You may not have noticed, but all the buzz about this campus is firmly situated in our School of Computer Science and Engineering, to which massive conglomerate corporations such as Amazon have been donating tens of millions of dollars.
In fact, the highly competitive nature of the College of Engineering has spurred it to announce a new direct-to-college admissions program, which will begin autumn 2018 and will comprise half of engineering admissions. The ultimate goal is to give prospective engineering students more assurance that they’ll study what they intended to at the UW.
Needless to say, the attractiveness of the UW is not exactly in its wide-spanning liberal arts and humanities programs. Its international pull derives itself mainly from its proximity to major tech companies in the Seattle metropolitan area, such as Microsoft, Valve, and Boeing.
But the UW holds a slew of top-ranked programs by U.S. News & World Report that most wouldn’t consider competitive. Take it as you will, but economics sits at 35, history 23, and sociology 17, just to name a few. Given how relatively small tuition is compared to other top 50 programs, saturated with private colleges and hefty price tags, it makes for a worthwhile consideration.
Take the department of English, which boasts some of the highest enrollments in the College of Arts and Sciences, eight Fulbright Fellowships, a Rhodes scholar, and numerous national endowments from the arts and the humanities.
Personally, given the massive influx of prospective students entering the tech sector after college with the promise of rock walls, nerf gun wars, and six figure salaries, I figured that eventually the market would be overflowing` with applicants, and I didn’t want to be a part of the grinding throughput that would follow. After all, you can’t automate writing, at least not yet.
Now that’s what I call job security.
In all seriousness, we now live in a world dominated by consumerism and by technological innovation, and frankly it’s exciting. We have access to nearly everything we want at any given time and it’s only becoming more ubiquitous.
The School of Drama has a multitude of notable alumni, nine of whom went on to form the Washington Ensemble Theater, which has been praised as “enormously successful”. The point is this: For fellow arts and humanities majors, the future is not as bleak as some jokes would suggest. No, I don’t intend on working at Starbucks when I graduate, and you shouldn’t either.
The point of a degree (nowadays) is to make yourself more marketable for jobs after graduation, and all one has to do is make whatever you study sound more appealing. Perhaps your vast knowledge and experience in writing in your major has prepared you for marketing or public relations. Perhaps your work in acting and stage production won’t land you a movie spot, but rather a position as a producing screenwriter or technical producer in theater.
Any group work or long-form assignment you had to do can be considered an example of project management and organization. The point is that not every degree needs to include an “-ist” for your career. Undergraduate and career advisors will reiterate this point.
Reach writer Zackary Bonser at opinion@dailyuw.com. Twitter: @ZackaryBonser
