YouAlberta
I submitted the last paper of my Arts degree recently. It felt really bittersweet. On one hand, I felt relief that after four years I had completed my degree and had accomplished something huge. Of course, I will be embarking on more schooling in the future, and I won’t just forget the skills I learned. In the fall I’m starting a Master’s program and I know the skills I learned in my BA will be instrumental in making sure I succeed. I also know of all the tangible professional skills I gained throughout my degree, like working under pressure, writing in accessible language, writing policy briefs, and most importantly: researching, analyzing and arguing my position. On the other hand, I felt really sad that it was all over. As many other Arts students also experience, I’m constantly asked what I expect to do after my degree. You know, those questions that usually start with a nervous “okay, you’re doing political science, so you’re going to be…” which is usually followed by “a lawyer, the prime minister” or “unemployed?” And as much as I love answering existential questions about my career prospects, (of which there are plenty, actually), I want to talk about the way my Arts degree impacted me personally.
First, my degree gave me the opportunity to think critically and challenge common assumptions about the way society functions. There isn’t a clear-cut answer for a lot of issues, and Arts degrees emphasize the value in critical engagement with our decision making, opinions, and encourage us to challenge systems of power, or at least look at them with more scrutiny. Just because something has been done a certain way for years, doesn’t mean that it should continue that way.
Additionally, the flexibility of my program gave me the ability to not only engage with every medium — from politics, to film, to video games — but it showed me the ways each of these mediums are interconnected, and carry power in society. In my first year, I took a class on the history of art, design and visual culture in Europe from the 15th to the 19th century. Every time I’ve visited a museum since then, I was stunned to realize how much I remembered. From the most trivial stuff, like noticing how weirdly women’s bodies were painted, to knowing the background behind a painting like Liberty Leading the People, even a class I took for credit came back and enriched my travel experiences. I definitely didn’t expect it to when I complained the whole way through, that’s for sure. It felt nice knowing there was a bigger picture, pun intended, and that arts and culture matters outside the classroom.
My degree has also given me a greater appreciation for storytelling in every form. I’ve taken classes on fanfiction, video games, fairy tales, movies, and television, and each has enhanced my love for using these mediums of entertainment to tackle big issues. Sometimes it feels weird talking about how I’ve analyzed episodes of The Mindy Project, written a research project on Die Hard fanfiction, and even wrote my massive honors thesis on celebrity culture and politics. But being able to take these topics, and mediums, seriously, and give them the same attention and weight as “traditional” mediums like literature or policy, reveals so much more about our communities, what we value, what we enjoy and who we pay attention to. Because really, almost everyone consumes media and entertainment, so shouldn’t we pay more attention to what’s being talked about in it? The malleable and customizable nature of my Arts degrees gave me the chance to explore so many different fields and truly apply my knowledge outside just my discipline of political science. It also allowed me to study topics I found genuinely interesting and explore them through lenses I didn’t even know existed before.
Finally, and the most significant, my Arts degree made me value the people and relationships in my life more. As many of my peers can attest to, the toll of doing a degree in social science (specifically in political science and gender studies for me), with the devastating things we read, that we know happened in the past and continue to happen in the present, is a lot. Freya did a great post on how to study a topic that is emotionally or mentally taxing, which ended up being a lot of the content I explored during my degree.
But, while I completely agree with the emotional toll our degrees can take, they can also provide a renewed sense of purpose. I’m able to directly apply things I learned in class to the way I interacted with the people in my life, and with the decisions I make. Whether to try and shop local after learning of the atrocities of massives corporations, or to support Indigenous activism and educate myself on my position as a settler on Treaty 6 land after learning about Indigenous history on this land, my Arts degree has given me the skills to expand not just my professional development — it’s taught me how to be a more compassionate person. I think, above all, the value in my Arts degree comes from this. It’s easier to learn how to write better, or argue points with more clarity, but being able to expand your intellect through engaging and being open to change, self-reflection and personal development, now that takes real effort and commitment. Learning this was central to my degree, and for that I am incredibly grateful.
