Studying philosophy has enormous intrinsic rewards. But a philosophy major is also a great preparation for a whole array of careers. That's because philosophy focuses on helping you develop the following set of skills, which are crucial for many careers:
Problem-Solving Skills: Studying philosophy is a particularly effective way to enhance your problem-solving capacities. It helps you analyze concepts, definitions, arguments and problems. It contributes to your capacity to organize ideas and issues, to deal with questions of value, and to extract what is essential from masses of information. Studying philosophy helps you put problems in a manageable form, frame hypotheses, and do research. It helps you both to distinguish fine differences between views and to discover common ground between opposing positions. And it helps you synthesize a variety of views or perspectives into a unified whole.
Communication Skills -written and oral: These regularly top the lists of skills that employers are looking for. Philosophy contributes uniquely to the development of expressive and communicative powers. It provides some of the basic tools of self-expression - for instance, skills in presenting ideas through well-constructed, systematic arguments. It helps you express what is distinctive about your view; enhances your ability to explain difficult material; encourages fair-mindedness in considering opposing points of view; and helps you eliminate ambiguities and vagueness from your writing and speech.
Analytic Reading Skills: For most of the jobs that Washington University graduates are likely to hold, you will be effective only if you are able to read carefully and critically the verbal material you will be working with - whether it's a legal brief, a scientific report, a company's new policy proposal, or a memo from the head of your division. Philosophy brings you face-to-face with some of the most challenging (and rewarding) texts ever written. Once you have mastered those texts, you'll have the ability and confidence to handle most any text thrown your way.
Persuasiveness: Through its focus on clear formulations, good arguments, and apt examples, the study of philosophy helps you develop the ability to be convincing. You learn to build and defend your own views, to appreciate competing positions, and to indicate forcefully why you consider your views preferable to alternatives. While many fields give you practice in arguing for your position, philosophy is unique in its focus on the quality of the arguments themselves.
Understanding Other Fields: Philosophy is indispensable for understanding the foundational issues in many disciplines. Many important questions about a discipline, such as the nature of its concepts and its relation to other disciplines, are philosophical in nature. Philosophy of science, for instance, is needed to supplement the understanding of the natural and social sciences which one derives from doing scientific work itself. Similarly, philosophy of law, biomedical ethics, or history of philosophy gives you training in the sort of cross-disciplinary thinking important in today's fast-changing and interrelated careers. It can also help you do well in non- philosophy courses and in other majors or minors.
Armed with these skills, philosophy majors typically score much better than most others on the LSAT, outpace all other majors in acceptance to medical schools, and find themselves advancing rapidly in the businesses and organizations in which they work.
Finally, there is the time-honored reason for studying philosophy. Philosophy will help you understand yourself and your world. It will acquaint you with the writings of those people, past and present, who have thought most deeply about human beings and the world, nature, science, morality, and social life. Socrates said, "Know thyself". It takes a lifetime. Philosophy will provide you with the materials and methods you need for this life-long task.
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