What can you do with a major in Classics? Anything! The Classics major, like other majors in Columbia and Barnard colleges, is not designed to be a pre-professional training, and while some of our students go on to become professional Classicists, most use the education they receive to help them succeed in a diverse range of fields unconnected with their major. Like students who major in other subjects, Classics majors become doctors, farmers, lawyers, writers, executives, chefs, teachers, social workers, politicians, entrepreneurs, and anything else they choose.The importance of an undergraduate education is primarily to train a student’s mind to cope with the challenges it will meet later, and only secondarily to fill that mind with any particular set of facts. Since all major programs at Barnard and Columbia have been designed to provide similar benefits, we believe that students should choose their fields of study based on their interests. For many people, the undergraduate years offer the only chance they ever have to explore the subjects which really fascinate them, and we hope that every student at Columbia and Barnard will take full advantage of that opportunity.
Having said that, we believe that the particular training offered by the Classics program will be more useful than most others when it comes to success later in life. Classics is a difficult subject, and students who have mastered Latin and Greek will find other intellectual challenges much less daunting than people who have never learned anything quite so difficult. Classics graduates know how to absorb large quantities of information quickly, retain it, and use it rapidly. They know how to analyse and interpret, to pay attention to details without losing track of the big picture, and to relate a work or event to its context. They have the kind of thorough understanding of grammar that only a training in Latin and Greek can give, and that understanding is reflected in the high quality of their English writing. Having been taught for four years in small classes by professors who know them as individuals and want them to succeed, they have received an education tailored to their own needs and goals. They also have the ability to read some of the world’s greatest literature in its original form, and at times when the task of earning a living seems tedious and uninspiring, many Classics graduates are very glad to have access to the riches of ancient literature, as well as to the many later works which cannot be fully appreciated without a substantial background in the ancient world. In addition, on a crasser level, Classics degrees are highly respected by law schools, medical schools, and employers.
——. I remember clearly graduating with my BSME and one of our professors told us that everything we had learned in four years wasn’t very valuable to us...but we had learned a way to approach and solve a problem.——
I wish someone told me that before I got my BSME. But I’ve come to the same conclusion.
Peter Kreeft, a preeminent advocate of Socratic logic and Catholic theology, has said that students who major in the hard sciences are better suited to studying classic philosophers, like Aristotle and Aquinas,because they believe in, and have the habit of searching for, objective truth.
If modern liberal arts teaches anything, it is skepticism.
But a truly classical education is worth its weight in gold.
The daughter of a life long friend graduated yesterday from St. John’s in Annapolis. Among the classics, she learned geometry from Euclid in Greek and calculus from Sir Isaac Newton.
To the point, I’m convinced she learned how to learn.
Priceless.