Advice to prospective undergrads who want to make the world a better place

Katja Grace quotes her friend Katla's "advice to aspiring undergraduates" on her blog Meteuphoric (which is definitely worth bookmarking):

Don’t use the apparent altruism of a course or degree as a strong sign of its usefulness for the world. Apparently altruistic courses are the ones concerned with climate change or poverty or species extinctions or social stigma or genocide or so on. Many people are apparently altruistic as an excuse for not doing difficult courses, and the coursework will be designed accordingly. Part of designing coursework for people who aren’t up to difficult courses is understanding that they do not need tools for solving important problems in the world, but rather for getting a job at all.

Also, courses about problems such as climate change or third world development naturally will not include much material on how to solve these problems, as they have not been solved. Instead you and your ‘altruistic’ acquaintances will probably have to discuss how to solve them yourselves, or if your teacher recognises that you are not up to this, to learn to describe how difficult and complex they are. On the upside, solving the problems will be easy because you are probably too ignorant to constrain them much. On the downside, your solutions will not improve the world.