Sporting News: The 20 Smartest Athletes in Sports

gtzulu said:
I never said the word "intellectual", and I never said that law was less "intellectual" a field than engineering. Of course engineering is applied science.

Are you trying to say that law is for smarter people and that engineering is for dumber people? If so, that's a pretty immature viewpoint. Most people know that the various fields of the sciences are as hard as one wants to make them. An incredible engineer is probably smarter than an average lawyer; an incredible lawyer is probably smarter than an average engineer.

Again, the only point I'm trying to make is that Georgia Tech is an ENGINEERING school and as such the idealized, model Tech student would aspire to be an ENGINEER. There's nothing wrong with taking another path... it's just like living in ancient Sparta and opting to be a great philosopher instead of a great warrior. (The great warrior is the model Spartan.)
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Get the stick out of your ass. Law takes a different skill set than engineering, much, much more skill in humanities-type stuff. Bedford is helping himself a lot in this area by reading a real book like Paradise Lost every week.

A person is as smart as they are, whatever they do. Engineers aren't innately "smarter" than lawyers, or vice versa. There's just a set of trade-offs between the two professions, both in terms of skills and lifestyle.

I'm also pretty sure he wants to work in IP law or some other engineering-related field. His engineering degree will be very valuable in those fields, so it's not like he's doing something completely unrelated like Criminal Law.
 
BuzzCzar said:
i guess, sort of, i am saying that. a better wording would be that Law is for more abstract thinkers while engineering is for persons that like a practical application.
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The guy who preaches that you shouldn't label a group of people is doing it himself. Shocker.

I completely disagree with you on this, BTW. I prefer to judge on a person-by-person basis. Some of the nerdiest engineers I have met were very abstract thinkers, great artists, and were much more right brained than LLC people.
 
andrew said:
A guy who plays Division 1 football while simultaneously getting a degree in Aerospace Engineering isn't the "ideal" Tech student athlete? WTF? How do you get more ideal than making the all-conference team while taking the hardest major on campus?
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You want to be an engineer and not a lawyer.

I think my analogy to ancient Sparta is apt. You would be more the model Spartan if you aspired to be a great warrior than if you aspired to be a great philosopher.
 
gtzulu said:
You want to be an engineer and not a lawyer.

I think my analogy to ancient Sparta is apt. You would be more the model Spartan if you aspired to be a great warrior than if you aspired to be a great philosopher.
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A lot of our most successful grads are not engineers. Think of how many management majors that have gone on to have amazing careers. Shop at wal mart lately?

This notion of an "ideal" student athlete that you are putting forward is just absurd. GT excells in many fields.
 
For the record, I want to go to law school, because, surprisingly, I'd like to get a job that pays very very well. Don't the most successful engineers go into management? Are they sellouts?
 
bwolff said:
A lot of our most successful grads are not engineers. Think of how many management majors that have gone on to have amazing careers. Shop at wal mart lately?

This notion of an "ideal" student athlete that you are putting forward is just absurd. GT excells in many fields.
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I think my point is being misunderstood. I'm not saying that a non-engineering career is less valuable or less important. I'm just saying that Georgia Tech is about engineering, so the model Tech student pursues engineering as a career. I enjoy engineering work and pursue engineering as a career as the majority of other Tech students/grads do. It is hard to look to someone who wants to be a lawyer as our Tech-student exemplar.
 
Allen Koholic said:
Don't the most successful engineers go into management? Are they sellouts?
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Depends on how you measure success. And I don't think anyone is a sellout so long as they do what they enjoy. To me, being successful is doing what you enjoy and being compensated well enough to do it.

I started off with the BS route and worked at a nuclear power plant for a while as a reactor engineer before realizing that the PhD route would be better for me. I didn't want to go the management route because I hate meetings, and managers have to go to lots of meetings. I thought of patent law, but after shadowing a few patent attorneys, I quickly realized that I would rather do manual labor for cheap than patent law for good pay.

After recently getting my PhD, I am working at a national lab as a research scientist. I wouldn't trade a research job like I have for the world. It's a very low stress environment (reminds you of college ... jeans and t-shirt are typical dress, but I wear a polo and khakis; you don't have set hours, come and go as you please; and my boss could care less what I'm doing so long as I'm getting work done by the deadline), I live in a relatively low cost of living, low crime city full of very friendly people, and I'm compensated at a great rate with great health insurance, vision insurance, dental insurance, a pension plan, 2+ weeks paid vacation, 10 personal days a year, 8 sick days a year, and a 401k. Will I be making more than $200k per year in 2010 money at any time in my career? Probably not, but I will be making six figures in 2010 money for the majority of my career, and that's more than I could ever want. Not to mention, most people stay working here until they are at least 70 because it's fun. My boss is 71.

Everyone defines success differently. For me, it's getting the optimal job. And low stress, above average pay, in a crime free, low cost of living city is optimum. Waking up and enjoying your drive to work because you can't wait to begin work is the best thing about my job. Now that it's CFB season, I don't get much work done, but it's the beginning of the FY, so there are no deadlines right now :)
 
Allen Koholic said:
For the record, I want to go to law school, because, surprisingly, I'd like to get a job that pays very very well. Don't the most successful engineers go into management? Are they sellouts?
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Really depends on the type of management they do. If they're leading engineering teams, making engineering decisions, that's just a higher lever of engineering. If they're just managing personnel and doing businessy things, yeah, they probably are sell-outs.

By the way, some people have objectives in life besides the soulless/meaningless pursuit of $$$. Just because a job makes more money doesn't mean it's the smarter choice.
 
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