Did My Degree Shape Me? What I Keep Telling My Son About University
The UCAS application page had been open for forty minutes. My son was staring at it like it might resolve itself, and I was staring at the kettle, trying to remember the last time I’d said anything useful about education that didn’t sound like a greeting card.
“You’re very quiet,” he said, not looking up.
“I’m thinking,” I said.
He waited. Em, as we call him, has a particular way of waiting for adults to finish their own thoughts. It makes you realise how often most people just talk to fill the silence. I made tea. The kitchen smelled of the Sunday bread we’d forgotten to put away. It was one of those ordinary moments that suddenly feels heavier than it should.
“I was wondering,” I said, “whether my degree actually changed anything.”
He looked up properly then. Not because it was profound, but because it wasn’t advice. I hadn’t told him which universities were better or that he should think about “employability” or that his generation didn’t know how lucky they had it. I’d just asked a question I genuinely didn’t know the answer to.
I studied English Literature. Not because I had a grand plan, but because I liked reading and I was eighteen and nobody in my family had been to university before, so we all just assumed any degree would work the same way as a price tag. You pay the money, you get the thing, the thing gets you a job. Nobody explained that the thing is not actually a thing.
Here’s what I remember from those three years. Not the content of the lectures, mostly. I remember the library at 9pm in winter, the way the fluorescent lights made everyone look slightly ill. I remember sitting in a seminar about a single sonnet for an hour and a half and realising that six people could argue in totally good faith and still not agree on what a poem meant. When I tried to tell my dad about that, he asked me what that was going to do on a CV.
At the time I had no answer. Now I think it was the most useful thing I learned. Because nobody in the working world hands you a problem with a single correct answer. They hand you a mess and ask you to make meaning out of it. English Literature taught me that you can hold two contradictory ideas in your head at once, not because you’re being lazy but because the world is genuinely complicated. It taught me to tolerate ambiguity without turning it into false certainty.
But the degree also shaped me in ways nobody warns you about. It shaped my stamina. Writing a 10,000-word dissertation felt like swimming underwater. I remember the week it was due, eating toast in the dark, being so far beyond tired that I felt unreal. I got a 2:1. Nobody outside that exam room has ever asked about it. But I learnt that I could hate something I loved, struggle through it, and still finish. That turns out to be more useful at work than almost any technical skill.
Still, none of that is the kind of thing you say to a seventeen-year-old who is currently panicking about predicted grades. When I try to explain it, it sounds like one of those quotes on a motivational poster. Em is studying computer science, or as he puts it, “what you should have done if you wanted to make any money.” He says it affectionately. He’s grown up watching me slowly transfer the skills of close reading into project management, which is a genuinely strange thing to witness.
Watching him apply is different from watching him study. I see him weighing options the way I never did. He looks at course modules and asks what the failure rates are. He emails universities and asks about lab time. He does research. I applied for a course because it had a picture of a nice campus on the prospectus. The difference between us is not intelligence. It’s that he treats education as something he’s doing, whereas I treated mine as something that was happening to me.
But in other ways, he’s not more mature than I was. He’s terrified. He thinks the wrong choice will somehow permanently seal his future. And that’s where I want to say something honest.
The truth is, degrees do shape you. But they don’t so much decide who you become as they make certain ways of thinking more available to you. An English degree gave me a suspicious, curious relationship with the world. A computer science degree is doing something else for him. I can already see it when he talks about debugging. He’ll describe staying up for hours chasing a fault, and there’s a calm in his voice, a kind of settled patience that I don’t have. He’s learning to treat failure as information, not as a verdict on his worth. That’s not what the syllabus says. But it’s what the degree is actually teaching him.
I think the biggest mistake parents like me make is projecting our own educational experience—good or bad—onto our children. My friend’s mum still tells her she’s a “lawyer now” even though she left law and works in charity. Because the degree is shorthand for who she’s supposed to be. And it makes me watch myself when I’m talking to Em. There have been moments where I almost said, “you should do a language, it opens doors.” Why? Because it opened doors for me. But I’m not him. The skills I got from reading Anglo-Saxon poetry in a freezing library at 8am on a Tuesday are not the same skills he’s going to need.
So what do I actually say to him? Not much that’s grand. I’ve started asking different questions. Instead of “what will you do with that degree?” I ask him, “what kind of person do you want to be at twenty-two?” Sometimes he rolls his eyes. Sometimes he pauses. The question isn’t designed to make him pick an answer. It’s designed to make him notice that the degree is a process, not a destination.
I also try to do practical things. On visit days, we don’t just look at the accommodation and the canteen. We sit in the library. We walk around the student union. I ask him to imagine himself there on a Wednesday afternoon. Will he feel sick with boredom or weirdly at home? It sounds fluffy, but it’s how I got the best data when I was applying for jobs later. The gut responses were more reliable than any league table.
We had a long talk that afternoon in the kitchen. Not because I gave him any wisdom, but because I stopped trying to give him a verdict.
“Do you regret it, then?” he asked. “Leeds. English Lit. All of it.”
“I don’t regret the degree,” I said. “I regret thinking it was the end of something. I treated it like the final answer. But it’s just the first paragraph.”
He looked at me like I was being pretentious, which I probably was. But I meant it. My degree didn’t define me. It just put certain words in my mouth. It gave me the habit of reading slowly, of asking for evidence, of being comfortable with not having an immediate opinion. And it gave me the life in Leeds, which is where I met your dad, which is a whole separate thing.
He still hasn’t filled in the application. But he did ask me what a dissertation is, and how long it takes, and whether he actually has to read all the books on his reading list or whether he can just skim them like I apparently did. (For the record, I did not admit the real answer.)
The kitchen went quiet again. The kettle boiled. He went back to his screen, and I sat there wondering if he’ll look back on his own degree in twenty years and feel this same weird mixture of gratitude, frustration, and indifference. I don’t know because I don’t know him at forty. I only know him now, seventeen, panicking, brilliant, typing his personal statement with one earbud in.
Whether the degree shapes him is almost beside the point. He’s already shaping himself. The degree is just going to be part of the material he uses to do it. I wish I’d understood that when I was his age. But maybe you can’t understand it until you’ve spent twenty years living with the answer.
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