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I majored in literature and minored in philosophy by taking an interdisciplinary programme.

As you suggest, the ideal path is majoring in something that will get you a job that pays decent to handsomely; and minor in something that will feed your soul. It sounds trite, but it is the best option and one few take from the people I've encountered.

I don't mean to burst your bubble but you might be romanticising a liberal arts education. It saddens me to say but I know UC Berkeley lit grads who still write like high-schoolers.

Literature doesn't teach you to write. Creative writing doesn't teach you to think. Forget about journalism. University writing style guides don't keep up with modern society. You have to tailor your liberal arts experience. Classical education taught the trivium to students at an early age so they can get a head start on teaching them how to think.

Luckily computer science teaches logic indirectly, but philosophically, it is only one type of logic. Writing involves many types of logic. But logic alone is not good writing. That depends on your audience and purpose. Good writing sometimes requires writing grammatically incorrect sentences. Good writing mirrors the natural flow of your reader's language, including phraseology, diction, and cause and effect. It has to jibe with them. But again, there are different purposes for a given writing composition.

When I got my first writing job, I was naively proud to say I was a writer. Now I'm embarrassed by it and just say what field or department I work in.

> but you're missing out on an incredible body of thoughts and ideas that might expand your vision borders.

Have to disagree here. Yes there is a lot of good stuff especially written in the past but looking at today I see high caliber English writers and books in every category I do not see in that quality and quantity in any other language. Ok I do not know how it's about Chinese but that's my perception regarding other in particular European languages.

Always when I look for something, literature, fiction or non-fiction I switcch after seconds to Amazon.com from my local Amazon and find way better and more stuff. Frankly, the local selection feels like written by amateurs comapred to the US, I know this might sound bold and is probably too generalizing but the general perception is that you do not miss out anything if you stick to English based literate, rather the opposite. Of course therr are exception and genious writes not from the US like Unberto Eco and others but still nothing to the vast majority English based literature offers. Heck, even my Kindle account is US only.

If one country produces excellent media it's the US.

It's true that the golden era of the non-English writers lies mostly in the past. What is not true is that the past writings are now invalid/deprecated or whatever term you may coin. If I had a choice between the body of the past literature and the modern content, I would have chosen to stick with the old texts without a second thought. They're just unbelievably great and what is written today is merely an echo of the past.

But what concerns me the most is that you dismiss the world literature without even knowing it and without being able to learn it. It's so arrogant that I can't seem to find the words to express my sorrow. All I can say is that the loss is yours. Nobody in the world has ever produced literature, songs and music like the French and Russian masters have. I am able to enjoy them in their natural form, as well as the English... let's call it "content". I can directly compare them and I'm telling you it would have been a loss of a monumental scale if I had been born in an English-speaking country and would have never been able to make acquaintance with those pieces.

That's not to mention that foreign languages are often less constrained and more expressive than English which on itself allows for more profound thoughts to be born and more naturally and creatively expressed. But that's not something that English-only speakers will ever find out.

I might try to persuade you to change your opinion but I won't. There's nothing in your position to brag about. In a way, I'm luckier than you and to that end I can only express my deepest regrets to you.

Spoken like somebody who's never read Journey to The End of The Night. In my opinion (and many others') it's one of the best novels ever written.

Tastes may vary but to dismiss foreign literature outright betrays a lack of experience as a reader. This is where I complain, as an old guy, about the poor state of liberal arts education.

Do yourself a favor and pick up some Dostoevsky. Or Gunter Grass. Or Murakami. Or Knut Hamsen. Or oh hell, there are far too many to list, those just come to the forefront in my head.

Here's a few more: Or Homer, or Sophocles, or Ovid, or Rumi, or Rilke, or Proust, or Cicero, or Molière, ...

Maybe you're reading in the wrong language. Try Spanish.

Ah g-d. Ficciones, 100 Years. Sigh. What a sad thing to miss out on those. (at the very least)

If you're talking about contemporary literature, then maybe, as I wouldn't know much about recent stuff. If not, then you're... I don't even know what to call it... to dismiss the french, russian, spanish, italian classics... wow.

I was an engineering major and switched to Creative Writing because of noted 'creative draw'. Loved the courses. Useless degree. Now I am a software engineer wish I had only minored in a creative field.

After all, college is just a place to pay for a degree, right? Might as well pay for something that will get you past HR.

I majored in biology because I felt it was the field that would be the most difficult to learn on my own. It wasn't the best choice, and I initially regretted the decision after I graduated. Biology is not well-respected among HR departments -- the degree requirements for many technical jobs read something like "must have degree in math, statistics, computer-science, or one of the hard sciences." Compounding the problem, I went to a school that is very committed to the liberal-arts ideal, and as such I have a BA rather than a BS.

Now that I have had several years of experience in 'real-world', I'm glad I chose the path that I did. Biology might not be a 'hard-science' as many people define one, but it is every bit as rigorous as chemistry or physics. I actually feel like biology gave me a leg up on people in a similar role, because experimental design and rigorous analysis is vital to getting good data in biology, since your area of study is affected by so many variables, many of which are stochastic.

If there was one thing I would change, I would have taken many more electives outside of the sciences. I branched out my senior year after I capped the number of credits I could take in the biology department, and scheduling issues wouldn't let me complete my CS minor. I enrolled in classes in Russian Literature, Studio Art, Art History, Philosophy, and Film Theory. I've constantly been surprised by how often the limited exposure I had to those fields has been helpful, especially Art and Philosophy.

It's important to remember that programming is only a method of solving a problem, you need to be able to understand the problem to put it to use. Low level courses often focus on teach the language you need to communicate in a given field, which is incredibly valuable as a developer.

>Might as well pay for something that will get you past HR.

Which for a sad number of professions (lots of them in tech) is pretty much all your degree is good for-at least it feels that way-provided you have enough drive to take on and have the ability to show side projects and "portfolio" type work to the person who will actually end up hiring you.

>>You can't translation energy.<<

This is a good point...a good translation depends heavily on preserving the writer's "voice", which is unique to each writer...

Masterful translations are among the most underrated examples of human linguistic skill that I'm aware of...

> It's interesting that the author pursued a degree in literature and that's what ultimately pushed her away from that career path. It seems to be a common theme where a formal education in creative arts makes people want to do something else in life, anything else.

I can only speak for myself, but I have a MA in literature (creative writing and poetry specifically) and am now a developer. The career path for that type of degree is often teaching and I wanted to be creative. Developing allows me to remain creative day to day. So while it may seem like I've moved away from my original field, I actually feel much closer to it compared to when I was teaching.

I always hated literature and writing classes, because it felt wrong to force people to do things which are meant to be pleasurable. At the time, I thought the only point of such classes was so that students could pretentiously be considered "cultured".

Finally, after years, I'm finally able to enjoy literature and writing. I had similar experiences with math.