Author: I CAN Finish College: The Overcome Any Obstacle and Get Your Degree Guide
Over the course of my career as a dean and senior administrator in a variety of schools I have heard the same question—usually in a plaintive voice and you can substitute any number of courses into that question—anthropology, history, art, literature. The assumption is that these are not practical courses. Having made the decision to go to college, presumably to become job-ready and more employable, then students look for the practical. Certainly if one is pursuing an online degree then time is precious. You don’t want to waste it with frivolity like philosophy.
But it may not be a waste at all. The question reveals the lack of understanding of the connection between what you get in an education and your future work life. Learning data entry is a good skill for the short term in a particular job. But critical thinking (such as what you would learn in a philosophy class) is a life-long skill that could actually get you out of the data entry pool.
So what does college prepare you for? College gives you skills that you can use in many career paths. Graduate school is where you most likely will specialize in the arena where most of your work life will be. Interestingly more leaders have liberal arts degrees as undergraduates than specialized degrees including undergraduate business degrees. The liberal arts are a strong preparation for the varied careers you may have along life's path. But what about preparing for a career? What you need for a career are skills. You also need evidence that you are intelligent and teachable. Your grades provide both.
We are in a fast-changing, information and service based environment. The field that is hot today may be gone tomorrow and replaced by something completely new. Think of social media’s impact on the advertising industry or ipods on the record industry. You need to show that you are smart in several areas. That would mean good grades in a variety of subjects and excellence in the majority of your courses. You need to show that you can find, absorb and integrate lots of information. Sometimes you may need to process it in different ways-"thinking out of the box." If you are engaged in a subject that you love then you will enjoy studying it. You will play with it. You will be more creative than if you are struggling to just understand the concepts of a subject area that you don’t really care about. And you just might find you love philosophy.
Employers also tell us that they seek, in addition to basic quantitative skills, really solid communications skills. You have to be able to write-presentations, memos, reports, speeches. They have to be clear, logical, literate (good grammar and spelling) and persuasive. Courses (like philosophy) that require you to read lots and to write many pages of papers are good practice for an executive career path. Firms want people who can come in and be good team players and can quickly learn how things are done. Translation: they seek people with good people skills and who are eager to learn and learn easily. If you majored in people centered subjects like Sociology, Psychology or Anthropology, to name a few, then you will know more about human behavior. But History and literature and Economics and Political Science are also studies in human behavior. All can help build skills useful in understanding situations and colleagues in the workplace.
Employers also seek people who have critical thinking skills and can solve problems even before they happen. Any major will enable you to develop those skills. All learning is about finding new knowledge and solutions to hard questions. Discovering how things work and why they work and how they have worked in the past is the essence of the work done in college. Engaging in research whether in the library or the lab is where the critical thinking skills are developed. The questions that professors ask to get you to think are designed to build this capacity. You must have some degree of quantitative aptitude. That means working with numbers. People come with varying degrees of skill in this area. Some is natural. You were born with it and would rather deal with numbers, spatial relations, or abstract quantitative concepts than read a novel or historical text. For others these are developed in school with varying degrees of success. Interestingly the field of logic which is highly mathematical is found in the philosophy department. However, whether you are managing a budget or developing a media plan based on data or designing a house you will need math in some form. Your future is in your skills—the ones that stretch your brain and can carry you for the long haul. Don’t stop with what looks purely practical. The people who get ahead don’t. Why Philosophy? It may be your path to the CEO’s chair that’s why. It’s all good.
For more go to www.icanfinishcollege.com (Chapter 4 of the book goes into this issue in detail)
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