Comment by nradov
13 hours ago
Sure, but to be fair to STEM fields, group discussions aren't uniquely a humanities skill. Collectively ripping apart a scientific journal article to find all of its flaws is a common activity.
Interdisciplinary study is great but there can be some friction in the labor market, at least for new graduates seeking entry level positions. When corporate recruiters see a college transcript that doesn't fit neatly into one of the usual slots they don't know what to do with it.
Computer Science also has its own friction with the labor market. It's really a branch of abstract mathematics and only tangentially related to commercial software product development. I think colleges ought to offer something like a "Bachelor of Fine Arts in Software Development" for students more interested in practical craftsmanship. There will always be demand for people who can build working software, even if most of them move up to higher levels of abstraction leveraging AI tools instead of directly writing code themselves.
My CS college told us bluntly: 'We're training you for the last job you'll ever have. Pick up the stuff you need to know for your first one on your own or while doing class projects.'
Worked out pretty well in my case. There's plenty I don't know about the Java Enterprise Edition standard libraries, but I can still walk through computing in decent depth from transistors to algorithms.
(And to the article's point, have probably gotten more CS jobs from my interdisciplinary skills than my CS-only skills)