As I write this article, I’m awaiting marks for the thesis I spent all of this year writing about the semantics and pragmatics of apology. This is the tail end of five years spent studying linguistics and media / communications. While my studies are drawing to a close, one thing that has been constant throughout these years has not abated — in fact, it has increased. When making small talk about my degree, one question always comes up: what can you do with that?
I have a few answers I default to — AI desperately needs linguists, and there are many jobs which need media skills in communication roles — but, in truth, I really don’t know what jobs I can do with the specific combination of degrees that I am graduating with. When choosing my degree at the end of high school, employability was omnipresent, a fine mist sprayed over every course guide and University pamphlet I pored over. My school’s career counsellor challenged me when I expressed fleeting interest in criminology: “but what are you going to do with that?” She saw me as a manager at an art gallery, a career pastiched together from the list of HSC subjects that sat in my file in front of her. Business and visual arts were the degrees she pointed me to.
Her suggestion, framed more as a diagnosis than advice, triggered a feeling that still eats at me in any discussion I have about employability. It is a feeling I still can’t quite explain; I loved learning and writing about art, but I didn’t want a career in it. The same was true of my other HSC subjects — Physics, Maths, Italian, English — and, indeed, of various University units I have done: introductory Arabic, great works of literature, public relations. This feeling is an anxious, smothering one. As if, by studying subjects like art and literature that I didn’t see a career in, I had somehow been dishonest. It also entails a question that I feel even less sure of how to answer: if I feel instinctively averse to several jobs which relate to subject matter that I, ostensibly, enjoy, what kind of job do I want?
Attending University is a privilege, especially in a country like Australia with high standards of public tertiary education. That I was able to study at all is the direct result of not having urgent financial pressures that necessitated full-time work once I left school. To study a degree without a clear transition into a workplace is a further privilege still; I have the luxury of part-time jobs to rely on, and the safety net of a family who could support me if need be, in the time I take to settle on a career path. The indecision I feel, no matter how anxious it makes me, is a blessing. Despite this, I did not attend University simply for fun. The dedication of time, money, and resources I have committed to my studies over the last five years are an investment, one which I hope to get returns from.
The most obvious way to get these returns is through a career. I understand why my relatives, career counsellors, and work colleagues are so curious as to what job I can get with my degree — the assumption is that I studied specifically to train for a particular career. However, this assumption is overly reductive. It rests on the flawed premise that the only factor differentiating careers from one another is the subject matter that the job revolves around. However, there are a myriad of factors which make career paths intellectually distinct; the kind of tasks one would be required to do, the ways of thinking that are most rewarded, the different interpersonal skills most frequently exercised. I loved art in high school, and still love it now; the reason I balked at being a gallery manager was not that I didn’t understand artworks, but that I have never had a head for business, for the investment weigh-ups that a manager would have to make, and that being in a managerial position of power has no appeal to me. Enjoying the subject matter of your career is good, but no more important than enjoying the procedures and dynamics that compose your workday; I would argue it is markedly less so.
Why, then, do we still correlate interest in subject matter with prospective careers? In truth, I think it’s just a lot easier to do so instead of grappling with the infinite other ways a career path could be determined. Subject matter is more accessible and explicable by both students and well-meaning advisors: it is easier for me to say I think language is cool than to say I like puzzle solving, and working alone, and tinkering away at multiple projects at once. This ease is also reflected in the way we structure degrees. Universities such as USYD seem aware that there is more to a career than just subject matter; compulsory OLEs and units focused on interdisciplinarity allude to an awareness that you need more than a set of facts in your head to be employable, and certain units are structured to specifically instruct students on ways of thinking and communicating. However, constraints, both unavoidable and arbitrary, limit how much students can cultivate different interpersonal, communicative, and procedural skills. Some skills are just categorically hard to teach and assess; interpersonal skills are difficult to identify, let alone assess without biases such as ableism. Tests of knowledge such as exams and essays are the easiest tests to administer. Beyond logistic constraints, administrative decisions, like cuts to subjects and amalgamation of arts cohorts into generic honours subjects, suggest that Sydney University does not care as much about providing students a range of opportunities to gauge how skilled they are at certain processes as they are their bottom line. The unfortunate fact is, if you’re a student looking to work out your strengths and weaknesses for career aptitude, you’re on your own for all but subject matter related questions.
This isn’t to say, of course, that my degree has not been instructive for my career preferences. I have learnt I like working alone and improved on working as a team; I have established routines that I intend to transfer to the workplace. The way I coped with degree stress is enlightening and helped shape how I interact with my mental health. The skills you learn in your degree, no matter how remote from a job title they may seem, are transferable to your working life.
Beyond this, though, there are other ways that you can get a return on your investment into University. I may never work in a domain that overlaps with linguistics, and yet studying it and writing a thesis in it has enriched me immensely. The way I prove logical conclusions has been sharpened; I know more than I had ever hoped to about the way that we speak and why we make the choices that we do. I am a repository of fun language facts, which makes for excellent small talk. I emerged from my media degree with a portfolio of pieces I had created all by myself, including a podcast that I’ve since published and shared internationally. Even if none of these accomplishments translate directly into a career, it is silly to say that they don’t amount to anything.
I joke about my degrees being useless, but I don’t really believe that. Even if they aren’t the key which unlocks certain career paths for me, they have changed the way I think, understand myself, and have endowed me with so much knowledge. My advice, however ill-equipped I am to give it, is this: study useless degrees. Learn things that make you feel satisfied to learn. Get to know the way your brain works in whatever context most befits it. Education is invaluable.
