By Alyssa Sanford
I’m well-acquainted with the Question.
It’s not so much a question as it is a bemused look, a slight lift of the eyebrows, a faint smirk tugging at the corner of the lips.
Entering my senior year in college, I’ve found ways to cope with the condescension that comes with the Question, short of crafting little voodoo dolls of my well-intentioned critics and sticking them deliberately with pins.
“And what are you studying?” the Questioner will politely inquire, after asking my younger sister, an aspiring urban elementary school teacher with a double major in Spanish the very same question.
I smile, a little ruefully, and drop my chin. “English and journalism.”
The Questioner, sometimes a relative, sometimes a recent college graduate, sometimes a parent of a friend or an elderly woman at my grandmother’s church, blinks. “Oh. That’s… wonderful.”
I can hear the question lingering behind it. And what in the world are you going to do with that?!
I will concede. It’s a fair question. I’ve long ago ruled out the possibility of teaching. I’m not much of a creative writer. I don’t see myself winning a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting; I am not one for sticking my nose in others’ business, for sticking my neck out for the sake of a story.
I have struggled with the Question myself. But I think I’ve discovered the Answer.
It came to me one recent afternoon, as I curled up in a lawn chair in a shady section of my back patio, sunglasses perched on the bridge of my nose that was currently buried deep in a copy of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me.
Coates’ eloquent letter to his 15-year-old son about the sobering realities of growing up black in a predominantly white society forced me to go through all the clichés of the young, white, privileged academic discovering a world apart from her own through literature: I did a lot of pausing, head shaking, and envisioning dreamy interior monologues about the unfairness of the world as it was for generations of African-Americans, and as it is today. I could not do much thinking or writing that would rival Coates’ raw, visceral rendering of what it’s like to walk down the street in Baltimore and perceive the fear radiating from black bodies posturing on the corner—the fear of bodily harm, of the loss of autonomy over one’s own body.
But I came across one passage. It wedged itself in my brain and stayed there long after I devoured the book in one sustained gulp:
“It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own especial Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness” (52).
And there it was. The Answer to the Question.
A Bachelor of Arts in English literature—well, it’s not the most auspicious of degrees when it comes to the post-graduation job hunt. I’ve taken up a great deal of white space on my resume emphasizing my “excellent communication skills” and my ability to “perform extensive research” and “condense necessary information into digestible chunks,” but does that really scream “Hire her!” to a potential employer when there’s a line of applicants with business degrees out the door? I think not.
My two closest college friends are my polar opposites, in terms of our career trajectories. One is a biomedical engineering major, and the other an accounting major. They have taken classes that don’t even register in my list of academic requirements—Calculus A and B, Statistics, Computer Programming, Electronics, Finance, Physics, etc. They have acquired skillsets that employers actively look for in job applicants fresh out of college: quantitative reasoning, proficiency in new technologies.
A 2013 Forbes report showed that employers tend to look for fluency in coding and technological systems, skills that a degree in the sciences and mathematics clearly provide. Among the top ten skills that employers look for in job candidates, Forbes listed complex problem solving, computers and electronics, mathematics, programming, and operations and systems analysis.
According to Matt Ferguson, the CEO of CareerBuilder, in a different Forbes article, “[employers] want to extract, parse and apply Big Data to bring better solutions to their clients and their own businesses. They need technologists in place who can devise bigger and better strategies, and execute.”
Precisely. This is what I’ve been told, in not so many words, as I’ve worked my way through my English degree. In a highly data-driven market, my skills are basically useless.
But I look at Coates’ recollections of his studies at Howard University, and I think that maybe he has the right idea—that those ‘outdated’ and ‘useless’ liberal arts degrees are actually worth something.
Mathematics and science—these are incredibly important fields of study, and endlessly applicable to everyday life. I won’t dispute that. But they are also somewhat rigid, unyielding. The facts are the facts, and will remain ever so. Certainly, there are new discoveries, and new strides in technology, but the essential truths remain. No matter how many times the accountant crunches the numbers using Quickbooks, she’ll get the same result. No matter how many times the biologist looks through the microscope at the slide of cheek cells, she will not find that they’ve developed cell walls, or chloroplasts.
There is comfort in that certitude, that objective truth. I know they feel this way, because of the way they genuinely feel for me when I’m facing a tight deadline on an entirely subjective paper about the effects of British colonialism on Nigerian literature.
“I don’t know how you do that,” they’ll say, with a slight shudder. “How do you even know what to say?”
I don’t always know. Because there is so much subjectivity in the literature that I read. But that is something that I can always expect. There is always complexity in the stories I read, in the questions I ask of the texts I pore over. There is never a singular correct answer.
I do not mean to suggest that there is no complexity in the sciences, the mathematical formulas. There is.
Still, I think that Coates makes a salient point. The real world, complicated and heartbreaking and deliciously unpredictable, is at times indistinguishable from literature. From a work of art. From the pages of a history textbook, or a sociological study. And, at times, it is a masterful puzzle that only a college graduate with a humanities degree can piece together.
It’s why Inc. magazine emphasized that job applicants should strive to show off their communication skills; their ability “to offer a fresh perspective with creativity and innovation;” their ethical and rational decision-making sensibilities, among other valuable real-world survival skills.
My training in symbolism, in the slippage of language, in semantics, teaches me that I should not take anything at face value. I should dare to question the available set of data in front of me and determine whether or not there is an essential truth that I am overlooking.
I am not suggesting that I am more comfortable with sudden twists of fate than my scientifically-inclined counterparts. In fact, I’m no more prepared for the tragedy of a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando than anyone else. But I do think that the “kind of discomfort” that my education thrusts upon me allows me to see it as a multifaceted issue. Not just gun control, or a matter of domestic terrorism, or homophobia, but ultimately, an isolated act of hatred in a society that emphasizes love and acceptance above all else. I refuse to be mired in partisan talking points. I refuse to swim in a sea of skewed statistics and problematic polls.
So, what in the world will I do with an English degree? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I have the skillsets to grapple with challenges and produce thoughtful insights. What matters is that I am prepared to encounter “humanity in all its terribleness” and accept it for what it is.
I will emerge from my undergraduate experience an adult prepared for the wonder and horror of adult life, a world apart from the privileges I enjoyed in college, a world that I am eager to unpack.
Is that the right Answer?
Human Spellcheck 