Dear Arts and Letters Freshman,
As you may have noticed, the fabulous ladies of HCND have dedicated their summer to writing articles that provide detailed advice on how to survive and thrive during your first year at Notre Dame. They’ve written on topics ranging from getting used to gender relations, to choosing a college major, to dressing for success, to pretty much anything you could expect at ND. I guess I just couldn’t resist adding my own two cents as well, specifically to the incoming freshmen in the College of Arts and Letters. The Liberal Arts kids – those who will venture into the wondrous fields of psychology, English, economics, film, and any of the (I don’t know how many) majors Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters has to offer.
Strictly speaking, this isn’t exactly advice, more a person sharing their experience in the College of Arts an Letters at ND.
So, whats it like being a student in the college of Arts and Letters at ND? Well, it’s learning to navigate O’Shag and Debartolo and becoming a bit too familiar with Starbucks. It’s doing more reading, writing, and critical analysis than you thought you could possibly do. It’s becoming familiar with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and JSTOR. It’s crash reading more often than you’d like to because you spent way too much time on Tumblr. It’s relying on John Green’s Crash Course videos in literature and thanking God for the existence of Spark Notes. It means envying the responsible student who writes perfect essays and has never had to endure the process of using caffeine at 3:00 am in an attempt to produce a decent essay.
It’s also about having those professors who make you genuinely fear their class as well as those professors who are ridiculously quotable and make the walk from the other side of campus at 8:00 am during winter worthwhile. It’s discussing and understanding the twenty or thirty something textbooks you bought at the beginning of the year. It’s being given the opportunity to explore your beliefs and the ideas that shape you and the people around you.
It also means getting teased (a lot). It means hearing names like “College of Arts and Crafts,” “College of Arts and Sweaters,” and basically any name that frustrated, sleep depraved, non arts and letters ND students can think of. There are only so many times you want to hear the question: so what exactly do you do with a degree in (insert major that isn’t STEM, business, or architecture)? Did I mention those websites that post those “reasons you shouldn’t study liberal arts” lists become really depressing after a while?
It also means realizing that the world isn’t very kind to humanities majors. Poetry, written expression, and art aren’t considered useful or practical. Many people tend to think that liberal arts majors will end up unemployed and skills such as critical reading and analysis are undervalued. Several times, I’ve found myself questioning my academic choices, whether studying what I loved was worth the uncertainty, and whether what I did even had purpose.
Thoughts like this might occur to you several times throughout the year. Or many. Or not at all. Wherever you are, I hope that you understand while studying humanities you’ll be more than fine. ND has an impressive record in student employment after graduation and you’ll be surprised to realize just how much you can do with an Arts and Letters degree. But most importantly, if you only remember one thing from this article, I hope you remember this: humanities and liberal arts matter. They always have, and they always will. We will always need people who understand history, political science, economics, literature, etc, because we need to understand how we express ourselves, how we tell stories, and how we develop and communicate ideas. Through humanities, we learn to examine the world through unconventional perspectives and ignite social change. People have no idea how much we create and contribute to the world around us. So no matter what you end up doing during your four years at Notre Dame, know that studying liberal arts and social sciences will leave you a better, more educated and socially conscious person.