Mission Statement:

Hey guys, I’m Diego Casillas. A handful of years ago I could be found in the library stacks at SMU constantly checking out books on historiography. You see, back then I was a few years into a PhD program in history. I was convinced I would accomplish the feat of presenting a dissertation and landing a coveted professorship job. Since then I have worked as a market researcher making cold calls to prospective customers, IT analyst fixing computers and rebooting servers, a software QA analyst that would thoroughly vet enterprise software for bugs, and finally as a senior software developer now actually coding web-based software. I am constantly introduced to people at work as the ex-PhD, or the guy who has moved up quickly.  I get the previous sentence sounds like a humblebrag, but the thing is, there’s a pattern and a system behind getting the job you actually want. The point of this blog is for all of us to continue learning the fine art of getting your coveted career regardless of your credentials.

Maybe it’s from learning to read between the lines during my grad school days, maybe I was lucky when it came to having decent social intelligence (at the expense of so many other skills), or quite frankly maybe I just love Machiavelli too damn much – the point is, getting your desired job regardless of your specific academic background (or even lack thereof) is totally within the realm of possibility! Studied philosophy and now you want to get into marketing? Studied art and now you want to get a job in IT? Studied English but now want to get a job doing sales? Don’t let your parents and their old crabby friends tell you it’s not possible, of course it is. Baby boomers and generation X’ers both created and played by the rules of corporate America. “You’ve got to study X to get a job doing Y at company Z.” In various online communities, and through anecdotal evidence, I still see humanities majors thinking this way. Even while being raised to believe that this paradigm is true, liberal arts majors still chose to study the humanities while having anxieties about job prospects.

My job here is to get liberal arts majors hired. I have had personal success, but more importantly than that, I have been able to help others in these endeavors as well. I was able to coach an ex-coworker into getting the exact type of job in IT he wanted, this was after getting a history degree as well. Now I can’t get him to stop gloating about his company and his job. In fact, it even kind of makes me feel a bit envious of his work situation! But on a serious note, it’s time to get liberal arts majors their due. I only ask for readers to do one single thing in their endeavors to get their desired jobs – get uncomfortable. It’s the only way to shake away a life-long belief system regarding the job market. If you do that, I guarantee you will make the appropriate strides in redefining your career.

Here’s what you can expect out of this blog going forward:

• Success stories and interviews from those who have been able to leverage their humanities degrees into successful careers.
• Job spotlights – articles on jobs you did not know existed and the type of experience and skillset necessary to do them. Have you heard of Software QA? You can do it now with an anthropology degree and it pays well!
• Articles with focused career advice – how-to article on optimizing LinkedIn, applying to internships, what exactly is networking (you know that thing everyone swears by), resume editing, etc.
• Book reviews! Liberal arts majors can do this in our sleep. So we will discuss books that are relevant to our job searches and extract as much useful information from them as possible.
• Giveaways! Follow us and engage with our community and you will have a chance to win books we review as well as other goodies like month memberships to things such as LinkedIn Premium, Pluralsight (IT training repository), etc.
• And just for fun, we’ll still talk about awesome humanities stuff. Cool new research shows that Atlantis was real? A comparison between Schopenhauer and Donald Trump? Jane Austen was a fan of the patriarchy after all? It can be serious or it can be fun, we will not lose sight of why we studied what we did!