‘History? But you’re smart; you should do something like mathematics.’ I vividly remember the conversation the summer before starting my bachelor’s. I had just announced to a group of my parents’ neighbours the degree I would be studying at university next year, and everyone fifty and above gathered around to disagree. History? Good grief.

Truth be told, history wasn’t my first choice. Growing up, I considered everything from architecture to biochemistry to business administration. When I first enrolled at Radboud, it was as a psychology student – and when that didn’t turn out to be the right degree, I was dead-set on studying English literature.

That was three years ago, and I will graduate with a bachelor’s degree in history and a minor in literature studies this summer. Some people’s faces will go through all five stages of grief when you tell them that. Others will simply treat your degree as a glorified hobby or an aesthetic afterthought.

‘I always thought history was very interesting,’ some computer science guy will say at a networking event to you and give you the kind of smile you give small children when they tell you about becoming an astronaut one day.

They just told you that attending philosophy lectures is a hobby for them (‘Something easy but not really something I can learn anything from’) – and no, they can’t tell you what they are studying in their degree. You wouldn’t understand. You smile back and think about Google laying off 12,000 employees this January.

I know, the humanities are generally the butt of the academic joke. And I’m the first to admit that it takes a certain degree of crazy to willingly spend years studying the lives of (mostly) dead people. Especially when no one can tell you what job you will end up with afterward.

When the poor career orientation lady passed by at my high school and told 17-year-old me that my test scores all pointed to the humanities, I was opposed, to say the least. You could probably send my high school self into cardiac arrest, telling her I’m writing papers about East German figure skating now.

After all, why would any seriously academically minded person write about something like that? Well, I did because East German figure skating is a great case study for soft power dynamics and gender. And I find deep diving into history’s largest doping system infinitely more interesting than mathematics.

Does that mean everyone should abandon whatever they study and get into the humanities? Absolutely not. But it hurts my soul to think studying humans’ thoughts, beliefs, and cultures over the centuries is somehow deemed unimportant. As if everything else didn’t start there.

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