“So what are you going to do with your liberal arts degree?” This is a question almost every liberal arts major has heard about a thousand times in their college career. When you yourself aren’t really sure what you want to do with your major the question can send you straight into a panic attack. Don’t let this stop you from studying something you are passionate about. It’s okay not to know exactly what you want to do career wise. In fact a liberal arts degree prepares you for a broad range of careers. A liberal arts degree is useful for marketing, consulting, business, law, teaching, human resources, and much more. It is helpful to understand what skills your liberal arts degree is giving you so you can better market yourself when you graduate college. Here are the skills you learn as liberal arts major and tips to make yourself even more marketable in the workforce.
Skills
Perusing a Liberal Arts degree improves your writing skills
The ability to write well will always be valuable, this is not going to change anytime soon. As a liberal arts major your curriculum is filled with papers, papers, and yep more papers.You will write research papers, argumentative papers, and more. If you enjoyed certain topics and did particularly well on some of those papers keep it on file, often employers like to see a sample of your writing and those papers will come in handy.
A Liberal Arts degree will teach you how to track trends
This skill is often over looked. Especially if you are perusing a degree in history or art history when you study different periods of time you learn how to understand how different actions, laws, regimes, and social movements lead to other actions, laws, regimes, and social movements. Many jobs in business and marketing need people with a strong ability to forecast and predict future consumer trends and you have already learned this skill.
Understanding People
You will most likely work with people. There are very careers I can think of where you don’t interact with others. The ability to work well in a team and network efficiently is a necessary skill. Liberal arts degrees teach you about culture and communication which helps your people skills. You often do a good amount of public speaking and presentations to present your ideas in liberal arts programs. This will make you more comfortable with public speaking and communicating with large groups of people.
Tips on how to give yourself an edge
Internship, internships, internships
The first one may be tricky because of the stereotypes that exist about liberal arts majors, but keep applying. Your first internship is also tough to land because you may also have little to no work experience. Most of the time people recieve their first internship through a friend or a family friend so be sure to ask with them if they know anyone looking for an intern and from there you will have the experience to explore more.
Learn hard skills on your free time
Try to pick up a hard skill as a hobby. Learn HTML, Photoshop, Finalcut Pro, iMovie, Keynote, or another language. If you like to write start a blog. It’s great to practice writing and is an excellent addition to a resume. If you like photography get a flickr account and learn Photoshop. You can also try to learn another language. Pop a language CD in your car for long drives or watch soap operas in a different language.
Grad School
A liberal arts degree is perfect for grad school they prepare you with the a wide range of skills in writing, critical thinking, creative thinking, and problem solving that would allow you to be successful in law school, research, education, and more.
Minor
You can pick up a more “practical” minor as well. Accounting is an extremly hirable minor to have. It is also a good idea to minor in a language. Spanish and Mandarin speakers are being sought after by hundreds of employers so it would be useful to minor in one of those subjects if it is something you enjoy