One challenge of professional development for college students: there has never been so much information at your fingertips, and yet, it can be overwhelming to sift through it all. Where to start?
Whether you’re already a humanities major, or just humanities-curious, below you’ll find a curated set of resources that can help you make connections between your humanities skills and experiences and your professional goals.
“What Are You Going to Do with That?” Podcast
This podcast provides a window into the lives of humanities majors, exploring why they chose to study what they studied and how those choices have manifested throughout their lives after graduating from college.
Study the Humanities Toolkit
Looking for facts about how the humanities prepare you for life after graduation? This resource provides an excellent set of data, complete with reams of graphs and charts, about the many ways humanities majors thrive both in college and after.
“What Can I Do With a Major In…?” Resource
This incredibly thorough tool from UC-Berkeley allows you to select a major from an exhaustive list and then explore the types of industries those majors go on to work in along with specific strategies for building sought-after skills in those fields while you’re still in college.
O*Net Interest Profiler
Maybe you’re not quite ready to declare a major yet and need help identifying your interests. Or maybe you just want a little confirmation that you’re on the right track with what you’re studying. Either way, this tool can help you learn about yourself and what you most want out of a career. The survey takes about 10 minutes and then provides you with a list of potential career options and details on each industry and job.
UP LinkedIn Alumni Page
Love it or hate it, LinkedIn provides a wealth of information for humanities majors who would like to learn about and connect with UP humanities alumni. You can search by major, career industry, location, and number of years since graduation. You’ll need to create a LinkedIn account if you don’t have one already and then join two groups–the Pilots Guiding Pilots LinkedIn page and the official UP Alumni LinkedIn page–which will allow you to message alumni directly from the site. Use this handy tip sheet for navigating the sometimes byzantine world of LinkedIn.
“How to Apply Humanities Mindsets to Your Career Development”
In popular culture the humanities are often framed as at best, disconnected from, and at worst, antithetical to, developing a successful career. This article from Columbia University flips that script and instead provides concrete methods and examples for how your humanities education in fact provides excellent tools for your personal and professional development.
“Humanities Skills for the Job Search: Close Reading for Analyzing Job Descriptions”
This article from Columbia University builds on the idea that the humanities offer excellent skills for career management by bringing together the specific skill of close reading with the genre of the job listing. The author provides practical tips for how to interpret listings and use them to craft your own job market materials. See also their 2-part series on using your humanities skills for interviewing: “Your Persuasion-Ready Pitch: How Rhetoric Can Help You Craft Your Appeal to Employers” and “Your Persuasion-Ready Pitch: Applying Your Understanding of the Employer in Applications, Networking, and Interviews.”
The RATE Tool
This tool, available to all UP students, is particularly valuable for humanities majors interested in learning how to articulate how what they’re learning in their coursework and their co-curricular activities translates to the core competencies that employers value the most.
