Did your degree shape you? A parent’s honest answer for teens choosing their path
The college fair was in the high school gymnasium, and my daughter handed me a glossy brochure from the engineering school. “You studied English, right? What do you even do with that?” she said. We were stuck in a line of parents holding tote bags, and I gave her the answer I always gave.
“Mostly I read books and wrote essays.”
She rolled her eyes and moved toward a booth with a robot arm on it. I stood there holding the brochure, thinking about a question I don’t think I’d ever answered properly. Did my degree shape me? I had spent four years and a lot of tuition money on a literature degree, and I worked in corporate communications. I had never used the word “intertextuality” outside of a classroom. But I had used everything else, every single day.
I told my daughter the honest part later, in the car. “The degree didn’t give me a job. It gave me a way to think.”
She said “OK” the way teenagers do when they’ve stopped listening. But I kept talking anyway, because it felt like the first time I’d actually said it out loud.
I had a professor in my second year named Dr. Whitfield, who taught a course on Victorian novels. I remember very little about the novels themselves. But I remember the day he stood at the front of the room and said, “Every sentence is a decision.” He was talking about Dickens, but he was staring at all of us. “You need to notice what the writer chose to include, and what they chose to leave out. What they emphasized, and what they hid. That’s where the truth lives.”
That idea followed me to my first job, where I wrote newsletters for a healthcare company. I used it every afternoon. What did the vice president choose to emphasize in the quarterly memo, and what did he leave out? Why did a client’s email use the word “unfortunately” three times in one paragraph? The degree hadn’t taught me how to design a marketing plan or use a spreadsheet. It had taught me to notice decisions other people had made, and to make my own deliberately.
I think about that a lot now that my daughter and her friends are being pushed through the whole college machine. There’s so much pressure around choosing a major as if it’s a destiny. The guidance counselors at the fair kept saying “employability” and “skills gap” and “internship pathways.” Every booth was a pipeline. Choose this major, get this job. Choose that major, get that salary.
But the truth is, most of us end up in rooms we couldn’t have predicted. I have a friend with a chemistry degree who manages a restaurant. Another friend with an art history degree who runs a logistics company. The degree didn’t shape their careers. It shaped how they looked at problems. What questions they asked. What they noticed when no one else did.
I’m not saying the degree is irrelevant. I’m saying it works differently than we tell kids it will. A degree isn’t a key that opens a specific door. It’s more like a set of habits that follow you through whatever door you end up walking through.
And those habits don’t come from the curriculum. They come from the small, ordinary things. Living with a roommate who grew up in a completely different kind of family. Sitting in a seminar where someone challenged your most comfortable belief and you had to respond without losing your temper. Writing a paper at 2 a.m. and realizing you could turn a messy set of ideas into something coherent. Those were the moments that shaped me. The content was almost secondary.
I wanted to tell my daughter something useful, though, not some vague “college helps you grow as a person” speech. So in the car, after the eye roll, I tried to be specific.
“Whatever you major in,” I said, “pay attention to how it makes you work. Not what it makes you learn. How it makes you work.”
She actually looked at me then. So I kept going.
“When I was reading Victorian novels, I wasn’t learning about Queen Victoria. I was learning to sit with something complicated and not give up after ten minutes. I was learning to read a long, dense thing and find the patterns in it. I was learning to defend an interpretation that someone else disagreed with, and maybe change my mind when they made a better point. That’s all. But those are actual skills. They’re just not listed on a job description.”
She was quiet for a minute. Then she said, “So you’re saying the actual subject doesn’t matter.”
“Maybe. Or maybe the subject matters less than the way you study it. How you’re asked to think. What you’re required to produce. Whether you’re memorizing facts or actually wrestling with something.”
What I didn’t tell her, because I was still figuring it out, is that this cuts both ways. I’ve seen people get degrees in fields they were told were practical, and they ended up competent but disengaged. I’ve seen people study something they loved and find ways to use it in the most surprising contexts. I used to look down on my own degree as impractical, but looking at my daughter’s generation, I wonder if the most valuable thing a college can do is teach you to handle ambiguity. There’s no major for that. It just happens if you’re paying attention.
I think my daughter will probably study something in the sciences. She’s good at it, and she genuinely likes it. But I’m not going to write her off as “the science kid.” The degree she chooses won’t define her. The experience of earning it will.
Maybe that’s what my degree ultimately gave me, a way of measuring that distinction. When I meet an adult and they tell me their major, I’m less interested in the major than in whether their eyes light up when they talk about it. Whether they had a professor who changed how they see things. Whether they still carry a habit from a seminar discussion ten years ago.
The college fair ended, and we walked to the car carrying tote bags full of brochures we’d probably recycle. My daughter tossed the engineering one onto the back seat. “So if I major in engineering,” she said, “I’m actually learning how to think?”
“Yes. And you’re also learning how to build a bridge. Both are fine. Just don’t confuse the two.”
She laughed. I’m not sure we solved anything. But I think she might remember that conversation when she’s standing in a similar gymnasium with her own kid in twenty years. I hope so. That’s probably the best I can do.
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