As a former college English major, I’ve been alarmed by recent newspaper and magazine articles about the dwindling number of undergraduate students following that path—or any other humanities discipline—to a degree. Everyone, it seems, is chasing STEM in the hopes of lucrative employment in our tech-driven future. Maybe they’re right and I’m wrong, but I’ve always believed that a degree in English, History, and the like, prepared you as a critical thinker and a lifelong learner—skills that help you keep your abilities fresh and marketable through a lifetime of career gyrations and reinventions.
I’ve believed similarly about architecture degrees—that they forge a unique bridge between left brain and right brain, preparing you to approach every undertaking with the problem-solving superpower of design thinking. You might not ultimately apply those skills to buildings, but nearly everything in our world could benefit from improved aesthetics and function—or complete reinvention from top to bottom.
I understand that, given the expense of secondary and beyond education these days, there’s enormous pressure to secure a return on the investment as quickly as possible upon graduation. This is especially true for immigrants to the U.S. or first-generation college attendees. But locking in specific career trajectories so early on and divorcing them from any true passion for the subject matter seems like a recipe for lasting job dissatisfaction and perhaps even middling performance in those careers. Passion is the engine that drives innovation and achievement.
Yes, we all need to find a way to reliably feed and house ourselves, but I’d argue that trained creative thinkers are more likely to adapt to changes in what the world needs from us. Today’s highly specific STEM major might prove to be a moribund field in 10 years, as we veer off in another more promising direction. Dead ends happen all the time. Maybe a chatbot really could write this column now or in a couple of years.
But can a chatbot tap into a flow state that synthesizes a lifetime of learning, observation, and practice into something cogent and transformative? Or is that a uniquely human ability facilitated by education in the arts and humanities? How often have you tapped that flow while you were drawing or absorbing other work by inspiring architects?
Inspiration may in fact be our greatest quality as human beings, along with the potential to act on it and invent something new, valuable, beautiful. I admire architects not just for their own sensibilities and what they can generate from them, but also their talent for eliciting creativity, skills, and problem solving from other collaborating disciplines—the metalworker, the finish carpenter, the structural engineer.
Nothing is more powerful than the capacity to be inspired and to inspire others, helping us all to reach heights we thought were beyond us. In fact, it’s unquantifiable.