I’ll just come out and say that there’s definitely a strong lack of analytical/computational talent among students in the earth and planetary sciences (perhaps partially owing to stereotypes of students in these fields, which contributes to the quality of undergrad majors in these fields outside of MIT/Caltech), and that these fields could provide extremely useful (and new) intellectual frameworks. Demand for this type of talent in the earth/planetary sciences is definitely exploding, as you can read in http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v473/n7346/full/nj7346-243a.html
(I’m secretly hoping that I’m not ruining my grad school chances by saying this—since I’ve mentioned this on several forums already!)
Also—I believe the same is true for microbiology. I’m not especially impressed with the microbiology students I know (and again, unless you’re at MIT/Caltech, I would probably major in something else first), but it is an area with massive potential for breakthroughs (especially since people are prone to systematically underestimating the net contribution of microbes) - and we’re still making breakthrough discoveries in the last year.
I’ll just come out and say that there’s definitely a strong lack of analytical/computational talent among students in the earth and planetary sciences (perhaps partially owing to stereotypes of students in these fields, which contributes to the quality of undergrad majors in these fields outside of MIT/Caltech), and that these fields could provide extremely useful (and new) intellectual frameworks. Demand for this type of talent in the earth/planetary sciences is definitely exploding, as you can read in http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v473/n7346/full/nj7346-243a.html
(I’m secretly hoping that I’m not ruining my grad school chances by saying this—since I’ve mentioned this on several forums already!)
Also—I believe the same is true for microbiology. I’m not especially impressed with the microbiology students I know (and again, unless you’re at MIT/Caltech, I would probably major in something else first), but it is an area with massive potential for breakthroughs (especially since people are prone to systematically underestimating the net contribution of microbes) - and we’re still making breakthrough discoveries in the last year.