Last month, Ke Jie, the world champion of Weiqi, was admitted to Tsinghua University Institute of Business Administration. Some people joked that he should choose artificial intelligence as his major, and he could take revenge on Alpha Dog after graduation. In the United States, the number of people choosing literature, philosophy and history is decreasing. Finance, artificial intelligence, applied mathematics and biology are popular majors. The average annual salary of engineering graduates is 82,000, and that of liberal arts students is 52,000.
In this case, how to persuade students to choose liberal arts? Generally speaking, it is of course empty-liberal arts can expand people's hearts and deepen people's souls. Can't liberal arts be realized? American writer Michael Massin doesn't think so. In an article published on the website of the New York Book Review, he said: "The liberal arts are the driving force of the economy. Art and entertainment industries play a central role in people's lives. They are basically created by people who study literature, history, philosophy and language. Art and culture contribute $760 billion to the American economy every year, accounting for 4.2% of GDP. Compared with the technology industry, it may seem insignificant. Apple has a market value of $900 billion, but art and culture provide 5 million jobs. Liberal arts can also incubate creativity, provide moral standards and question the status quo, which is becoming more and more important in the technology circle full of scandals and crises. "
Stills of Goodbye Mr. Loser
For example, Ma Xin said that the musical "Hamilton" was originally a 900-page biography written by Ron Cherno, who graduated from the English Department of Yale University. Lin-Mannur Miranda, a drama graduate, bought a book at the airport. After reading several chapters, she thought of adapting it into a stage play. In 20 17, the play toured the United States, creating thousands of jobs for actors, dancers, stage designers, clothing, lighting and sound engineers. This book has also sold more than one million copies.
The cover of Hamilton's biography
The Lion King has been playing for 265,438+0 years, and its creator, Julie Taimer, studied myths and folk stories at the university. The author of The Evil Witch is also a literature major. Jennifer Lee, the author of Frozen, graduated from the English Department of the University of New Hampshire. These performances were made without any algorithm.
Shonda rhimes, a master of literature and creative writing at Dartmouth College, has produced TV series such as Scandal and Grey's Intern. She just signed an agreement with Netflix, with a salary of $65.438+50 million. She is writing eight plays.
"Grey's Intern" stills
In February this year, Spotify bought a podcast company for $200 million. The most popular topics of podcasting are history: wars, dynasties, murders, political crises, etc.
Sangla, a columnist of The Times, said that liberal arts students are the future of business, and the skills that can be learned from liberal arts students include:
1 communicate clearly
Nowadays, students studying anthropology and classical literature are sometimes as inarticulate as graduates studying science, but the most important thing in general humanities is to teach clear expression, which is the most useful business skill. Mr Hoffman expressed a similar idea. He said that his degree in philosophy at Oxford was basically "studying how to think clearly". Entrepreneur Luke Johnson admitted in this week's Sunday Times that he recalled that he grew up in a literary family. He used to complain that writing, media and politics had nothing to do with his business life, but now he realizes that "skillfully using powerful written and oral language is an extremely valuable skill and plays an important role in many aspects of management."
2 market research
There is a contemptuous view that non-science graduates are sentimental liberal arts students. Although this is not entirely correct, it is generally correct, because the humanities professors are very sympathetic. History encourages you to imagine people's lives in the past; Anthropology encourages you to imagine that things may be different for different places and people in the world; Literature class takes you into other people's thoughts, hearts and souls. As william nicholson wrote, "We study to know that we are not alone". This ability to imagine yourself from the standpoint of others is very useful in business. You should try to find out what kind of services and products people different from you need.
3 failed to close
Enter "humanities degree" in Google, and the second item that appears is "useless", which is a typical traditional attitude of business circles towards humanities degree. The closeness of liberal arts students to failure is very valuable. Most technology companies realize that many popular products are born from initial failures, so they are trying to embrace disappointment and failure, while the study of humanities often involves thinkers and writers who have failed in research, or people who have succeeded after death.
More can be added: humanities graduates are experts in extracting information (after reading only one and a half novels, they wrote a paper on Henry James' works), accepted the gender balance frankly (the ratio of male to female in English class is 6: 1 unlike computer class), felt comfortable that ambiguity is a part of modern business (there are few right and wrong answers to thesis topics), and were good at getting along with people (because of time). "But it is important not to get carried away. The fact is that we need more science students with soft skills and more liberal arts students who know technology. The best thing for business is that we don't need to divide disciplines so early. "
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