Excerpt from a University homepage story by Jamie Saxon, Office of Communications
What can you do with an English major? A philosophy major? A Ph.D. in classics?
A better question: What can’t you do?
Recent Princeton alumni from the University’s 50-plus humanities departments and programs have gone on to a breathtaking array of careers: interventional cardiology, NFL global operations, and a scholarly niche in French fragrance, to name just a few. Others have gone directly to graduate school in their disciplines to become the next generation of curiosity-driven scholars and teachers.
The rigorous education of a Princeton humanist builds finely tuned skills in close reading, close looking, text analysis and problem solving. “Those are foundational tools in the humanist’s kit,” said Rachael DeLue, a professor of art history and director of the Princeton Humanities Initiative — a sweeping new commitment to humanities scholarship to expand its impact on campus, in higher education and in the wider world.
“Beyond that toolkit,” DeLue said, “the humanities also cultivate skills that stand out in any field: navigating ambiguity, asking difficult questions well, understanding nuance, considering multiple perspectives simultaneously, thinking creatively and imaginatively, and communicating value.”
Alumni across the humanities disciplines don’t merely find work across a wide berth of opportunity. Their ability to think critically and embrace complexity — the hallmarks of liberal arts education at Princeton — helps them excel wherever their career paths take them.
For example, nearly half of undergraduate alumni from the Classes of 2003 through 2022 who majored in the humanities completed an advanced degree in business, law or medicine, as well as other master’s and doctoral degrees.
And in a single humanities discipline, art and archaeology, the 250 undergraduate alumni from the Classes of 2010-19 are working in fields as varied as sales, medicine, law, business and finance, C-suite and general management, architecture, engineering, and computer software and information technology.
