
How to Get a Job With a Philosophy Degree - wallflower
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/magazine/how-to-get-a-job-with-a-philosophy-degree.html
======
smoyer
Not every Philosopher deserves the job they manage to land ... my experience
is that they live to be vague, so make sure you know whether the philosopher
is one of the logical philosophers during their interview. You don't want the
waffling kind.

One quick example ... my son was taking a 400-level IST class on Enterprise
Architecture at Penn State from a very vague professor with a Philosophy
degree. When asked to define Enterprise Architecture, he rambled on for half
an hour before concluding that "you really can't define it ... kind of like
Electrical Engineering". He was pretty flustered when one of the students read
him the IEEE definition of Electrical Engineering. So this is an example of
the type of person you don't want to hire.

For an example of the type of Philosopher that can help you move forward, read
this comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6390914](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6390914).
A person like this is good with program logic, but is also trained to
recognize false arguments, inconsistencies, etc when you're debating how to
build something. Want to get political agendas and personal biases out of the
way? Hire this guy!

~~~
beloch
There's an old joke that says while physicists, engineers etc. focus on
knowing _everything_ about something so specific that it's practically
nothing, philosophers focus on knowing as little as possible about
_everything_.

------
habosa
This quote really stuck with me: “this race to get jobs becomes more important
than the actual ‘let’s educate our students,’ ” Henderson said. “It’s not
uncommon to encounter a 20-year-old who has not benefited from the maturation
you get from higher education, from true engagement in a classroom — it
becomes more about taking classes as an extended way to build your résumé. You
think you’re talking to a 20-year-old who should have bright ideas and
enthusiasm, and they can’t get out of the mode of: ‘What are the words I’m
supposed to use in this conversation?’ And you see that the risk has been
taken out of résumés — that’s the part that’s most disheartening.”

I go to UPenn, and the pre-professionalism defines the school. The students,
especially those in Wharton, do almost nothing between the hours of 8am and
8pm that isn't in some way connected to building a career. I'm not condemning
this attitude though, because it is productive and realistic. In the modern
economy students at Penn often come out with great jobs and a relatively
secure future, and that's very important. I also can't say I'm much above it,
I put a ton of effort into finding internships and jobs. I just wish there was
some way to balance this with the "Hollywood" depiction of college where
students sit around and engage each other in intellectual conversation for the
sake of mental expansion. I wish this was the type of where people don't just
join a handful of clubs/groups to build their resume, and where people don't
avoid interesting classes that might hurt their GPA. I've loved my 3.5 years
here, but that element has been decidedly missing.

~~~
ritchiea
Well it certainly drives me nuts from the other side as well. Perhaps the best
skill I walked away from liberal arts school with is to listen to a roomful of
people over the course of 90 minutes, understand their individual arguments
and find consensus or points of disagreement that need to be further hashed
out. At work, no matter where I've worked, the big issue I see over and over
is people talk a great deal but fail to listen to each other. A roomful of
people doesn't always have to agree, but it kills me how many times I've seen
disagreement at work take the form of "we'll all keep doing our jobs the way
we individually define them without really discussing that it doesn't give our
product a cohesive direction." I'm biased but I believe this is at least in
part because college education for most people lacks students engaging each
other's ideas.

------
hobo_mark
...and with well-connected, rich parents, of course. I was very surprised to
read how involved these parents are in their precious snowflakes careers, at
times it read as if they were still high-schoolers instead of functional
adults! I guess that with that kind of support there is virtually no way you
are ever going to screw up or find yourself in a difficult situation, with or
without a philosophy degree.

------
001sky
_Your son wants to be a philosophy major? Chan paraphrased the response of
many a parent: “How do you get a job in philosophy?” But hold your tongue, he
urged them. Let them think big. Two months later, they might decide they love
math anyway..._

== The only reference in the article to the headline topic.

~~~
pmiller2
Oh, come on now. You should realize that "philosophy" is just a stand-in for
"liberal arts" here. It's like I used to joke with a friend of mine in college
who was doubling in Philosophy and English... "You're majoring in 'what
graduate school am I going to,' aren't you?"

------
mgkimsal
I got a job with a philosophy degree by sending out letters to job ads in the
newspaper, back in the day when that was the done thing. I got a phone call
back from someone who said "I've never met anyone with a philosophy degree -
why don't you come on in to chat". So I did, and got a job at a small startup
(though that trendy term hadn't been coined just yet).

I got a philosophy degree because I felt it was the only thing I could get a
degree in. I'd dropped out of college because I'd failed calculus - twice -
and was basically told I'd never graduate without passing calculus, and it
seemed hopeless. I got coaxed back much later, and lamented to a friend during
lunch about the calculus/degree situation.

"Well," he said, "you _could_ take a logic class, but that's _really hard_ ".
Umm... Really? There are classes in that? I took it. People dropped out of the
class, but I'd aced it. I'd already been programming about 10 years at that
point, so the principles of logic were pretty ingrained, though I didn't know
all the terms. But I passed, and was encouraged to enter the philosophy
program, such as it was. So I did. I did it basically because it was the only
time a professor had ever shown an interest in me or my talents. So I had a
philosophy degree to show for it.

"What will you do with a philosophy degree?!" was the standard reply of most
of my family. "I dunno" was my standard reply. Looking back, it's apparently a
standard springboard in to law, but I wasn't aware of that path either. I
hated school, and was happy to be done (after a mere 6 years!), but I realized
there were no "philosopher wanted" ads in the paper, which was all I knew
where to look.

Tying it back to the article a bit, the 'career department' was 100% useless -
they didn't even try to help, and two of the people in there said they only
had time to help "real" students. Basically, if you were doing engineering,
they'd place you at GM/Ford/Chrysler at the time - I'm not sure what else they
did there, really.

~~~
derleth
> I'd dropped out of college because I'd failed calculus - twice - and was
> basically told I'd never graduate without passing calculus

One of the biggest pieces of BS is forcing calculus on people who have neither
the need nor the desire to know calculus.

CS majors, for example, would be better served by a Discrete Math course
instead of calculus: That's formal logic (first-order predicate logic, in
specific) along with combinatorics and big-O notations (big-O, big-Theta, big-
Omega, etc.), and some emphasis on writing proofs. If they later decide to
learn calculus, they can either take freshman formula-grind calculus or Real
Analysis, which is where you learn where stuff like the chain rule actually
comes from by deriving calculus from first principles. Real Analysis is a lot
more interesting.

Gradually getting back to my point, the focus on calculus is outdated and at
odds with any STEM program that _isn 't_ exclusively or even primarily about
creating civil engineers and physicists.

~~~
mgkimsal
I've still got a chip on my shoulder about it (or, maybe... some other
humiliation thing going on). From what I could tell, this was a basic general
ed requirement - people getting English degrees were taking it, and passing,
but somehow I _could not get it_. It was quite a depressing period in my life,
and for the life of me I still don't understand how so many people can grasp
something apparently so _basic_ , yet I'm stymied by it. Furthermore, why is
"if a=b and b=c then a=c" stye logic apparently so difficult to others; people
were dropping out of logic 101 saying it was "too hard", but apparently
calculus is 'easy'?

~~~
derleth
Do a Google search on 'algebra vs analysis' (without quotes) and you'll see
that analysis (the broad field of mathematics where calculus lives) and
algebra (the broad field of mathematics where the kind of logic you likely
studied lives) are two different _mindsets_ more than anything else. Different
kinds of mathematicians are attracted to each of those fields.

This is, of course, another reason why calculus shouldn't be the barrier
course (you can't graduate without it!) that it is. Some people just don't do
that, and they shouldn't be penalized for it if their field doesn't require
calculus (or any analysis) in the first place.

This thread is interesting:
[http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=619519](http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=619519)

~~~
mgkimsal
thanks!

------
NN88
While this article did a great job extolling Andy Chan it did nothing to
answer the question, How to Get a Job With a Philosophy Degree.

~~~
peterashford
I have a philosophy degree and a job in software engineering. I don't think
it's like trying to get a job with Leprosy, or anything.

------
stephnexus
I went to college more than 15 years ago at a top-25 ranked school. Unlike in
this article, one of the defining characteristics of my college experience
(and one of the reasons I chose that college) was that no one asked anyone how
they did on their SATs or how they were doing in class.

There was no implicit academic ranking or pressure. It was each person's
individual choice to work extremely hard, to work the required amount, or to
slack off, and all three choices were viewed as valid.

I also didn't feel so much pressure to study something with the sole end goal
of making money. I understand why that's changed for millennials, although I
think it's unfortunate. Maybe a solution would be for schools to support more
double liberal-arts/STEM majors?

On the good side, the career services described in the article are leaps and
bounds ahead of the career services I received at college. If those have
improved, it's a big step in the right direction.

------
arota
I was a philosophy major and I now work as a software developer. While my
primary goal in studying philosophy wasn't to improve my chances at getting a
job, my studies certainly prepared me for the problems I would face as a
professional developer.

Learning how to think logically, approach complex problems, and structure
coherent arguments, are important skills that you gain from studying
philosophy. Perhaps this is why the mid-career median salary for a philosophy
major is, according to PayScale Inc., more than that of several other science
or business related majors (with only a bachelor's degree, 10 years after
graduation) [1].

As an aside, philosophy and computer science aren't as unrelated as one might
think; there are some interesting scholarly works that examine the
philosophical foundations and implications of topics in computer science
(android epistemology [2] is a good example).

[Unfortunately this comment is related more to the article title than the
article content since the latter does not address this topic directly.]

[1] [http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-
Degree...](http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-
Degrees_that_Pay_you_Back-sort.html) [2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_epistemology](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_epistemology)

~~~
pmiller2
>philosophy and computer science aren't as unrelated as one might think;

There is some interesting category theory and set theory being done in
philosophy departments.

~~~
lists
You weren't be referring to Quentin Meillassoux would you?

------
menssen
Obvious man is obvious: learn to program.

Seriously though, there is an immense amount of overlap between formal logic
and computer science. I learned most of what I know about Turing machines and
computability theory from Philosophy classes.

FWIW, this on my résumé has served me well:

Undergraduate Philosophy at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. This
would say "BA," but I abandoned the American higher education system one
credit (senior paper) away from graduating. Happy to talk to (or rant at) you
about it.

------
shanac
I went to one of the schools mentioned, and am active in alumni affairs in my
city. I also have a liberal arts degree.

I don't think these numbers work. And I see it in the fact that alumni affairs
is beefing up its career services portion of its events. There is a
recognition that if donations are to continue, then understanding that the
careers they were sending kids off to based on prestige are slowly
disappearing, and that the adults that had those careers are starting to
transition into something else.

I'm also not 100% convinced that career offices at liberal arts schools are
prepared for this. While I'm actually fairly happy with what I learned
(because I can see it taught me to both think analytically about various
subjects and communicate what I thought), I also can see that the traditional
preparation has absolutely nothing to do with the well paying jobs out there.
Further, when I finally figured out some ideas of what I was interested in
late in college, my career office actually had no idea how these positions
work or what they are like in real life.

I'm not sure they still do either, based on other times I've interacted with
graduates. Many of them fell into what they did based on their connections
(which all the schools mentioned provide, no doubt), including myself, at
times. Based off resumes I've seen, particularly for technical marketing type
roles (which I've seen more of, so I can comment about that), the internships
don't seem to fully provide a good glimpse of what they know (and can vary
hugely), or if they fully understand what goes on in these positions. Further,
internships up until recently mattered very little - as the school could
provide connections.

Weirdly, I don't blame the school at all. I'm more appalled that they admitted
to me at graduation that I should take an unpaid internship (height of the
recession) because they figured that most students could afford to effectively
work their first jobs unpaid to get skills for jobs they don't know how to
connect people to. This is not going to change until they get more alumni with
a wider range skills, so, hence, above.

TL:DR Schools are doing this because up until now they could send their kids
into jobs. Now well-paid careers are shifting, and they can't. This matches up
with the rise of internships and stories like these. Meh.

------
fennecfoxen
Anecdote: the Wake Forest University career-services department was not of
very much use finding a job programming computers in 2007. A job ad from the
(now-defunct) "Hidden Network" on the side of
[http://thedailywtf.com](http://thedailywtf.com), though, was incredibly
useful. Your mileage may vary. :P

~~~
abat
The article is about the changes Andy Chan did to improve Wake Forest's career
services. He joined the university in 2009 two year after your experience.

Let's hope his changes mean more recent students got more help.

------
f4stjack
Let me tell you what I did to get a job with a philosophy (and a sociology
m.a.) degree:

\- took a programming specialist course (this is how they are calling it over
here)

\- found a job

\- profit

The fancy thing is philosophy is not a technical profession, like medicine or
engineering, and I dare say it does not have the aim of making its students to
"get a job". You can write books and maybe be another Zizek but more often,
you do not do that, or rather cannot do that because life wants you to find a
job and get your own life ASAP.

Which sucks, sucks because if I am doing a job which is totally unrelated to
the education I have taken, why did I lose all that time and money? To get a
piece of paper?

~~~
rquantz
You think programming is unrelated to philosophy? If it was any good, you
hopefully spent a lot of time learning how to break arguments into their
constituent parts and follow them to their logical conclusions. You learned
how to read closely, and how to write. In other words, you learned how to
think.

I don't know why Americans seem so confused about the purpose of education, as
if you're a failure if you don't leave school and proceed to do exactly what
you were doing in school, except getting paid for it. The purpose of school is
to is to turn people into intellectually nimble citizens of a democracy.
Whatever you then go on to get paid to do, your education was only useless if
it failed at that.

~~~
quanticle
It has to do with the rising costs of a college education. If you or your
parents are going to pay the equivalent of a single family home to a school
for a four year degree, you had better have something concrete to point to at
the end of it. "Intellectually nimble citizen of a democracy" does not cut it.

~~~
ohyes
Actually, you haven't established guidelines for what would "cut it."
'Concrete' is extremely vague, so the ball is in your court there.

If you mean 'a degree that will guarantee me a job,' you are SOL there buddy.
A dearth of engineers would mean rising unemployment for engineers. (We
currently have a glut of unemployed lawyers, for god's sake, no reason that
couldn't happen to computer scientists or mechanical engineers if a trend
started).

Being able to communicate, reason, and argue better than 99.9% of my peers
with traditional CS degrees is in fact a concrete advantage.

------
corporalagumbo
_Sitting near the front of the auditorium were the parents of a freshman — an
investment manager from Bronxville, N.Y., and his wife. The father went to
Dartmouth, and when their son announced that he was applying for early
decision at Wake Forest, his father asked, “Are you sure you couldn’t do
better?” Under the spell of Chan’s reassuring message on finding a career, he
turned to his wife and looked at her intently. “This,” he told her, “is the
greatest school.”_

Wait, what?

~~~
jonnathanson
It's a little confusingly worded. There are two time periods being condensed
in that cluster of sentences. T1 = when the kid first applied for college and
told his father about wanting to go to Wake Forest, prompting the father's
dismissive comments; T2 = when the son, now a freshman _at_ the school, shows
his parents around.

That last sentence is also a little sloppy in its pronoun use: "he" is
referring to the father, when it could conceivably (as written) be referring
to the son.

~~~
corporalagumbo
Thanks, that clears it up. I suppose we can't really complain about poor
proofing, seeing as they are giving away this content for free.

~~~
matthewowen
I can't really see a reason to object to the proofing - it seemed pretty clear
to me that two points in time were being contrasted.

------
skidoo
Very interesting thoughts there. I have an uncle who has taught Philosophy at
the University level at one of those ivy-eating colleges in Massachusetts for
over twenty years. He's fond of saying that Philosophy is a dead science, that
nothing new has come from that world since the middle of the 1900s. I tell him
to watch more of the older HBO comedy specials. Or read comic books.

------
algebr
Hmm, another philosophy degree holder here.

The degree has helped me very little in getting a job. I mean, the most it did
was strike up some conversation during my job interviews, but that's about
it...and that's okay.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of philosophy to my day-time coding, as trite as
this might sound, is that it helps me think clearly and in a structured way.

~~~
stephnexus
That doesn't sound trite.

At Purdue CERIAS, the philosophy and linguistics departments are official
granters of its Information Security masters degree, along with the technology
school.

[http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/site/education/graduate_program...](http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/site/education/graduate_program/interdisciplinary_requirements/)

------
rubiquity
The title of this post should be "Pimping Wake Forest and Andy Chan." It's
good to see universities put an emphasis on how to translate studies to a
career but this article doesn't explain any of the approaches other than that
Andy Chan used to work at Stanford and a Silicon Valley start up. Maybe I
missed the bigger point.

------
FlailFast
Andy was the man at Stanford...and I'm guessing this is his attempt to prove
that he doesn't need the "Stanford brand" to work his career advising magic.
Will be interesting to see if other schools follow Wake's lead here and adopt
a more b-schooly approach to career services (for better or for worse).

------
_sh
Here's how I started with my freshly-minted philosophy degree:

"Philosophy teaches abstract thinking--how to manipulate and reason about
purely abstract concepts; how to logically construct and analyse models of
world (and being-in-the-world)."

I probably kissed a little arse too.

------
alexeisadeski3
The purpose of a liberal arts degree is unrelated to finding gainful
employment. If one wants to improve their job prospects, they should probably
just get a job.

------
apu
Or you could become Paul Graham =)

------
TruthElixirX
>On a Friday in late August, parents of freshmen starting at Wake Forest
University, a small, prestigious liberal-arts school in Winston-Salem, N.C.,
attended orientation sessions that coached them on how to separate,
discouraged them from contacting their children’s professors and assured them
about student safety. Finally, as their portion of orientation drew to a
close, the parents joined their students in learning the school song and then
were instructed to form a huge ring around the collective freshman class, in a
show of support.

Just right off the bat, what the fuck? My start to my college career was me
and my mom lugging my stuff 300 miles to the dorms, unloading, her hugging me
good bye, then not seeing her again for 2 months.

~~~
seiji
Key words: "small, prestigious"

~~~
positr0n
Extremely similar talks to parents trying to disuade them from helicoptering
happened to me at orientation for Texas A&M in 2008, and my sister at Texas
Tech in 2013. These are two not particularly prestigious and definitely not
small schools, so I think it's a pretty nationwide phenomenon.

