How can I land my dream job with a philosophy degree?

What can you do with a philosophy degree? Almost anything you want - seriously. 

Get answers to some of the most asked questions surrounding how to turn a philosophy degree into your dream job. 

Guest: Matt Katz, faculty member in the Department of Philosophy, Anthropology and Religion, at Central Michigan University 

Adam: Even though philosophy, I think is the victim sometimes, or poetry might be the other one, of the joke of like, you know ‘what are you gonna do with that, be an underwater basket weaver?” Philosophy majors seem to do pretty well, actually.

Matt: I think so, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of different routes you can take. It's a subject that I love. I have a lot of fun with it. I'm glad that I get to do it for a living. I sometimes giggle that I get to, you know, hang out in a classroom with people and talk about things that I'm interested in, and hopefully, they're interested in them too. And we have great conversations and sometimes I'm like, I'm doing this for a living. Come on, right? But I think there's a lot of there's a lot of things you learn with a philosophy degree and as well as other degrees in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences that you pick up that apply to a whole range of jobs, right? Reading texts very carefully, right? Being able to synthesize information and analyze information and solve problems and question assumptions and find solutions that people hadn't thought of before, right?

And communicate both written and orally really effectively. Right? These are skills that apply to sort of all manner of jobs. In philosophy particular, we spend a lot of time being really careful about reasoning and what sort of conclusions follow from what premises and how to read something very carefully. So I'll give you an example. A colleague of mine just recently spoke to a graduate of ours who's been out for a few years. And he's a project manager for a company that does power-related infrastructure, so working with electrical equipment or electrical infrastructure and gas infrastructure. And so when they're completing a project, they have to follow very complicated regulations, and they have to follow them very like to a T, right? And part of his job is understanding what the regulations say, right? And he says, look, philosophy of education helped me out a lot in this, right?

We have other graduates in journalism who say like, look my education in philosophy taught me to question presuppositions and assumptions that, you know, all the way down the road no matter what I'm looking at. And that's a useful skill, and they're really well-known journalists who got degrees in philosophy, right? And so it's, it's, you know, people all, a lot of time people will say, “Well, what are you gonna do with that?” Right? And there's not, like, one thing that I can say, it's not like, you know, I use this as an example. I don't pick on anybody, but it's not like you get a degree in accounting. It's pretty clear what the career track is, right? You get a degree in athletic training, it's pretty clear what the career track is. It's not so clear in philosophy, right? But that's because it's wide open.

What can I do with a philosophy degree?

Who contemporary philosophers should I read?

Adam: Who are your favorite famous philosophers?

Matt: Favorite famous philosophers?

Adam: Who are your favorites?

Matt: I can tell you who I read the most. So, I read this. So, I work in the philosophy of psychology, right? And a lot of the problems were sort of set or described by this guy called Jerry Fodor. He's a 20th-century philosopher, who worked at Rutgers for I think almost his whole career. He just died a couple of years ago. So I read a lot of Fodor I sent a text to a colleague of mine last semester, and I said “How much is too much Fodor to put on one syllabus?” just like laughing at me, like, stop it. Yeah. But all the, all the guys in that kind of area that work in philosophy of psychology Paul Churchland's, another one, I don't read a ton of Paul Churchland, but...

Which famous people studied philosophy? 

Matt: Does it become a strike when the umpire says it's a strike? Or is it a strike? And then the umpire either gets it right or gets it wrong. And if you talk to different umpires, they'll say different things. Some of them will say, I calls 'em as I see ‘em, and some of them will say it's a strike 'cause I say it's a strike. No, that's a philosophical question.

Adam: It kind of speaks to kind of the flexibility of having that skillset in different career paths, right? Like, this is not an actual anecdote, but it wouldn't be surprising to be like, oh, one of the guys at the rules office there at, at MLB who sits down with all those umpires at the end of every year and decides how that works, is somebody of the philosophy degree. You know, those amalgamations of rules and values of even a game. Like, somebody's gotta be good and care about kind of tying all that stuff up, right?

Matt: Yeah. So unquestionably, I can't imagine, I haven't looked at the rule book for the NFL or the NHL, right? The rules have to be insanely complicated written documents, right? And to understand them and to understand the effects of making a tiny change requires, you know, the ability to read documents really carefully and understand what they're saying. Here's another example. So, I've done some contract grievance work bargaining work with my faculty union, right? And those documents, collective bargaining agreements are legal documents. They're very, very complicated and they're very particular and precise. What does the language of the contract say? What event happened? How does the language speak to the event? Was there a violation of policy? Wasn't there not a violation of policy?

And again, like you say, there's a lawyer in every building, and when HR is involved, there's a lawyer involved, but there isn't necessarily, you know, like I did this work for faculty unions, and I don't have a law degree, but I can read language really carefully and I can understand what's going on and how to apply it, right? Same kind of thing in a negotiation collective bargaining negotiation, right? Like, what have the parties come to agree to, and then how do we put that in writing? And then later on there's a question about, okay, what exactly did this writing mean? Did it mean this kind of event? Or did it mean this other kind of event? Or did it mean both or did it mean neither? Right? And, so there's a lot of interpretive work that goes on, you know, with, again, legal writing, but not necessarily by lawyers, could be a philosopher, right?

Adam: Yeah. It makes it feel, when you describe it like that, it makes it feel really tangential to things like law or like technical writing.

Matt: I mean, that's another good example. I actually had a friend who tried to hire me as a technical writer a long time ago. He was working in tech. So, I mean, you know, every time you pick up, I don't know, say you buy a new microwave comes with a manual, right? Or a new TV or a, well, iPhones, I think the materials, they're online now, right? But there's a technical manual for anything you buy, for any piece of equipment or whatever. And that was written by somebody who has to, you know, put language on paper in a very, very precise way. And you can tell sometimes they're better and sometimes they're worse. And again, you know, philosophy's my home and it's my love, but I don't wanna, I don't wanna speak outta turn that the, the, and I don't wanna, I don't know the details of the program, but the English department has a certificate in technical writing. You know, like I say, philosophy is my love, but, I like to talk up all the programs in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.

Adam: The Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences here, Richard Rothhaus and I had this conversation outside once. We have a little poetry reading that goes on out in the spring. It's Leaves of Grass. There's a Walt Whitman reading that they do out here in the botanical gardens. It's beautiful. You should go to school here, it's great. And I ran into him at it a couple years back and he said, you know, it's a good reminder that the world still needs poets.

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you said to start that it's thought of as fluffy or something. Yeah. I don't know the adjective you use. I mean, look, there's different styles of philosophy I work in, in what's it used to be talked about, the analytic continental divide, right? Continental was the reason I got those names was because it was this sort of philosophy that developed in the, in the 20th century on the European continent, right? And analytic philosophy is sort of what developed mostly in England, Great Britain and the United States. So, I do very analytic philosophy. I do a lot of logic. I focus on argument, structure and so on and so forth. There's other kinds of philosophy, so the philosophy department here at CMU isn't a department, it's an area, right?

And I'm in a department with philosophy, anthropology, and religious studies and religion we call it, if you wanna understand what led to you say the way the world looks like today. So yeah, the world needs poets and the world needs religious scholars and could we understand any of that without a firm understanding of culture? So the world needs anthropologists, right? Like I said, I've been going to career fairs and talking to employers, right. And lots of them say, and when you look at career services and they're holding a fair, they have a list of who's coming and what majors they're looking for, right? Yeah. And a lot of the employers don't have lists of majors. And when you go talk to them, they say, we don't hire majors, we hire people. Right? And the reason is they want somebody who they can train whoever it is to do the job that they need them to do.

And what they want is for people who can communicate with other people, right? Or who can write, or who can read carefully? And so, for example, we had just this past spring, we invited an employer to Anspach for the day to talk to some students and have lunch with some students and so on. And she was from RXO, which is a logistics company, a shipping company, right? And she was like, yeah, we hire everybody, 'cause we need people. Like, people start by working the phones and helping people who are shipping, you know, driving a truck with a shipment, helping them figure out what went wrong, what's missing, or where they got lost or solving whatever problem needs to be solved on the shipping end or the receiving end or whatever. Right? And that's a communication game.

Adam: Thank you. Thanks for coming and talking to me about philosophy. I really appreciate the time that you put in here.

Matt: Thanks very much for having, having me happy to talk about this stuff.

Adam: Hopefully we'll have you again sometime in the future. Hopefully, we're still doing this sometime in the future if I'm not replaced by an A.I.

Matt: By an AI, yeah. I don't think so. Not anytime soon, I hope.

Adam: All right. Awesome. Thanks again.

Matt: Thank you.

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