Follow the Passion of Your Heart, Not the Trend of the Times

Be sure your journey is YOUR journey and not simply following the crowd

When I started college in 1970, I attended a high-quality community college. My arents were not wealthy. My dad worked in a sawmill. But we had a decent life. We owned our own home. It was tight at times when I was very young, but as I got older and my Dad advanced we had a comfortable life.

My Dad’s dream from the time I was born was to send me to college. For a sawmill worker to say that in 1952 was like saying, “I will build a spaceship in the backyard and fly to the moon.” Most other men in his position would say, “Hey, I worked in the sawmill. If it’s good enough for me, It’s good enough for my kids.”

The community college in our town had an excellent faculty. Many had left the university to teach without the ‘publish or perish’ dynamic in the university culture. I later taught at that same school. Our research showed that students who began at the community college did better in their upper division work than those who had started at the four-year school. Not as prestigious, but my folks were nothing if they were not practical.

Anyway, I digress. I had one goal – to become a teacher. And I was a humanities person. I was getting an English degree with a Speech-Communication minor. Later I shifted those around, but ended up with a double-major. My High School guidance counselors tried to talk me out of it. There was a huge teacher surplus at the time, and teacher’s salaries were so poor at the time that many teachers qualified for food stamps.

At the time, the quick road to a high-payer career was – wait for it – Keypunch Operator! And they had a whole lab set up at the college. In just a year you could have a high-paying career in the computer industry. Doing what you ask? Operating these big machines that punched holes in the data cards used to program the computers.

For those younger than 60, computers used to be programmed and data stored by running these long thin cards through them with holes punched in them. That let the light through and the photocells connected to circuits that stored the results on big reels of magnetic tape.

It was computers like that which sent the first astronauts to the moon.

By the time, I was transferring to the university to get my “useless” degree, the integrated circuit (microchip) was opening the door to digital computing and by the time I graduated with my first degree, there were no more keypunch operators.

Meanwhile, my “useless” degrees didn’t lead to a teaching job, but they did open the door to working in the media for several years before I could leverage that additional experience into first a part-time teaching job at the same community college I graduated from ten years before. That job then led to a tenured position at the college down here. When I retired, I was making a six-figure income and I retired with a pension plan equivalent to having more than a million dollars in an annuity.

But more important than that… I got up in the morning every day anxious to get to “work.” I worried that they would figure out I was just having fun and stop paying me. I was happy and fulfilled. I had to retire early for health reasons, but how many people can say they spent 30+ years doing something that they loved?

So, why did I tell you this long story? Am I bragging? Okay, maybe a little. I still have some problems with pride. Working on it. But there is a deeper reason. Too often like those Keypunch operators we chase after a career or a business based on what will pay the most money. The quick buck. The lucrative trend.

How many students each year over the past two decades have been dissuaded from majors like English, Art, Music, of History? A major university in the U.S. shut down it’s modern languages department. If you want to learn French, try Berlitz is the message they were sending. Not in those words. But what about the student who learned conversational French in high school, but wants to go deeper maybe become a translator, a scholar? Fortunately, there are still plenty of colleges who understand that it might be good to learn other languages than English.

The emphasis was on programming, science, math, engineering.

 “Learn to Code” that was the mantra of the last two decades. But, something is happening. While coding is still a thing, it may be going the way of the keypunch field. At least at the level of JUST coding.

An Article from The Atlantic by Kelli Maria Korducki called, “So much for Learn to Code” reports how skill in writing code alone is probably going to be on the decline. ChatGPT can write decent code in a number of programming languages. You can tell Chat what you want to do and it can write the code for it. This means that anyone can write basic code for simple applications. With the right prompts you can create a smartphone app or build a wordpress template without writing one line of code.

Of course, for higher level type of programming (such as that required to program an AI) the need for that coding ability is still important, but as the Ais get more sophisticated, the bar will keep rising.

Programmers today need to learn more than how to write code. Indeed, according to some of the professors Korducki interviewed, the basic introductory courses may be more like math courses where the student learns the process of finding the solution, but uses the calculator for the actual calculations.

So, no, those programmers at Google or Microsoft working on the next generations of software won’t be out of a job, those people making tons of money creating small apps for businesses may find themselves with a lot more competition.

And how do you program using Chat? You give it instructions in writing. Coders who used to sit alone with their code and eschewing the “soft” disciplines like writing, will have to learn to write, conceptualize, and think outside the code. And as we deal with the emergence of AI and the potentials both beneficial and dangerous, other soft disciplines like philosophy, psychology, sociology, and political science will matter more.

Korducki concludes:

“Those who are able to think more entrepreneurially—the tinkerers and the question-askers—will be the ones who tend to be almost immune to automation in the workforce.

The turmoil presented by AI could signal that exactly what students decide to major in is less important than an ability to think conceptually about the various problems that technology could help us solve. The next great Silicon Valley juggernaut might be seeded by a humanities grad with no coding expertise or a computer-science grad with lots of it.”

So, if you are standing at a crossroads, deciding on a career, or starting a business, don’t follow the trend, follow your heart. Do what you love, and the money will follow. It might be that your Art History degree may be just what is needed in 2030.

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