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This is the gold-star recommended 3-line template for a company’s Instagram bio. Well, something like this – I wouldn’t be the person to ask. My co-intern, Tara, on the other hand, certainly would be. Before this internship, I’d had a pretty hard time taking business majors seriously. While I’m not necessarily proud of the jokes I made about the supposed simplicity of their studies, I know I am not the only one who has done so. How could we not? When one of your best friends (who, by the way, landed a summer internship at a highly prestigious consulting firm) tells you that one of her classes was entirely about how to write professional emails, it just feels like such low-hanging fruit. This is especially true when you are a humanities major, quietly praying for somebody else to be the punchline of the joke for once
In all honesty, the worst part is that derisions of the liberal arts don’t usually come in the form of a lighthearted jab. At virtually every familial or neighborhood gathering, I am confronted with the “question”: “And what are you planning on doing with that degree?” I place the word question in quotations as such because, broadly speaking, they are not really searching for the answer to a query, but rather, they are passing judgment with rising intonation. They already arrived at the conclusion that my degrees in Philosophy and Psychology are useless, – except, of course, if I want to try my hand at teaching. When I added my third major, Political Science, this became a three step dance. I could see the light in their eyes when they exclaimed “Ah! So you want to become a lawyer!” Praise be, the world makes sense again. Alas, I have had to dampen many a spark, as I regret to inform them that I have absolutely no intentions of pursuing law school.
Why, then, am I doing all of this? Seventeen credit hours a semester spent poring over responses to responses to responses written by academics whom I have long since forgotten the names of. I always thought I knew the answer to that question. I had genuinely never understood people’s dismissal of my majors – I was learning to think critically, speak creatively, write intentionally (apparently I have yet to fully internalize that one), and engage with ideas in ways so many people are not lucky enough to be able to. This was the point of going to college. Who cared if my skills weren’t “marketable,” or that there weren't any “clear career paths” laid out for me post-graduation? I probably should have.
Don’t get me wrong, I am perfectly comfortable with definitively saying that attempting to parse through Kant’s Prolegomena is harder than formulating an Instagram bio or crafting a polished email. That said, I still don’t know how to do those things. Nor do I even know what most of “those things” even are. When I arrived at GenZen, I had no idea what to do with myself. While Tara jumped right in on a “social media audit,” I switched aimlessly between browser tabs and tried to quell an overriding sense of impotence. Suddenly, doubts I had never encountered before crept into my mind, as I began to wonder: could it be that my liberal arts education is indeed useless?
I’ll spare you from the anxiety that I’m sure you are experiencing – the answer is no. In my time at GenZen, I’ve compiled research, created workshops, established a blog series as well as a short-form media series, and contributed odd bits and pieces to brand identity projects, social media campaigns, and more (the breadth of things that you do when working for a start-up is really deserving of an “etc.”). I had never made an interactive presentation before, nor had I any formal experience with journalistic writing, nor had I learned any branding/marketing strategies. In this way, yes, it's true that Philosophy, Psychology, and Political Science did not prepare me for the specific work I would do here. But that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because they prepared me for something altogether much more important – the discomfort that I would experience whilst doing all these things for the first time.
The first time I was asked to write an essay sans-prompt for a class was one of the worst experiences of my life. Obviously I’m exaggerating, but it was definitely at least one of my worst academic experiences. I have always done quite well in school, a fact I attribute largely to my obsessive diligence to guidelines (both written and oral) and rubrics. I pride myself on my ability to recognize what each professor or teaching assistant is trying to get us, as students, to say (all of my experiences with class-wide discussion boards have confirmed that this is, indeed, a skill). But when I was given instructions to not only choose the thesis of my first paper, but choose which of the nine books we covered that semester I would be choosing to create a thesis about – it was nothing short of catastrophic. To this day, the worst grade I have ever received on an essay was in that introductory class. Also to this day, there has yet to be another class where I have been as proud of the progress I made. By the last essay, I chose a thesis instinctually, highlighting a statement in a text I didn’t agree with as I was reading it, and then proceeded to write a multi-paged paper explaining why with relative ease.
Since that class in political theory, the number of assignments I have had in that style has grown exponentially. I have had a professor who asked us to write an essay about “something puzzling” from ancient philosophy, another who wanted us to create a nondescript “mixed-media project” on 20th-century American political thought, and more than one wherein my grade was, at least in part, dependent upon coming to class every day ready to be cold-called, prepared with questions and insights about the last night’s readings. At least for me, a lot of these things were deeply uncomfortable. I like to consider myself a fairly confident and well-adjusted person, but I definitely am better suited for certain environments rather than others. I like when things are straightforward, clearly defined (for me, not by me), and where there are measurable benchmarks for success. I don’t like when things are too easy, but I like it even less when they are unintelligible.
Enter GenZen. With the highest of compliments, probably the least straightforward environment I will ever find myself in (at least professionally). And yet, I managed to take initiative and come up with things I could contribute to the project. Is my workshop material the best out there? Probably not. Are these blog posts profound and impressive pieces of writing? Not really. But, they have allowed me to carve out my own niche in this company, towards the ends of both my own peace of mind and the continual (nonlinear) development of the movement as a whole. This is something I can say with absolute certainty I wouldn’t have been able to do without my training in the liberal arts.
Would it be helpful if I was tested on explicit, tangible things like how to identify the audience of a campaign, or how to make sense of engagement metrics? Sure, in some contexts. I’m glad there are people in the world who know how to do those things. I’m also glad that I am not one of them. There will be places for people with those strengths and skill sets, but there are also places in the world for people like me. People who, despite going in without any “industry” knowledge or skills, know a little bit about something else – how to answer a question that doesn't have any right answers, how to pose a question that doesn’t have any right answers, how to approach things from new angles, and how to be okay if your attempts to do any one of these things don’t go as planned. To view life, whether that be academically, professionally, or otherwise, as a continual, experiential learning process – that is the value of a liberal arts education.
About the author
If you were wondering who wrote our blog today, her name is Alexandra! She has been working as a summer intern since June. She has one more month left in Ireland and is excited to enter her junior year studying Philosophy, Psychology, and Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A fun fact about her is that she loves Diet Coke & iced coffee, especially when consumed on audiobook-supported long walks.
Click on our Instagram posts below to see more of her work!
