truly useless?

Today is going to be a double header, since it's been so long since i've blogged. I was on twitter today with a vengeance, for reasons that will not be disclosed, and while looking through my timeline, I saw an article on Clutch Magazine (clutchmagonline.com) titled "I Have A Useless Degree". Now keep in mind, I'm writing this post before reading the actual article so I do not know with certainty what the article says, but of course, with a title like that, one can guess. Anyway, just reading the title got me to thinking about my degree. For those of you who do not know, the official title of my major is Conservation and Resource Studies and the emphasis is Environmental Development and Urban Welfare which you can read about here. Briefly, I studied and continue to study the lack of green spaces in communities of color and how this lack manifests in economic, social, and educational spheres. After reading the article title, my first thought was "no degree is useless" and then I began to think back on some conversations I've had since graduating with friends and family.

The question of what are you going to do with that major really set in and began to be asked more and more of family and of myself. The ultimate question I had to ask myself is, is this degree actually useless? Does anyone else care about this? And finally, how can I make them? To think that your degree is useless is to misunderstand what it actually means. It's always been my belief that your major, and your grades do not define what you know nor do they depict who you are. Yes, I do believe that hard science majors, and math-based majors do have a more directed path for post-undergrad life than humanities majors, but I disagree that either is better than the other. I've heard many times, of people who have degrees in something completely unrelated to what they do, and what they love; I think my degree is wholly reflective of just that. I love my community, and all that I do works towards bettering these communities. However, I do not yet have a job nor do I have a delineated path of how to get where I want to go, but I would never feel justified or correct in saying that my degree is useless.

College nurtured my thinking and critical reasoning, encouraged me to ask the right questions and challenge institutions. I did not go to college to get a job, I had a job in high school. I went to college to learn more about myself and how my talents and ideas would help to shape the world as it is into a world that exists as it should. The person that left college is a person that is equipped with the mindset and the challenge of contributing positively to this world in efforts of creating a new one. Because I am not bound by what my degree says, but instead by what I learned through it, there has been nothing useless about my college career. I charge you to think about what you learned in college, what you held on to, and what challenged you the most. Take your experiences and your knowledge and use it, as Tim Gunn would say, "make it work"