Q&A: Is a geography degree totally useless?

Hello guys, I have received a message from a teenage student who left me a rather long and rambling message on one of my earlier posts about degrees. I will jump to the punchline and deal with just one question, he asked me if a geography degree was a useless degree? This guy likes geography, truly enjoyed it at A levels and wants to pursue a degree in geography but is worried that he may be at a major disadvantage with such a degree when looking for a job. He then read that I have managed to carve myself a rather successful career in corporate finance despite the fact that I do have a useless degree in geography. So, this guy wants to know if he should pursue his dream to study geography at university (whilst not thinking about looking for a job until he graduates), or should he study something else like engineering or law that may be far more useful when it comes to his prospects in the job market? You may think, oh Alex you have a geography degree, you're going to be biased when answering this question - well, allow me to assure you that I have nothing to gain by defending my (sometimes rather poor) choices and all I want to do is to help guide him.

Are you interested in geography?

You want the short answer? Yeah a geography degree is useless.

Here's the longer answer. A geography is far less useful than a degree that will point you in a specific direction - such as one in law, medicine, dentistry or even engineering. At least with one of those degrees, your career choice is a forgone conclusion - nobody studies dentistry and then decides, actually I don't want to be a dentist, I want to be a sushi chef instead. Few geography graduates end up finding work that is directly relevant to their degree for a simple reason: too many geography graduates, too few geography-related jobs. Now one area of geography that fascinated me was meteorology - the study of weather, particularly with climate change happening, I thought with my geography degree I would be able to get a job looking at changing weather patterns, studying the weather for the government, the aviation industry, the farming industry or even the military. At the very least, there the is job of weather forecasting, right? Wrong. The demand for meteorologists is so low that very few positions available and those are already filled - I didn't want to be on a waiting list, doing unpaid internships to fill the time, hoping for a position to come up to allow me to get my foot in the door. The more niche the expertise, the fewer opportunities there are. The Met Office in the UK is not a big company like Apple or Google aggressively growing and expanding, no if you were to look at their recruitment website at the moment, their only vacancies are work experience and internship type placements. They are not hiring. I bet they didn't warn you about that at the university did they? That situation sucks especially for those who truly love meteorology!

The only job that you can almost certainly do that is directly relevant to geography is to become a geography teacher. Now I don't want to say anything bad about geography teachers because I owe so much to a geography teacher I had in VJC, he went above and beyond his call of duty to help me as a very troubled teenager then. However, I am acutely aware that not everyone can work with children - I certainly cannot, not with my temper. I was at the gym the other day for the adult gymnastics class and some kids from the previous class were fooling around on the trampoline. Their coach said something like, "can you leave now please, your class is over" and they just ignored her. Well, I raised my voice and shouted. "Out! Now!" The kids froze for a second before literally running out of the gym in shock, given how angry I sounded. Their coach then turned to me and said, "Alex, are you okay?" Gosh, somebody has got to have the patience to deal with children at school and I've said this before: teaching isn't a career, it is a calling. You're not paid enough for the kind of work you have to do dealing with difficult kids. However, if you like studying about the world, you might want a job that will eventually allow you to travel a lot to see this wonderful world - a geography teacher is mostly going to be stuck in the classroom for a few decades, that would frustrate the hell out of me (even if you took naughty kids out of the equation). So I would urge caution before going down this path: do you have the patience deal with very naughty kids?

Do you have what it takes to be a teacher?

So what do geography graduates do? Well, they end up doing what I did - we get jobs that have absolutely NOTHING to do with geography and we accept that we should have probably done a different degree. But it isn't really a major issue if you do still end up very successful in whatever you end up doing. My time at university didn't teach me anything useful that I could use at work and a lot of the skills like research and being able to find information to solve the problems at hand - that's called knowing how to use Google. Look, any 12 year old can look something up on Google up and get you the information you need, you don't need to do a degree to learn how to 'research' something. Perhaps the one skill that I did take away from doing a geography degree was how to write a decent essay, but that's still one skill I have never used at work - I do use it for my blog here. Yeah, I learnt how to present my arguments concisely and structure a good argument within a certain word limit, not unlike what I am doing on my blog here. But hardly anyone has to write essays as part of their job and it was not something I took 3 years to learn - I remember once I exceeded the word limit on an essay in my first year at my university. My tutor took me aside and told me to stick to the word limit or he would stop marking once I had breached my word limit. He didn't actually 'teach' me how to write it, he just told me what he wanted. So much for universities teaching us useful things: often we just need someone to say, "figure it out, you're an adult."

In any case, your university cannot predict what kind of job you will end up doing after you graduate. Unless you have plans to say go work for your parents and your parents have a family business, only then do you know exactly what kind of skills you will need to do your future job. But otherwise, most companies simply accept that they will have to offer new recruits a lot of training and support in the first few months of their job, to allow them to ease into their new roles and learn how to do their jobs well. Having a good degree merely proves that you are able to climb that steep learning curve very fast, but you're going to be learning about processes and information specific to the products and services that your company provide - none of this will be familiar even to the best graduates from the top universities, you're going to be learning about it all from scratch. So by that token, with a lot of jobs in the business world, it really makes no difference what you studied or if you even have a degree or not in the first place, as long as you have somehow managed to land yourself the job in the company because let's face it - most degrees are useless: arts and social science degrees, general science degrees, business studies or banking degrees are all totally useless by that token. Even computer science degrees are mostly useless given fast the technology develops so whatever you learnt at university is going to be obsolete in a few years - you'll be amazed just how many degrees out there are just totally fucking useless. It isn't just geography degrees that are in that useless category, many other degrees are equally useless. Yeah, amazing but true.

Warning: your degree may be useless!

However, not all geography degrees are equal. If you have a geography degree from Cambridge or Oxford, you pretty much can get a job interview with any graduate recruitment programme looking for graduates with general degrees and that could get you into the lucrative world of banking, for example. Why? Because Oxford and Cambridge only accept the very best students from around the world for all their courses, including for geography. So who cares what you studied at university, nobody gives a shit - the fact that you've proven that you're a brilliant student by getting into Oxbridge is all that matters and the irony is that it is your A levels (rather than your degree) that got you that job interview, because it is your A levels that determine which university you get into! Likewise, if you have a degree - any degree - from a university at the wrong end of the league table, then getting a job will be a lot more difficult because gatekeepers are going to look at your university and say, "urgh, isn't that a rather shitty university languishing at the bottom of the league tables? Is this guy lazy or stupid - how did he screw up his A levels so badly to land up at such a bad university? What went so desperately wrong?" So by that token, the ranking of your university matters far more than what you actually studied.

Many people get a degree simply to prove that they are able to work under pressure, understand complex concepts and work in a fairly independent environment. Of course, most young people will have ambitions and desires when it comes to what kind of job that would like ideally once they graduate but when it comes to reality, here's what usually happens. When you start looking for a job, you apply for loads of jobs and hopefully you will get some interviews which will in turn lead to at least one or two offers. If you only get one offer, you take it rather than stay unemployed. If you get two or more offers, you then pick the best one (or the 'least bad' one) and even then, it may be the best option available at that time which may have little to do with either your degree or your dreams. After a year or two working in that first job, hopefully that experience will give you some clarity about where you want to go in your career development, bearing in mind that there's nothing wrong with eliminating something you really don't want to do for that will help make you think about what will truly make you happy. The longer you work, the opportunities you will discover about things that do make you excited and passionate about and if it has nothing to do with your original degree, you don't go back to university and spend another three or four years getting a degree - you're too old for that. You actually start learning and training yourself for the moves you want to make in your career because by now, you're an independent, mature adult capable of figuring complex stuff out for yourself. You're no longer a child who needs to be a student in a classroom learning from a teacher: you've already grown up. Hence whether your degree is useless or relevant doesn't really matter that much any more.

Do you really need a degree as an independent adult?

If you really like geography, then by all means go study it at university if you can get yourself into a good university - remember those league tables! There's no point in enrolling for an engineering course if your heart is not in it, if you simply don't have any passion for engineering - you'll be miserable and your results won't be great because your heart just isn't in it. And if you really have no desire to become an engineer for example, then you really don't need any more reason not to study engineering. I was passionate about studying about the world - gosh, when I was a young boy, I used to read Atlases cover to cover, studying about every country in the world. I was thoroughly fascinated by geography and wouldn't have studied anything else at university. But in hindsight, I realize what it was about geography that attracted me: I had a miserable, difficult childhood which I have talked about a lot on my blog. Geography was a form of escapism: when I had a horrible day, instead of focusing on the crap in my life, I would read about another country and think about what it would be like to live in an exotic country like Morocco or Peru. I would close my eyes and imagine the colours, the smells, the people, the sounds, the weather. I have always wanted to learn about other countries in the world - now that is probably a good reason for a child to read loads of books, but to do a degree in geography? Even I would say that in hindsight, that was probably not a good enough reason. I could have studied something else that could have earned me a lot of money to go on loads of exotic holidays. But for what it was worth, I was genuinely interested in the course content and did enjoy studying at university. I still pursue that form of escapism today in studying foreign languages.

So a question gatekeepers would ask you at a job interview would be, "so I see you studied geography at university, tell me, why did you choose to study geography?"  Now I can't give you the model answer that would satisfy the gatekeeper. What I would say is that you can't bullshit a gatekeeper, so it is best to be honest. I have told that story about using geography as a form of escapism at a job interview before: risky, I know. But at least it was genuine and honest - sharing that I had a difficult childhood also made me seem more human. A lot of candidates show up at these interviews thinking, "I must show strength, I must justify my decisions, I must prove myself to be better than everyone else to get the job!" So they come across as arrogant and full of crap: when asked to justify their choice of course at university, they make it sound like it was the most rational, most perfect decision ever made in their lives which is questionable when they have something like a geography degree from a university that is neither Oxford nor Cambridge. I'm like, come on, who are you trying to kid? That's bullshit and I'm not buying it. When I told the story about my difficult childhood to a gatekeeper years ago, she paused for a moment, took off her glasses and said, "You know, I had a difficult childhood too - I used to read a lot as a form of escapism, my school had a good library. I understand and I empathize." Oh I knew that woman could sniff bullshit from a mile away, so sometimes being totally honest is my best and only option - it actually worked!

Studying geography was a means of escapism for me.

A typical careers adviser would ask you the questions, "what do you want to do? What kind of career do you want? What is your ideal job?" That can be a difficult question for a teenager who may not have clarity about those issues yet and there's nothing wrong with either saying that you don't know or even changing your mind a few times as you find out more. If you do know what you want to do, then you work backwards from there - you find out what qualifications and experience you need to get you onto the right career path and get you where you want to be. But if you honestly don't know what you want to do with your working life, that's fine - in this case, then you may as well just study something you know you are passionate about and take it from there. The world may be a different place by the time you graduate, you may discover more about yourself and what you want to do with your life whilst at university - thus there's nothing wrong with not making such important decisions about your career before you have even started university. Some of my friends who have the most interesting and successful careers today have no idea what they wanted to do with their lives when they were 18 and most of them are doing things completely unrelated to their degrees. I guess for many students, they know they are going to have to work hard at university to get that degree and they want it to count for something. But your time at university is what you make of it - make sure you have an interesting social life, embrace new experiences, work part time, do internships, try to travel loads and make loads of friends. University should be about growing up rather than simply studying to pass exams. By that token, yeah go ahead and study geography and cross that bridge later.

So that's it from me on this topic, over to you now. What do you think? Would you do a degree in a subject purely out of interest without worrying about your future career prospects? Or should students be guided towards more 'useful' degrees?  Do you have a degree in a subject like geography or history and has it served you well? Are you doing a job that has little or nothing to do with your degree? Do you wish you had studied something more useful at university? Are we all expecting too much from our degrees per se then? Do leave a comment below please. Many thanks for reading.