We teach students how to think, to have a broader sense of awareness about the world. The good thing about having a broad set of skills, which includes critical thinking, which includes the ability to innovate, which includes the ability to work on collaborative projects, for example, is that you can bring a creative approach to problem solving.
Conceptual thinking can help you a lot in research. It helps you see the patterns and from those patterns, withdraw information, and then make solutions to problems.
I think in a career can be really challenging because you're often working with a different variety of people. Students learn how to have difficult conversations as conceptual thinkers. So to meet someone else with a different perspective and to be able to work that out is a really critical skill.
Our students work with the community in every step of their coursework, whether that means doing research that relies on community archives or collections are doing oral histories or doing projects directly for the community.
In the technology field. It is becoming more and more apparent that they want to hire graduates who have been trained in the humanities graduates who are thinking about connections between literature, technology, ethics.
My work with the humanities track has really tapped into that kind of relationship. The goal of the humanities track is to think differently about how you do community engaged research, how a university or a place of power engages with communities, and really making sure you're creating a space where the community has as much say as anyone in the university does.
