KATE: If I had a kid going into undergrad right now, I would encourage them to major in whatever it is you are interested in and want to do, and maybe minor in one of those practical things, that type of thing to get a little bit more to make that jump [from academia to industry] easier potentially for them. Especially since I don't know what it's like to get an undergrad degree and then go get a job, but absolutely still value that liberal arts, humanities education piece.
JOSHUA: So instead of trying to teach Shakespeare for employability, instead of reframing the purpose of a humanities education with employability as the higher goal, I wonder if the more traditional model still holds. And it's just a matter of in the junior or senior year finding some of these more practical pathways.
Yes, certainly. Especially since that kind of experience, and the kind of contextual thinking about it that emerged in your conversation with Kate, honors both the academic and the business/industry/career sides. If college/university is your thing, your path, use it it to freely study what you like. Don't subjugate your native educational and personal interests to job-and-career-based justifications that are nothing but spurious propaganda that insults both realms. As you said, let, e.g., the humanities just be the humanities. If your academic interests fall into areas that have been traditionally considered impractical or not applicable to any job world besides academia, and if you think academia might not be your employment future, deliberately get that internship (or "internship") experience to address and honor the practical side of things while still allowing your intellectual and academic interest free rein. None of us can tell, especially these days, how that might all come together at some point in unforeseen harmonious ways. As I see it, taking this approach only increases the whole-life surface area upon which serendipity can manifest itself.
"None of us can tell, especially these days, how that might all come together at some point in unforeseen harmonious ways."
Exactly. I'm reminded of a dubious directive from a dean, who charged my department with brainstorming how we might anticipate the needs of current third graders when they reached college age. That was before COVID and before ChatGPT. I think if the world has taught us anything in the past 2-3 years, it's that adaptability is the long-term skill, not sunk costs in predetermined pathways.
Someone might have said a few years ago that the exploding demand for UX researchers might justify an undergraduate degree in that field. But now the market for UX roles has completely tanked. You can't map top-heavy credentialing systems onto a marketplace that has boom/bust cycles. And I actually think there will always be some healthy antipathy between the arts/humanities and that boom/bust marketplace. How to build resilient and flexible bridges between the two worlds is a different level of the conversation.
Well said on all counts, including the part about the endurance of a healthy antipathy between the arts/humanities and the marketplace. As we both know, and as I know your entire readership knows, the liberal arts function of inculcating a broadened mind and deepened mental/moral character and sensibility naturally plays into questioning the axioms and assumptions that underlie and drive other things, including economic and financial systems and cultures. The Socratic gadfly as intellectual and spiritual archetype.
Despite some of my longstanding dystopian proclivities when it comes to assessing current cultural conditions and projecting future ones, I think what Sertillanges said about the value of ostensibly superfluous knowledge that one has gained through study, but that has not found its way to direct use or expression in one's work, is applicable:
"Even if one does not use everything that one has learned, the accumulated knowledge gives a hidden resonance to one's words, and this fulness has for its reward the confidence it inspires. It is a great secret to know how to give radiance to an idea by means of its twilight background. It is a further secret to preserve its power of convergence in spite of its radiating quality."
When I consider this winsome point, I'm moved to imagine a diffuse informal guild of former academics moving through the non-academic marketplace and exerting a wholesomely leavening and deepening influence simply by virtue of their presence and its radiant twilight background of liberal learning.
This:
KATE: If I had a kid going into undergrad right now, I would encourage them to major in whatever it is you are interested in and want to do, and maybe minor in one of those practical things, that type of thing to get a little bit more to make that jump [from academia to industry] easier potentially for them. Especially since I don't know what it's like to get an undergrad degree and then go get a job, but absolutely still value that liberal arts, humanities education piece.
JOSHUA: So instead of trying to teach Shakespeare for employability, instead of reframing the purpose of a humanities education with employability as the higher goal, I wonder if the more traditional model still holds. And it's just a matter of in the junior or senior year finding some of these more practical pathways.
That. ↑↑↑
Thanks, Matt. The internship idea passes the sniff test for you, too? :)
Yes, certainly. Especially since that kind of experience, and the kind of contextual thinking about it that emerged in your conversation with Kate, honors both the academic and the business/industry/career sides. If college/university is your thing, your path, use it it to freely study what you like. Don't subjugate your native educational and personal interests to job-and-career-based justifications that are nothing but spurious propaganda that insults both realms. As you said, let, e.g., the humanities just be the humanities. If your academic interests fall into areas that have been traditionally considered impractical or not applicable to any job world besides academia, and if you think academia might not be your employment future, deliberately get that internship (or "internship") experience to address and honor the practical side of things while still allowing your intellectual and academic interest free rein. None of us can tell, especially these days, how that might all come together at some point in unforeseen harmonious ways. As I see it, taking this approach only increases the whole-life surface area upon which serendipity can manifest itself.
"None of us can tell, especially these days, how that might all come together at some point in unforeseen harmonious ways."
Exactly. I'm reminded of a dubious directive from a dean, who charged my department with brainstorming how we might anticipate the needs of current third graders when they reached college age. That was before COVID and before ChatGPT. I think if the world has taught us anything in the past 2-3 years, it's that adaptability is the long-term skill, not sunk costs in predetermined pathways.
Someone might have said a few years ago that the exploding demand for UX researchers might justify an undergraduate degree in that field. But now the market for UX roles has completely tanked. You can't map top-heavy credentialing systems onto a marketplace that has boom/bust cycles. And I actually think there will always be some healthy antipathy between the arts/humanities and that boom/bust marketplace. How to build resilient and flexible bridges between the two worlds is a different level of the conversation.
Well said on all counts, including the part about the endurance of a healthy antipathy between the arts/humanities and the marketplace. As we both know, and as I know your entire readership knows, the liberal arts function of inculcating a broadened mind and deepened mental/moral character and sensibility naturally plays into questioning the axioms and assumptions that underlie and drive other things, including economic and financial systems and cultures. The Socratic gadfly as intellectual and spiritual archetype.
Despite some of my longstanding dystopian proclivities when it comes to assessing current cultural conditions and projecting future ones, I think what Sertillanges said about the value of ostensibly superfluous knowledge that one has gained through study, but that has not found its way to direct use or expression in one's work, is applicable:
"Even if one does not use everything that one has learned, the accumulated knowledge gives a hidden resonance to one's words, and this fulness has for its reward the confidence it inspires. It is a great secret to know how to give radiance to an idea by means of its twilight background. It is a further secret to preserve its power of convergence in spite of its radiating quality."
When I consider this winsome point, I'm moved to imagine a diffuse informal guild of former academics moving through the non-academic marketplace and exerting a wholesomely leavening and deepening influence simply by virtue of their presence and its radiant twilight background of liberal learning.