The Useless College Degree

or if you think you "didn't get anything" out of studying english--go spend some time in a job mostly NOT populated by college grads. think about how and why you are different.

I have had a job like this, and the difference is basically that I lucked out and got to spend 4 years studying random interesting shit, while they didn't get a break from working. I wouldn't say we were very different in terms of our capacities or abilities though, and in terms of cultural literacy, mine is limited in its on ways.

it just made the world seem a lot bigger once I was there

yes yes this is a big deal! being a perpetual student nowadays, i still have "wow anthropology is so cool" moments almost every day for exactly this reason.

Real question: For all of you who got an English degree, what did you end up doing? Did you go to grad school? What (serious) advice would you give to someone who just graduated with an English degree? (Besides, you know, freak out.)

― kshighway1, Monday, October 12, 2009 11:43 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

lol i am in medical school

I did English for undergrad and now I make books. Admittedly, almost nothing of what I learned in the English prog bears any resemblance to what I do. You don't rly have to know shit about books, reading, or the English language to produce the things.

go spend some time in a job mostly NOT populated by college grads. think about how and why you are different.

I'm basically the only person that I work with or see socially on a regular basis who ONLY has a lowly Bachelor's degree - everyone else I know has a PhD or at least a Master's (the art and library people). It also feels strange at times but that might be me projecting a lot.

Real question: For all of you who got an English degree, what did you end up doing? Did you go to grad school? What (serious) advice would you give to someone who just graduated with an English degree? (Besides, you know, freak out.)

I got an English degree. I am a maths teacher, hopefully leaving soon to start own business. The advise I would give is "think about what you really like doing, which someone might conceivably pay you to do, and then build the best possible CV in order to do it" - that sounds totally obvious obv but most ppl don't.

When I started my English degree, I thought I would be a high school teacher. When I finished, I thought I would be a college professor. But somewhere along the line, I had become interested in cultural and media studies and other subjects that English departments were certainly receptive to but not founded upon, and even though I took the GRE Subject Test in English six months after I graduated, I wasn't sure I really wanted to study literature any more. And then, the longer I was out of school, the more insular the academic world seemed to me in general. I slowly began to realize, too, that smart people and interesting work were not confined to the academy, as I naively thought while I was there.

So now I'm a copy editor at an encyclopedia company. When I first started working in publishing, right after college, I was really just looking for a job that my English degree would qualify me for. And for most of my 20s, I approached my job merely as something that paid the bills while I pursued other activities (music, writing, arts management) on the side. But in the last couple of years, I've had some opportunities that have allowed me to feel more invested in my work and see it more as a career. I'm not teaching or analyzing texts, but I am doing research and occasionally writing articles, which I feel like my college education prepared me for.

Btw, I think the reason why people think English degrees are useless is that there are so few jobs that require the specific knowledge gained from the degree. Most likely, you're never going to need to be able to interpret the end of Kate Chopin's The Awakening after college, in the way that doctors or chemists or computer scientists will apply what they learned in school. But there are lots of jobs, from journalism to advertising to development, that require a skill set that the English major possesses: an ability to write well and to think critically.

But there are lots of jobs, from journalism to advertising to development, that require a skill set that the English major possesses: an ability to write well and to think critically.

OTM. this is kind of the whole point of a liberal arts degree - you get a basic set of communication/writing/critical thinking skills. it doesn't really have much to do w/ the content of the degree at all. rather, having a liberal arts degree just communicates to employers that you have a basic competency and set of communications skills that would allow you to do the job

btw i feel like we had almost this exact conversation maybe 6 months to a year ago on ilx?

haha yes:

also, college is not a trade school - sure, a philosophy or whatever degree is 'useless' in the sense that there are no jobs for philosophers w/ just a BA, but that's the same for just about any undergraduate major besides business, etc.

i think a liberal arts/sciences undergraduate degree is useful b/c it basically communicates that you have a basic competency in language, problem-solving, organizational and communication skills. whether or not that you really have those skills might vary, but in the job market that's basically what a BA does.

― mark cl, Monday, April 27, 2009 2:28 PM (5 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is why what you major is often irrelevent - w/ one exception, when i applied for jobs no one cared that my degree was in philosophy or what my knowledge was in that field - all they cared about was that i could demonstrate those basic problem-solving, communication, and quick-learning skills that a liberal arts degree can give you

― mark cl, Monday, April 27, 2009 2:30 PM (5 months ago) Bookmark

seriously dudez fuck college

drew had this really good post:

College is an institution and so are most workplace environments, and in a brutally reductive sense, undergraduate college education is basically just a "can you move more or less capably through an institution?" test. it's a pre-requisite not in the sense that it guarantees the knowledge of discipline x or y (though it is partially that)- it is also meant to just show that this person knows how to schedule themselves, meet demands, jump through hoops, be reasonably informed and articulate, not alienate or wildly infuriate others, not get tossed out for plagiarism or harassment or some other malfeasance, etc.- it is a test of one's capacity to function inside an institution, and it is not surprising that other institutions would want to see that you are already capable of being in one. So, again, it's not "sufficient", but many employers it is still "necessary" because it presumably demonstrates a set of personal qualities (ambition, work ethic, focus). The unfair fact is that lots of preparatory tutoring, smaller-class-size high school education, and lots of money and lots of grade inflation have reduced the value of this signifier, but that hasn't actually meant that it's not still necessary-yet-not-sufficient on the other side.

― Neotropical pygmy squirrel, Monday, April 27, 2009 2:39 PM (5 months ago) Bookmark

yeah except sometimes employers don't care about your skill set, or your capability, in general. they want to see that you've performed EXACTLY that job before, even at the entry level a lot of the time, or they think you're not committed or will require too much training or something.

yea, i think esp w/ undergrad internships being more and more common, there's definitely a degree to which employers expect you to have certain office skills that you wouldn't necessarily get unless you've worked before

i am also pretty cynical about internships though. i had a couple in college and they gave me way more responsibility and interesting work than my post-college jobs, but they didn't really "count" because they were internships, not long-term employment. hell, my part time receptionist job throughout college didn't even qualify me for admin assistant callbacks. but again, maybe this is just an "i/my timing/location sucked" issue, and this is generally not the case.

(sorry for shitting on this thread with "it is impossible to get a job" posts guys. i'll stop now.)

table yr posts bear the wisdom of a great human.

that might be the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me on ilx. thx.

(and yes, maria, it is terribly hard to get jobs. i was fired from one a few months out of college, and so decided to apply to grad school b/c i knew i could get lots of money, and that i would at least get to TA some classes, thus bringing me closer to teaching people...somewhere...)

Just chiming in to say I really appreciate the interesting back and forth we've got going on here. Thanks, guys.

hoosless college drgree

yr welcome. I forget sometimes that I've done more or less what I wanted (though that's sometimes pretty foggy) and its good to see ppl judging themselves on their own terms. Love all my friends doing post grad stuff but am glad to be elsewhere right now, even w/out work.

I just really really regret not having (making?) the time to do any internships or the ability to make it to job fairs because I was busy with my service job or rushing to catch my bus all the time I wasn't in class. I feel like that + recession and shit really fucked me over.

I got an english degree a little more than a year ago, did a bunch of internships while in school, and just lucked out and got a job doing tech writing

english degrees allow you to post on ILX all day and have people say OTM

p much

i got myself an English degree many years ago and i'm about to get another one. i think jaymc was totally otm about the best part about an English degree is not, you know, knowing how to recite the prologue to the Canterbury Tales in Middle English, it's thinking and writing critically. my job requires a lot of reading, but i don't "use" my degree that much, and that doesn't bother me?

i never did interships or anything, but i always write, just about every day, i try to see it more as a hobby than anything else, that way i don't get down about it.

sometimes I get drunk and write wedding vows

sometimes i fall asleep and dream about The Mayor of Casterbridge

w/ my philosophy degree, i thought that i wanted to do phd work in phil and was only planning on taking a year or two off between undergrad & grad. i just looked for random jobs at universities and publishing companies.

i ended up getting a job in an ethics library at georgetown university, where i worked for 2 years (kind of crazy tho that i actually found a job that was interested in the fact that i studied philosophy - this is totally the exception imo), and it was awesome. seriously, university/college jobs are the best imo. usually pretty decent pay, great benefits, really cool work environments.

also, my first job totally helped me figure out at least the start of my long-term career. a couple of library jobs later and i'm now doing a master's in library & info science. it was seriously the best decision i've made to NOT go into a philosophy phd program

i think it's *super* important to take LOTS (like at least 2+ years) of time off between your first college degree and your second

yea absolutely

I did a bunch of internships in publishing places, they were fun but it was weird working w/o pay in a field where it is almost impossible to work into a steadily paying gig

then again I interviewed for a job at a textbook publishing company and they gave me a spelling test that was easy as fuck, but I panicked and spelled everything wrong so maybe I don't deserve that shit I don't know

had i had more luck in job-searching, i might've taken more than 2 years off before starting grad school. but i wound up working for minimum wage with no benefits, with a bottleneck of eager overeducated people waiting for promotions ahead of me, so at that point a stipend, health insurance, and flexible schedule were pretty attractive. even if you just get screwed in the academic job search later, 5 years of guaranteed pay and some level of independence might be worth it, right?

I did an internship at a textbook publisher that may have led to my first job out of college, which was at a textbook development firm, although I think it's probable I would've gotten the job anyway. I did another internship that same summer at Minty Fresh Records, which mostly just served to deromanticize the notion of working in the music industry.

i think it's *super* important to take LOTS (like at least 2+ years) of time off between your first college degree and your second

Depends on your field, though. This would 100% not have worked for me in lolscience unless I had been working directly in lolscience. Like, taking two years off to be a barista would have been a bad plan.

why "lol"science? is it because most people around here have english degrees?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolsci

More lol to me than anyone else really because after studying lolscience I now spend my days in front of a computer lolemailing about nothing scientific.

And then, the longer I was out of school, the more insular the academic world seemed to me in general.

this feels very OTM to me

kinda weird this morning I got an email from some university telling me that I should apply to their complit phd program - and as far as I can tell it's not spam, and I haven't talked about grad school plans anywhere except here. somebody has it out for me

yeah out of the blue yesterday i got a card in the mail from a seminary

i was like lol 5 yrs too late yall

comp. lit. professors are kinda the very definition of self-important challops dropping geeks, though.

― Mad Vigorish (Eisbaer), Monday, January 5, 2009 8:32 PM (9 months ago) Bookmark

sorry dyao :D

haha I agree completely with that statement Eisbaer

which is why I wanna become one

jk complit dudes are chumps WGSS is where it's at

gbx how did you make the transition from english deg to med school? did you need to take any classes to get the science background? MCATs?

bigtime

did a post-baccalaureate program (about 15 months), wherein i took alllll of the prerequisite science classes in one fell swoop

chem, physics, orgo, psych, biochem, bio, w/MCAT prep on the side

it is secretly the easiest way into medical school, btw