I attended the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD from 1993-1995. At the end of that period, I was awarded a Master of Arts, Liberal Arts degree (we nicknamed it the evil Spanish woman degree, or M.A.L.A.).
During four different job interviews (between 1995 and 1997), the person on the other side of the desk would look at my résumé, get a furrowed brow, and ask, “Why did you get a liberal arts graduate degree?”
There were a couple of responses to this, none of them particularly useful (nor indeed adequate). The best I could come up with was, “It taught me how to learn.”
I used that phrase when I had to give a speech at my undergrad alma mater, Hampshire College, in 2002. I don’t think the kids got what I was saying, but I tried.
This morning, I was reading an interview in The Comics Journal with Eddie Campbell, one of our age’s finest cartoonists (excerpts here). His 4-page Little Italy comic strip (collected in Three Piece Suit) is my all-time favorite. Here’s a snippet from the interview:
I think on the education front, the world focuses too much on the idea of education as a means to a job. Imagine learning all the great wisdom of the world so that you can get a job. What an absurdity. We should be learning all the great wisdom of the world in order to become wise.
All of which is to say, nothing at St. John’s explicitly prepared me to be the editor of a pharmaceutical contract services business-to-business magazine, but I wouldn’t trade those two years for anything (now, the four years at Hampshire, on the other hand. . .).