yat1@sphinx.uchicago.edu (elena margaret yatzeck) (06/25/88)
I've been reading with interest the stories about people who went from liberal arts degrees to jobs in computers. I'm working on a Ph.D. in English at the University of Chicago, and I work 25 hours a week at the business school writing Ingres applications in C and embedded SQL. I'd have to agree that this is not only a job that a humanities-type person can do, but that it's one in which a humanities background is a real asset. I started out here as a receptionist--I'd be interested to hear from other people who took this route. I was just looking for a way to earn money. I ended up doing a lot of computer work, and finally switched over to programming full-time. This job pays a lot more than the more "traditional" jobs humanities grad. students take (TAs, for example, only seem to make minimum wage), and I find that it complements my work in English--you just can't think about Chaucer for eighteen hours a day! But more importantly, I think this would be a job that any liberal arts person would enjoy--it combines creative control (how you're going to write the program) with enough responsibility so that you don't feel you're doing something pointless, with deadlines which are reasonable. This isn't the kind of job where someone's screaming at you to make xeroxes for them. The reason I think the humanities are an asset for the job is that in our shop we don't have a "technical core"--the programmer is responsible for finding out from the end-user what he wants, and giving it to him. I find that being able to communicate with people gives me a head start--I have a very thorough understanding of what it is that my end-user wants to do on the broadest scale (keep track of faculty members, say), on a programming scale (what the screen should look like), and from the standpoint of what would be reasonable to do on the level of computer code. A liberal arts background is excellent training for keeping multiple perspectives in mind as you plan and carry out a project. So anyway, it's nice to know there are other people out there with a similar background! Elena Yatzeck yat1@sphinx.uchicago.edu or staff_elena@gsbacd.uchicago.edu