opportunities.

I do expect to encourage him to engage in competitions like science fairs and Math Olympics, but my experience with those is that they are fun, yield good discipline, and the team activities are just as good at developing team skills as any sport.

carapace|6 years ago

"Interview with E. O. Wilson" might be a better title here.

Noumenon72|6 years ago

If your goal was for 1% as many people to click on it. STEM is a cultural marker and people want to know if it will go up or down in status. Both for their own status and to know if it will help their kids. "Interview with E.O. Wilson" only attracts people who are interested in raising or lowering the status of evolutionary biology, which is much smaller because most people know they will get in trouble if they pick the wrong side.

bsenftner|6 years ago

I've always felt STEM as yet another compartmentalization of people that create from the business side that manages to own all of the profits from said object/process the STEMs create. A business education is essential to anyone with larger than a job ambitions, so why is an MBA level education not a critical component of a STEM education? Seem like a critical oversight, or intentional for some odd valued reason.

781|6 years ago

> A business education is essential to anyone with larger than a job ambitions

Funny how many billionaires are out-there without an MBA.

> Of the top 100 people listed by Forbes as the world’s richest, a grand total of 16 have MBAs. The highest-ranking MBA is Michael Bloomberg at number 11

https://www.businessbecause.com/news/making-the-headlines/52...

kurthr|6 years ago

Science Technology Engineering and Math aren't just for business, but I think you mean that the business managers end up owning their product?

MBAs seem mostly centered on the US (some in Europe, but much less in Asia) business experience. I haven't noticed that it's made the US much more successful, but it is important to have the MBA tool set to fairly get money out of the US banking/venture system.

In other places the business might hire a CFO to do the money-work rather than making them CEO or requiring it of your VPs. So although an MBA might be useful in many business contexts (especially in the US), I don't think id make it part of STEMB.

soundness-mess|6 years ago

You don't need to understand business to be an engineer, meaning you can fix something an engineer can be expected to without knowing a damn thing about business.

Also, business is just not interesting for some people. I am one of them and I'm glad I wasn't made to agree with something I don't believe in, in order to be what I do believe in.