In Defense of a Degree
There is this one scene from the Simpsons, countless seasons ago, that I replay in my head probably about once a month: a football player is carried off the field with a gruesome, career ending injury. He turns to Dr. Hibbert and insists, emphatically, that he must be able to continue playing. Hibbert shrugs him off, saying “oh I’m sure you can fall back on your degree in… *gasp* COMMUNICATIONS?! Oh lord!” The player sullenly responds, “I know, is phony major! I learned nothing…NOTHING!!!”
That clip haunted me throughout my undergraduate years as I pursued a degree in…communications. And let’s be honest here, communications degrees and the people who hold them do have a certain reputation, although that reputation (as I frequently remind myself) was largely conceived by outsiders without a clear understanding of what a communications degree actually entails and don’t usually make it past the name, which admittedly is a little vague. It’s also fair to note that, while I was a student at one of the most well-respected communications programs in North America, that mileage definitely varies as to the true value of a coms degree from institution to institution. But that’s just it, right? VALUE, real or perceived, tends to be the measure by which many, if not most post-secondary programs are judged.
But what are the standards for that? And who sets them? Is it your likelihood to be hired after graduation? Perhaps, but plenty of people obtain jobs and work long and fruitful careers without a bachelors degree. Is it the skills you hone as part of an intensive, dedicated course of study? Sure, in some cases, but definitely not all. How about the average annual income of those with the same degree? Now we’re getting warmer. None of that really matters at this point — I’ve been out of college nearly five times as long as I was in it.
However, as I make my way through my second decade of post-undergrad life, I often look back at my time in undergrad and wonder what I actually took from it — what value my degree has FOR ME. And more and more, especially as of late, I can say definitively that not only did I learn something, but that I apply what I learned almost every single day…just not in any of the ways I could’ve anticipated when I was 22.
Before I get to that, though, lets take a second for some backstory: the year was 2004 and all I wanted to be in the world was a filmmaker. I had aced my way through all of my high school’s film production classes, making a lifelong friend out of my teacher in the process, and was set to unofficially TA those classes in the fall (provided I could adequately lie my way out of gym). At the same time, like every other rising high school senior around the country, I was thinking about the university application process as well. Naturally, the big ticket schools — your Tisch’s and UCLA’s — where a job in the industry was (allegedly) all but guaranteed upon graduation caught my young eye quickly. When it became clear that my family’s financial situation (and my math grades) made attending that top tier a fantasy, I started to look at what else was out there.
My sister suggested, strongly, that I check out the lesser known but nonetheless academically strong school she attended, a large liberal arts university in Montreal. She also suggested, strongly again, that I set my eyes on the communications program there rather than the film program. When I pushed back, she very convincingly pointed out that I could study plenty of film production as part of a communications degree IN ADDITION to other subjects that would make me more well-rounded and employable upon graduation. (This fact is HIGHLY debatable in retrospect, but it made sense at the time.)
I applied, was one of only 150 students accepted into the program that year, and spent the next four years immersed in the worlds of media production (film, but also television, audio, and digital media), media literacy, semiotics, marketing, licensing, and whatever other courses I could take to expand my knowledge and pad my resume, including a healthy number of history, religious studies, and sociology electives (just in case).
By the time I reached graduation, I also reached the conclusion that many had been too kind to point out to me beforehand: I was not going to be moving on to a professional career as a filmmaker.
Were there jobs I could have obtained in the industry? Sure. Were they jobs that enabled me to be creative in any way? Nope. This lined up with the narrative just about every alumna of my program told me: I could make a go of it in the industry, but I’d likely, barring some obscene luck, just end up making some asshole his coffee for 10 years before looking to switch careers. My dream of seeing my ideas make it to the silver screen was over*, my soul was more than a little bruised, and my job prospects were uncertain. But I did still have a wide range of knowledge accumulated over four years bouncing around my head that, surely, I could put to use in some way.
As luck would have it, my former film teacher had just moved to LA to pursue HIS dream and there was a vacancy teaching film production at my high school alma mater that I quickly made a play for and was hired to fill. I quickly expanded my portfolio at the school, taking on roles in the special programming, advisory, and student life departments as well. Over the next five years, I somewhat unexpectedly fell in love with teaching. What I had originally viewed as a lifeline or a means to an end very quickly became a path to joy and career fulfillment. I would eventually go on to obtain my Masters in Teaching and licensure to teach middle and high school history (Remember those electives? Not so useless, it turns out!) and have been teaching Middle School Social Studies ever since.
I wake up excited and come home happy almost every single day, and the fact that I do so while teaching a notoriously challenging age group makes my success even more palpable. That said, I haven’t so much as touched a camera or written a script treatment in years. So there we have it, right? An extended reevaluation of my priorities followed by a career change, just as the prophecy foretold.
Except that isn’t really the end of the story. The more I think about my day to day life as a teacher, the more I realize that my level of success in this field is connected, in no small part, not only to my masters degree, but directly to my bachelors degree as well.
First and foremost, to effectively teach history in the 21st century, one cannot view it as a set of disparate names and dates presented in a vacuum. This may seem obvious (although experience with countless curricula has taught me it is not), but history must be TOLD LIKE A STORY — with memorable set-ups and strong continuity and compelling characters — and PRESENTED LIKE A MOVIE, with engaging presentation skills, strong public speaking, and more than a little humor. Teaching is a performance, the classroom is a stage, and the kids are the most important audience you can have. Teachers who remember those things are the ones who are remembered and whose classroom content is retained.
While some of my classroom showmanship is an extension of my naturally bombastic personality, much of my teaching, lesson planning, and classroom management style directly mimics the way I used to plot out scripts, organize productions, and write elevator pitches. Organization, empathy, active listening, and professional rigor can be applied in infinite ways, and I obtained all of that during undergrad.
Furthermore, history education and multiple narrative theory are inseparable in the modern era of education. Which is to say, there is no one narrative or acceptable version of history (despite what certain states would have you believe) and the reality is that the Eurocentric version of the colonization of the Americas that most people learn (for example) is a woefully incomplete narrative. Sure, you can teach kids some names and dates and flat anecdotes about freedom when teaching the American Revolution, but if you really want them to UNDERSTAND those events and their impact on our lives today (which should be every history teacher’s goal), you have to look at indigenous narratives and the stories of the enslaved as well. It is only though exploring, and subsequently questioning, as many narratives as possible that we truly begin to understand the totality of the past. We need to know not only what different voices say about the past, but why and how they say what they say and their motivations behind doing so — what is their agenda, what are they trying to prove? There is another name for this type of logical reasoning and practiced research: Semiotics, or the study of encoded messages within media and a cornerstone of any communications degree worth the money one pays for it. Another win for the ol’ undergrad diploma.
In case it was not clear before now, I tend to perseverate a lot — usually to my own detriment. However, the clip with which I opened this piece is not the only snapshot of my undergraduate years that I return to with regularity. In fact, this last one may be the most important and far reaching. On my very first day of university, within the first ten minutes of my first class — Introduction to Digital Media — my professor held up our recently-published textbook and said in a tone of seriousness that the industry was moving so quickly that some of what we learned that semester might be obsolete by the time we reached our final projects. Now, glass half empty this statement might’ve cast a shadow on our learning, making one think that no matter how hard we worked that we were destined to always be one step behind the industry we wanted to join. However, glass half full? This statement is a call to perform every action that is central to a good education: to leave our minds malleable rather than firm, to always be curious, and to accept that there will always be more to learn and to embrace that fact. I never did ask my teacher which version he was thinking of when he told us that, but I decided to go with the latter and it is those lessons I seek to build into every lesson and unit plan I write, assignment I give, discussion I lead, and presentation I make; to infuse my students with a radical sense of wonder and possibility, or barring that at least a fully engaged curiosity muscle. I consider this far more important than any particular content I teach in a given year, and without my Coms degree, it would have never even occurred to me.
All of the above to say that the usefulness and value of a degree comes not from what it is, but what it enables us to do. And even though my career has taken me far from the media world, the lessons I learned and skills I developed there serve me day in and day out. I realize I am, perhaps, the exception to the rule given the number of coms majors who leave their programs with a much more limited skillset, but the next time you read a resume and come across a communications degree, or any other non-traditional degree or certificate for that matter, don’t scoff; you have no idea the work that was put into that degree, or the skills that person is taking away from it.
Phony major? I think not.
(*In 2013, four years into my teaching career, several friends and I made it to the final round of a local 48 hour film competition and I did, indeed, get to see something I wrote and directed on the big screen. So that was cool.)
