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[ameretrifle]

Well, since they've finally sent me my diploma, I can now announce without hesitation that I totally have a bachelor's degree. In humanities. This and a dollar should get me a small fry at McDonald's. (Hmm? Job search? Yes, I have been looking for openings commensurate with my total lack of experience, and those are far harder to find than I seem

Comments

[nina_ds]

Ah, a degree in the humanities! One of those fields where even a PhD means you'll be earning just above minimum wage for the rest of your life, if you're lucky! (Yes, I know this from bitter experience.) Still, it is a field of great emotional and intellectual satisfaction, which actually does count for something.

I haven't done this meme yet, but it looks like there are several different versions of the list floating around... I have two levels of answers to this, like the 25-30 I've read and the 30 or so others that are on my bookshelves waiting! I've also noticed that there are a lot of "Well, I didn't read this, but I read that" - like I haven't read A Town Like Alice, but I have read On the Beach, which I think is a more significant book; or, I've read most of Hardy (masochist, I know, and not all of it sinks in after a while!) and all of Austen.

And I've seen 4 different movie/tv versions of Anna Karenina. What, that doesn't count?! (version with Greta Garbo and Frederic March by far the best; Keira Knightley, are you f'ing

[ameretrifle]

Yeah-- I've always intended to get a later degree in something marginally more practical, so I got to indulge myself a bit with my bachelor's. Actually, I floundered around for several years trying to pick something to major in, because almost none of the careers I was interested in cared at all what you had a BA in as long as you got one. Which, given my indecisive nature and the way they start hounding you to choose a major the second you enter college (and I started in community college, where I was actually getting a couple years' leeway on that decision), was a lot of fun. Would've preferred to just lock myself in the library for a couple of years, but no one consulted me

[nina_ds]

Like their old offices on the second floor of the Interior Design building, past the boarded-up elevator shaft. That made an impression on me.

Sort of reminds me, in another way, of visiting the physics department at a major university and having to go all the way to the other end of a very large floor, crawl past some filing cabinets stored in the corridor, and there was the ladies' room, which probably hadn't been used for ages. It had an aqua vinyl couch in the outer room that looked very much like the 1960s but was in nearly pristine shape.

It's not unusual for Women's Studies to be a concentration in any university; it's not actually a bad thing, in a way, because it keeps it grounded to other subjects, and I think all things need to be more interdisciplinary. I love it when classes like music or intellectual history are linked in with women's studies or ethnic studies of some sort, because it's kind of easy to get "ghettoized".

[ameretrifle]

*nods* Exactly. Then again, it is a university. If it's not important to the football team, god only knows when it's been replaced. I've seen my share of 70's and definitely 80's furniture, and I don't know when they made some of those desks... And lord, some of those old buildings... Fortunately, they've got a nice, modern little office now in the new Psych building. No vinyl couches, anymore. And apparently the problem with the AC will go away once they finish the back half of the building. ;)

and I think all things need to be more interdisciplinary

Oh, absolutely. That's what made me finally gravitate toward Women's Studies (after a couple dozen false starts). Their degree program forces you to be interdisciplinary, which I did and still do adore; only thing is, there's hardly any core courses. Three listed; one doesn't exist anymore, so you take two seminars instead (which can be on any topic), leaving you with one core course-- "Women in Western Culture: Images and Realities", I believe. Largely art history, with some overview

[nina_ds]

Yeah, you'd think there'd be a core lit & theory course at least. I've been in interdisciplinary situations where it's all anchored by a "general critical theory" unit, and you'd think that feminist literature would be a subset of something like that. (It would be if I taught it!)

[ameretrifle]

I think there was a "Feminist Theory" course, but it was definitely an elective, and I can't recall whether it was philosophy or English. I heard it was good, but I never managed to get it into my schedule. (There couldn't have been more than one or two courses in the entire program that ever offered more than one section at a time.) I was hoping to get something like that with "Philosophy of Feminism" (also an elective), but apparently there'd been some sort of shake-up in the philosophy department. The professor I got taught to the book. She sort of had to, because the books were full of dense, not especially significant philosophical essays that had been written by feminists, instead of, as many of us had assumed, about feminism. I was tempted to burn those books after the semester ended and I couldn't sell them back, but I've never got around to it. Other people who took the course said they wrote their papers on "Girls Gone Wild". After a ten-page paper on Feminist Standpoint Theory, I felt I'd gotten the short end of the stick.