One of my more popular posts was All Degrees Are Useless, To An Extent, posted roughly three and a half years ago and detailing my frustrations with being an English major. I’ve had my doubts, I’ve wondered if I made the right choice. I love literature, and developing my writing and my ability to analyze and think critically (a phrase that seems to carry little meaning on the surface) has done more to help me in all aspects of my life than programming or examining rocks ever did.
I love the sciences, and mathematics especially has a way of bringing out a kind of childish excitement and curiosity. For me, it’s all about solving problems, understanding the world around me, finding things out, and reasoning through to find an acceptable explanation. When I was in high school, Biology was one of my favorite subjects, and I remember begging my teacher to let me do extra work (she declined, saying that I already had the highest grade and there was no point in doing extra work). I was delighted by Physical Science (the intermediary between general science and proper Physics) because of the way it allowed me to investigate and understand the physical world around me.
I came late to my love of English and literature. I had always loved reading, but memorizing vocabulary words and writing short essays didn’t excite me. High school English courses were more about rote memorization and filling out worksheets (who are the main characters? why is Sally’s dress blue? what is the significance of the green light at the end of the docks that Gatsby sees when he looks towards Daisy’s house?). There was no real investigation or insight into the works we read, so I got bored and I looked to other fields of interest. When I finally got to college, I found that I actually did excel in literature, and it was so much more than reading and memorizing and loving Shakespeare. But, as I quickly found out (and later blogged), the arts (fine arts and liberal arts) are very much discouraged as being “hobbies,” and not altogether useful.
One of the many things about the liberal arts that gets overlooked is the focus on developing analytical skills, as well as writing and speaking skills. People see philosophy classes as frivolous, but the courses in ethics, critical thinking, and metaphysics that I took were invaluable to me because of the focus on thinking beyond what’s on the page. It’s an exercise in “reading between the lines,” if you will. Logic, too, is invaluable for people wanting to develop proper skills in constructing an argument. My literature courses, however, have proven extremely valuable to me as an accounting major. Mathematics, it’s true, prepared me well for the mathematical portion of this degree (valuing financial instruments, time value of money, and the like–it’s all algebra and calculus). But mathematics can only go so far in preparing you to read long, dry financial statements, researching the history of accounting for a financial instrument, and then being able to present a clear, concise, well-organized paper (or memo) regarding the subject.
So when people ask me how much of a stretch it is to go from English to Accounting, I tell them it isn’t much. I was already good at math, I was already an excellent reader. But a background in liberal arts did more to help me prepare for a degree in Accounting than a degree in mathematics would have. Accounting is partly a social science that demands understanding of how people work, what they need, and how to organize information to best reflect how that information is used. It’s also partly a mathematical science, since you can’t understand time value of money equations or the Black-Scholes pricing model if you don’t understand at least basic calculus. But I’ve noted that people who don’t write well, and people who don’t read well–people who didn’t invest time into taking writing and literature courses, or philosophy or history–don’t do as well as the people who do excel at writing, who have had at least some background in the liberal arts.
It’s been a little more than three years since I wrote that post griping about the misunderstandings of the liberal arts. Now, I’m more glad than ever that I went through with both the BA and the MLA in literature. I’ve found those degrees more useful than not in the MS in Accounting.
I’m sure that not everyone will find such a degree plan useful. There are a number of major/minor combinations I could have had that would have been equally useful if I wanted to end up with an MSA: English with a mathematics or business minor; Business with a philosophy or literature minor; Business and mathematics. Any of them could have been just as useful to me as an accountant, but that’s knowing my own intellectual strengths and weaknesses. However, I think that, in my own experience, I have easily proven to my fellow business majors that a degree in liberal arts is not, in fact, useless. Certainly my 4.0 GPA is proof enough that I am capable of performing just as well with my BA as my BBA [Bachelor of Business Administration] counterparts.
When I started my MBA, I was shocked at how much time was given over to communications. Clearly there is a legitimate need to teach communications, as business communications are a very particular beast. However, I quickly realized that a good deal of what was being taught was more about analyzing and breaking down complex business information and turning it into something that could be communicated. And the reason they had to teach this was because I was in a class full of people who had eschewed getting art history BAs like myself, and had therefore not been taught how to analyze a picture, develop an idea about it, break the idea down into logical parts, and present it (with footnotes) in such a way as to pass one’s class in Rococo and Neo-Classical painting.
OK I exaggerate. But my liberal arts degree, combined with the professional writing I subsequently did, made that part of B-school a breeze. The only math that really challenged me was the stats–but now I can do a monte carlo simulation as easily as I can write a report.