Did your degree shape you? How I answered my daughter on the drive home from a college tour
My daughter asked me the question in the car on the way back from a college tour. We were stuck in the slow lane of the interstate, and she was flipping through the brochures the admissions office had handed out at the end of the day. She’d been quiet for most of the ride, the way she gets when she’s processing too much information. Then she looked up and said, “Did your degree actually shape you? Like, would you be a different person if you’d studied something else?”
I knew the answer right away, but I didn’t say it immediately. Mostly because I had to untangle it from what I’d always assumed the answer should be.
I studied English literature. Not because I had a grand plan or a calling. I’d gotten a C in high school chemistry, and the guidance counselor, a kind woman with a perpetually worried expression, told me I should probably stay away from anything that required a lab. So I picked English because I liked reading and because it seemed like a degree that would keep my options open. Which turned out to be another way of saying I had no idea what my options were, and wouldn’t figure that out for a good three years after graduation.
The brochures in my daughter’s bag make the same promises mine did, just with better graphic design. “Find your path.” “Discover what you’re meant to do.” I remember sitting in my own college’s information session, hearing those words, and feeling like everyone else in the room understood something I didn’t.
The truth is my degree did shape me. But not in the way the brochures promise.
It shaped me in a seminar on Victorian literature where I’d skimmed the reading the night before and had to spend twenty minutes defending a shaky interpretation of a poem I barely understood. I talked long enough that the professor finally cut me off, but not before I’d said something that made him pause. He wrote on my final paper: “This is a weak argument, but a strong observation. Try again.” He meant it as encouragement. I still have that paper somewhere in a box.
It shaped me through the people I met. My roommate studied engineering and now teaches pottery to adults. A friend from my Chaucer class does policy work for the state government. Another guy, who audited our creative writing workshops for three years without ever enrolling, now runs a landscaping company. None of us ended up anywhere the course catalog mentioned. But we all learned how to sit with a hard problem and wrestle with it, and that turned out to be useful everywhere.
So yes, the degree shaped me. But my daughter wasn’t really asking about that. She was asking whether the piece of paper hanging in my office is the reason I am the way I am. And that’s a different question entirely.
So much of what I actually use day to day—patience, the habit of listening before speaking, the discipline of showing up and doing the work even when I don’t feel like it—I didn’t learn in a lecture hall. I learned it from being broke in my twenties. From a first boss who let me make mistakes and then calmly pointed them out. From having a kid and discovering that you can’t just read about things anymore; you have to actually do them.
When I finally answered my daughter, I told her that a degree is less like a mold and more like a backpack. You carry some of it with you, but you set it down a lot. The parts that stick are the tools you reach for without thinking: how to break a big messy problem into smaller pieces, how to ask a question that gets to the heart of something, how to write a clear email that doesn’t make people groan. The specific facts, the required reading, you shed most of that within a few years. Nobody has ever quizzed me on Victorian poetry. But plenty of people have noticed when I could summarize a chaotic situation into a single page.
She frowned at that. “So your degree was kind of a waste, then?”
It wasn’t, and I told her so. But I also told her it wasn’t the degree itself that mattered—it was what I did while getting it. The late nights in the library that taught me I could survive on less sleep than I thought. The group project where I had to carry someone else’s weight and learned not to resent it, because it made the final work better. The one professor who saw something in my writing that I didn’t see in myself and told me to keep going.
Those are the things that stick. Those are the things she’ll still be using at my age, no matter what she studies.
I’ve been on the other side of the hiring table too, and I’ve read a lot of resumes. I can tell you that the candidate’s major shows up in the conversation far less than you’d expect. What shows up is whether they can think clearly, talk honestly about their mistakes, and follow through on what they say they’ll do. Those habits get built in college, sure. But they get built in a lot of places. A summer job scrubbing dishes can teach you as much about accountability as any twenty-page paper.
When she asked what she should study, I didn’t list careers. I asked her a different question. “What do you enjoy doing for hours at a time, even when you’re not good at it?” Because that’s usually the clue. She thought about it and said she liked the research part of her history project—digging through old newspaper archives, trying to piece together what actually happened. She had no idea what job that translated to. I told her that was fine. I told her to pick a place where the teaching was good and she could try a bunch of different things, and to sit in on a class when she visits campus and watch the professor, not the slides. The degree would do its part. She’d do the rest.
I don’t know if it landed. We sat in silence for a few minutes while she put the brochures back in her bag. Then she asked if we could stop for gas station coffee, because the tour had run late and she still had homework. We pulled off at the next exit, stood under fluorescent lights squinting at the machine, and talked about nothing important.
Later that night, I thought about her question again. I don’t think a degree shapes you the way a river shapes a stone, wearing you down into a smooth version of something. It’s more like the first apartment you rent. You learn a lot there, and you remember certain things about it forever. But you don’t live there forever. You carry forward the useful skills—how to cook for yourself, how to coexist with someone you barely knew a month ago—and you leave behind the furniture that never fit.
My degree gave me the habit of sitting with a hard text until it opened up. It gave me people I still call when something good happens. It gave me a great story about a Chaucer seminar that went completely off the rails. But it didn’t give me direction. I found that on my own, slowly and unevenly, and I’m still finding it. I suspect my daughter will do the same.
When she comes home from college in a few years, I hope she has her own answer to that question. And I hope it’s not a neat one. The honest answers to “what shaped you” are usually still being written.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Did your degree shape you