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The day after getting my master’s, I got on a plane for New York and was hired as a minimum-wage editorial assistant — because I could type 90 words a minute. My salary didn’t even cover the rent for my studio apartment, but being able to walk from Harlem to the Brooklyn Bridge on the weekend was worth a lot.
Eventually, practicality oozed in and I went to night school for the minimum number of education units to qualify for a teacher’s license.
All these years later, I’m glad practicality came late. I still applaud English as a good major.
Susan Ohanian, Charlotte, N.Y.
As a rising sophomore at the University of Maryland, I am pursuing dual degrees in computer science and government and politics. This semester, I took a political philosophy class in which we read some of John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty.” Mill argued that we ought to shape our own conception of a good life by constantly engaging in “experiments in living.”
I love studying computer science and from evaluating algorithmic complexity to manipulating linked lists, I’ve already learned a lot. But none of these topics has changed the way I live in the way that experiments in living have.
This idea has influenced how I make decisions, pushing me to embrace new experiences over familiar ones. Experiments in living drove me to take a spontaneous trip to D.C. to read on the National Mall instead of in my dorm room. They helped me make new friends and join new student groups. One evening, as I found myself admiring the moon with strangers in the middle of the night, this phrase echoed in my mind.
I can’t get enough of the satisfaction I feel when my code passes all of its tests. But philosophy — as with literature, art and history — has the rare capacity to feed our souls and help us find beauty in the world. We must not devalue the humanities and risk wasting it.
Dhruvak Mirani, Cooksville, Md.
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