Did your degree shape you? What I realized when my daughter asked about mine
The kitchen was a mess of glossy brochures and half-empty coffee cups. My daughter, a high school junior, had every college she was considering spread out in front of her, each page covered in sticky notes. She looked up from a cheerful campus photo and asked, “Dad, did your English degree actually shape you? Or was it just, you know, a piece of paper?”
I remember setting down my tea and pausing for almost too long. Because the truth was, I hadn’t thought about my degree in years—not as a living thing. It was a line on my resume, a requirement for my first job, a topic we joked about when I did my taxes. But her question hung in the air, and I found myself pulling up a memory I hadn’t visited in a long time.
My junior year, I took a Victorian literature course taught by Dr. Nguyen, a man who wore corduroy jackets with elbow patches and assigned more pages than anyone could honestly read. The final paper was on Bleak House, which is maybe the most intimidating novel ever written. I remember sitting in the library, surrounded by photocopied critical essays I barely understood, feeling completely lost. I wrote a draft that was essentially a summary with some fancy words, and I knew it was weak. When I got it back, the grade was a C-minus, and Dr. Nguyen had written in the margins: “You’re describing the plot. Where are you in this?”
That comment annoyed me for weeks. I had done the reading, I had shown up to class, I had followed the format. But the more I fumed, the more his question burrowed into my head. What did I actually think about the novel? Not what the critics said, not what I assumed the professor wanted, but my own take. So I went back to the book and started reading it again, slowly, with a pencil. I underlined passages that confused me, wrote questions in the margins, and argued with the text. That second time, I saw things I had completely missed—how Dickens used fog as a character, how the legal system in the novel was a monster that ate people whole.
The rewrite didn’t get an A, but it got a B-plus, and more importantly, it changed how I did every bit of work after that. The degree itself hasn’t done much for me in a practical sense. I don’t write about Victorian novels, and I’ve never needed to diagram a sentence at work. But that practice of sitting with something difficult, of forming my own opinion and defending it, of tolerating the discomfort of not understanding something right away—that has followed me everywhere. It helped me when I learned to code for a side project, when I had to give feedback to an employee without being harsh, when I read my daughter’s essays and had to tell her the structure didn’t work without making her feel stupid.
I didn’t say all of that to her at the kitchen table. What I actually said was, “It shaped me, but not in the way you’re thinking. It didn’t give me a career. It gave me a way of stubbornly chewing on ideas.”
She looked at me, skeptical. “So it wasn’t a waste?”
“No,” I said. “But I also didn’t know that until a decade later.”
That’s the part I wish someone had told me when I was standing where my daughter is now. Everyone wants to know if a degree has a return on investment, and that’s a fair question for a family paying tuition. But there’s another question that gets missed: what happens to your brain when you spend four years being wrong, and revising, and starting over? The specific subject matters less than the process of being forced to think in a way that isn’t natural to you.
For me, it was the humanities. For my wife, it was a degree in biology, and she’ll tell you that dissecting a fetal pig didn’t teach her much about parenting, but it taught her to follow a protocol exactly and to handle the smell of failure. For a friend in engineering, the degree taught him how to break big problems into small, boring steps—which is strangely useful when you’re on the PTA board.
If you’re a parent or a teacher, you’ve probably seen a student agonize over picking a major. They’re afraid of choosing the “wrong” one, of being locked into a path that leads to a dead end. I get that fear. But here’s what I’ve come to believe: a degree shapes you less through its content and more through the mental habits it builds. So the question isn’t “What will you do with this?” It’s “What will this do to how you think?” And that’s a much harder thing to measure.
When my daughter asks for advice now, I try to model that shift. Instead of asking “What job will you get?” I ask things like “What course makes you curious even when you’re confused?” or “What subject do you hate because you’re not good at it yet?” Because sometimes the thing that shapes you most is the thing you struggle with. I never wanted to read Bleak House again, but I’m glad I had to.
There’s a concrete way to bring this into daily life, too. When a kid comes home with a bad grade, the instinct is to ask “Why didn’t you study?” But a less defensive question might be “What part of this felt confusing?” That opens a door for them to talk about their thinking process, not just their score. When they say they’re “bored” with a subject, try asking “What question would make it interesting?” That’s not always going to work, but it’s better than letting them assume boredom is a personality trait.
I’m not trying to romanticize college, either. Some degrees really are vocational, and that’s fine. My own daughter might end up in a nursing program, and I’ll be thrilled, because nursing will shape her in ways I can’t predict—maybe a thick skin, maybe a habit of seeing patterns in symptoms. The point is, humility matters. We can’t control exactly how a degree shapes anyone, including ourselves.
By the time we finished our tea, the brochures were still spread out, and my daughter had moved on to comparing dorms. I don’t think she got the answer she wanted, and I’m not sure I gave a clear one. But later, she came back to me and asked, “What if I pick something and then hate it?” I told her that hating something is also information. You learn what you don’t want, and that narrows the path.
I still don’t have a neat conclusion about my degree. Some days I feel like it made me who I am. Other days I feel like I’d have ended up the same way anyway—just maybe reading more. But that’s the most honest answer I have, and it seems to be enough.
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