How do I deal with two parents who don't see the utility of science and mathematics while pursuing an education in science and math (while depending on their income to fund my tuition?). They come from a blue-collar background and don't think learning arcane symbols has anything to do with innovation or make big bucks in today's world.
My parents wish for me to go off to the industry ASAP or do some freelance or make an app that get them rich quick. I want to pursuit further education beyond that of a bachelor degree.
In the summertime I am preparing for some course work for next semester, but they keep on telling me that I should sign up for some fitness class or make money. I appreciate their viewpoint, but I can't bring myself to balance between studying and concentrating on course work while doing things that are a waste of time.
What should I do?
Answer
If the goal of your parents for you really is that you become the next Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin, or Mark Zuckerberg, then letting you go to graduate studies and letting you hang with all the other smart people is certainly more useful than telling you to "start getting rich now". This is akin to wanting to raise an Olympian athlete, and, rather than making him train, shouting at him that he needs to run faster right now. Of course the assumption that any specific person will break through and get super-rich is unrealistic to the point of being ridiculous, but obviously it will be hard to convince your parents of that (at least short-term), so you may need to work with what you got.
While the idea of Nox is generally useful (find statistics and show them), it sounds like your parents may be the type for which statistics are too abstract and would probably not work very well. Rather, you can try convincing them with anecdotes of well-educated people who "made it" (became rich, to use the terminology of the question). Of those there are many - opposite to popular opinion, most startup founders etc. are not random people off the streets who were selling sandwiches before breaking through. Rather, most greatly successful ideas and companies have been developed by people with degrees from top universities in, yes, math and science. There is a reason why Silicon Valley is in the Bay Area, and it's likely not the weather.
Concrete examples include:
- The company Google sprung out of a research project by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two Stanford graduate students. Sergey is now the 18th-richest person in the world.
- Facebook was not a research project, but (at least so the story goes) the original ideas have been developed by Mark Zuckerberg in a dormitory in Harvard in discussion with other students in breaks between computer science classes.
- Bill Gates never finished, but even the founder and long-time CEO of Microsoft was in Harvard for some time. Incidentally, there he met Steve Ballmer, who became CEO of Microsoft after Gates - another case of a very wealthy and important person who happens to have great education.
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