43 Too-Real Signs You Got A Liberal Arts Degree

1. You can’t watch Disney movies the same way anymore, because all you see are race and gender.

2. After graduation, you’ve said the words “I should teach English abroad” at least once.

3. Your friends accuse you of “overthinking” everything.

4. You still haven’t figured out exactly what you’re supposed to do with your degree, unless it’s a) teaching b) teaching or c) unemployment. However, it does make a nice doorstop.

5. You’ve often thought that you can totally go to Law School (because why not?) but sometimes you have the feeling you can do crystal meth, but then you think, “Mmm, better not.”

6. You use your degree to analyze Breaking Bad and The Wire or the gender politics of Miley Cyrus.

7. For most 20-somethings, doing what everyone else is doing includes drugs and alcohol. For you, it’s the Peace Corps and City Year.

8. You speak at least one language you never get a chance to use and will inevitably forget later — along with almost everything you learned during undergrad.

9. When you tell people what college you went to, they’ve never heard of it. It’s not because you’re cool and non-mainstream but because (apparently) you wanted to talk to your student loan officer for the rest of your life.

10. You often have to explain what you actually did in your major. “What is an International Studies degree, anyway?”

11. You’re on Idealist more than OKCupid, and you’ve thought about trying to pick up people on LinkedIn, just to save time.

12. Every job you are actually interested in is an unpaid internship, and if you do get a job (that throws pennies at you), no one will think you’re getting paid for it.

13. Your extracurriculars these days include going over to your old college mate’s apartment while they smoke pot and listen to reggae. You will, at some point, pretend that you also like reggae.

14. You signed up for your major to get out of doing math ever again, not realizing that Econ classes were required as part of your track. Today you still can’t do math and don’t know how people got along without calculators.

15. All of your shopping splurges are to your local thrift store, and if the Salvation Army were Rodeo drive, you’d be Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, but without that whole hooker thing.

16. You have former classmates that now follow a rock band or have used their Sociology degree to start one.

17. To relive their college days, some people go to reunions or mixers. You go to protests.

18. Everyone you went to school with is now in a co-op and lives in Portland, Seattle or New York.

19. You still don’t know what sports are.

20. No one you know has a car.

21. Almost everybody you knew in college is now going by a different name, ala “Tako with a K.” Remember that they can tell when you’re saying it wrong.

22. You went to school with a bunch of guys who wore capes every day, all of whom are now a) software billionaires or b) living in their mom’s basement.

23. You’re now friends with a lot of your former professors, who are totally awesome outside of class.

24. Almost everyone you know has been to Burning Man.

25. Your parents still ask you want you want to be when you grow up and constantly bring up your cousin, who is in his last year of residency and “DOING SO WELL.” You can feel your brain turning to liquid.

26. You’re still at your local cafe more than you are at your apartment and are afraid they might start charging you rent.

27. When people ask you what you got your degree in, you sometimes say things like “Depression,” “Guilt” or “Poverty,” and they laugh. You’re not exactly joking.

28. You constantly get Alumni emails asking you for money, and you laugh.

29. To impress a guy when he’s coming over, some people might put on a sexy dress. You leave out your copy of Infinite Jest, which just happens to be open on the coffee table. And instead of “sexy background music,” you put on This American Life.

30. “Voting with your dollar” means lying and saying that you went to the farmers’ market for lunch instead of Chipotle.

31. You use things like mason jars to drink out of — not because you’re poor, just because it makes you look interesting.

32. You have a favorite quote and it may or may not be tattooed on your body somewhere.

33. You had that one professor who was insistent that you type in Georgia or Garamond (“because it just looks so much nicer, don’t ya think?”) and now you use it on everything. Fonts that aren’t in Georgia just look wrong to you.

34. You had another professor who used Papyrus on everything, and now you can’t stand to look at Papyrus.

35. You still cite your sources, even in emails. And you still have a very strong opinion as to whether sources should be in ALA, MLA or (ugh) Turabian.

36. You have the New York Times set as the home page on your web browser.

37. You know what the initials “B.U.G.” stand for, even if you hate that phrase.

38. You often lie about and say you’ve read major works of literature, just to escape the shame of not getting around to it with all this free time you have.

39. If you were to take a shot every time you or your friends say the word “problematic” or “hegemony,” you would always be shitfaced.

40. You are the type of person who always gets suckered into signing up for causes on the street — because you just can’t say no.

41. You really want to change the world, but you can’t remember the last time you changed your underwear. Thursday? Whatever, getting quarters for laundry is annoying.

42. You take those free classes online out of habit, because you still don’t know how not to be in school.

43. You will go to grad school when you run out of reasons to not go. But for now, you’re happy with going to Neftlix University. After all, it’s a lot cheaper.

image – Liberal Arts/Amazon

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