Every time I tell someone that my major is Classics, I get the same question*--"Classics? What are you going to do with that?" I usually say I'll probably end up teaching. But, as you can imagine, I get a lot of conflicting information about the difficulty of finding a job with a humanities major.
There are the cheerleaders. These tend to be people involved in my education somehow, who are always eager to assure me that the education I'm paying exorbitant amounts of money for really is worth something. And there are the nay-sayers. Those tend to be unconnected outsiders who want to deliver a 'dose of reality'.
My family varies in opinion. My mom is convinced I'll be fine. My dad keeps saying that I should find a high-paying job, but I really don't think he understands higher education very well. I'm a first generation college student--they want me to do well. I don't mind--I want myself to do well too. I'm going to have major loans to pay off once I get out of this place.
Right now, I'm thinking I'll join the Peace Corps after I graduate. If I do that, I'll be able to get 15% of one of my loans forgiven**. After that . . . well, right now, I'm looking at grad school, and then going on to become a professor.
Trouble is, I'm not sure I want to be a Classics professor. I'm somewhat disillusioned with Classics. It all feels so disconnected from reality--it's really the epitome of scholarship for scholarship's sake.
Actually, what I'd really like to do is write books. Maybe not novels--I've actually got a growing interest in non-fiction. Maybe it's from spending so long blogging. I'm 21. I started blogging six years ago. Six years isn't a long time, but still, that's--what, a quarter of my life? And if you figure in that I started keeping a journal when I was 13, it's closer to half. It's gotten me used to writing, even if I don't write a lot of fiction.
Non-fiction writing could also give me a chance to use my degree, and maybe to get back to what made me love the Classics in the first place. There's a passage at the beginning of Livy's History of Rome:
"The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid."
That passage inspired me so much in high school. That's what I care about. And that's not what Classics is about. Here, we have to be "serious" scholars, and only think about what the texts tell us about the authors, or the society, or even about the texts themselves! We don't even get to just appreciate the texts for their own beauty--if we admire them, we're supposed to admire them for how cleverly the author incorporated so many themes and metaphors, etc. etc. etc.
I know all this, and yet I find myself well on the way to becoming this thing I find so distasteful. I'm thinking--what if I could write books that explore the things in Classics that I care about? Obviously, I couldn't pass them off as "serious" scholarship, but the only people who read "serious" scholarship are more "serious" scholars. If I want to have any sort of affect on the world, that's not the people I want to reach anyway.
I'm not complaining, mind. I'm excited about how many different, exciting things I can do with the rest of my life. I'm just a little worried about doing the wrong ones.
* Well, two questions, actually. The other one is, "What, like Beethoven?" Other variations being, "What, like Dickens?" I've taken to saying, "Classical Studies--Latin and Greek and things like that" to avoid this problem.
** Obviously, that's not my primary reason for wanting to join, but it would be a bonus.
