Thinker Gates Of Hell
As soon as you start college, the way everyone looks at you changes. You're no longer a high schooler with the world ahead of them; you're in college now, and you're prepping to step into that very big world. The difference between these perspectives is obvious by how people talk:
Scenario 1:
Student: I'm a senior at Common High School.
Adult: Oh, that's wonderful. Where are you thinking about going to college?
Scenario 2:
Student: I'm a freshman at Generic University.
Adult: Cool! What are you majoring in? What career are you thinking about pursuing?
By this point in the school year, high school seniors are used to reciting their college list to anyone who asks, and even for freshmen in college, stating your major and/or minors is just another part of your introduction. I would argue though that there is one additional way to once again change people's perspective of you. It goes like this:
Scenario 3:
Student: I'm a freshman at Another University.
Adult: Great, what are you majoring in?
Student: Philosophy.
Adult: ... oh that's nice.
Immediately, their perspective changed.
I've become used to this response among others over the past six months, and I've also grown accustomed to people looking twice at me when I say my major. They expect something like "engineering," or "biology," or "poli-sci," anything but "philosophy." Philosophy was the class that most people notoriously disliked whenever they were in college, and it isn't one of those fields that is in high demand right now for our society.
So why would a freshman come into college already saying that they wanted to major in philosophy of all things?
My response is that I have had the extraordinary luck to have been introduced to philosophy in high school by teachers who knew what they were doing. While I am not denigrating any other high school's philosophy courses by any means, I am quite sure that I had a unique educational experience in regards to philosophy. After taking the initial introductory course junior year, I chose to take the available dean's seminar my following senior year. These seminars were quite unique in the fact that the topic changed every year based on whatever the dean wanted to teach and the class only had sixteen available seats. I had done well in the previous year's seminar on "Mountains" (that was literally all that the course was about, mountains) so I was able to easily secure my seat in the next one which ended up being called "Jane Austen and Philosophy." This was the course that began to lead me down the path less-traveled to study philosophy full-time in college.
"Jane Austen and Philosophy" was a class unlike any other, and it is in my top three of all-time favorite courses. In this class we didn't just learn the rote philosophical thoughts of the typical canon of thinkers. We took on a variety of philosophers that I had never encountered before (or even heard of yet) and applied their principles to Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Emma. The abstract ideas written out in sometimes convoluted language suddenly took on a very real and substantive meaning in the context of each novel, and I began to realize how this concept could be applied to other forms of artistic expression. Philosophical ideas could be brought to life through films, artwork, novels, and music, and such mediums could then provide an avenue for contemporary thought to enter onto the scene and spark new discussions.
This is why I want to study philosophy: its applications are as limited as your imagination is. (Really, it is. Just think about how many variations of any moral dilemma you could come up with.) So yes, I am a philosophy major. Those still exist in 2019, and not just on philoso-raptor awareness day.