I can't decide if marketing concepts consist of the same thing repeated over and over again, or if they are a deadly concoction of mind-numbing buzzwords, pseudo-psychology, and pop-culture neurology. Every time I try to read something from these notes, I literally feel like someone is firing ion cannons through my cranium. The whole time I'm thinking "Kill me now. Kill me." This eventually evolves into "Kill them. Kill them." and I usually give up reading around here.
Today, I managed to cover everything that I need to know about it. By "cover", I mean that I glanced briefly through them without actually understanding anything. The reason for this is that not a lot of it makes sense. There are equations without quantities. There are names for things that are complete misnomers. I came across this exact sentence: They are just buying more for value items. What does that even mean? Are they buying more value for their items? Are they buying items that have more value? Are they buying value, that by some logical paradox contains more items?
This wouldn't have bothered me as much as the rest of the general stuff, but that sentence appeared twice.
Anyway, here is why we don't need to study marketing, and why there is absolutely nothing that warrants a second module of it next semester:
One. There are three major groups of people studying in this course. On the more positive end of the spectrum, there are those who hope to further their studies, and perhaps eventually get tenure at a university or join the industry as a researcher. Just next to these people are the ones who have a mild interest in the subject, but would rather be technical experts rather than intellectuals. Then, there are the people who have no future whatsoever in the field of science, and are going to attempt to get an arts degree once they graduate.
None of these people are going to benefit from a dry, morale-crushing module such as this. Information Technology, I can understand. We all use computers, and knowing the language of databases is actually a good thing. Communications skills, makes me want to stab myself. But at least there are a number of things that you can learn from there. Marketing does not have such obvious benefits. All that marketing does, is make people like me a lot more motivated to study the other modules in an effort at procrastinating from marketing.
I have decided not to give a damn about this module. I am fairly confident in my ability to come up with things that look and sound professional, when they are in fact disguising a rickety network of loosely-joined ideas. Thus, I will instead focus my efforts on science, which actually makes sense to me.
I really like how my science modules are beginning to overlap in content. It just shows how applicable these fields are to each other. Genetic engineering has uses that extend all the way from drug screening to improving the production of metabolites. The techniques used in cell culture are even more important. This is deeply satisfying. Another reason that I am liking this is that the actual time spent studying is greatly reduced.
Science all fits together. People usually just imagine science as a collection of great pillars, one for each major branch of science, and with minimal connections between them. This simply isn't true. Science is a paint, and mathematics is the canvas. The paintbrush, logic. Science is organic. Each field occupies a space, but this space is not always exclusive to one topic. Each pixel of information pulses and dilates, merging with other fields. Events that occur on one "end" of the painting set into motion waves and ripples, changing the face of knowledge.
This somehow reminds me of an episode of Numb3rs where there was a device that could recreate the images shown on an LCD screen based on the radiation patterns emitted. It sounds like it could be possible. All we'd need is a really high-resolution scanner, and some kind of algorithm to deal with the radiation that has already passed through the head of the person using the screen.
-Joe