As evinced in my students’ teaching evaluations, my experience of teaching at Columbia has been one of joyful camaraderie with students aspiring to positions like mine. Columbia’s East Asian Languages & Cultures department is full of promising undergraduates deeply interested in the history and humanities of East Asia. Many of my students, though, were non-majors earning their humanities credits alongside social science and natural science classes as part of a liberal arts education. These are the students whom I most love to teach: students who began college late due to military enrollment, or to a need to work at age 18 and contribute to their families’ income.

When teaching students like this, I feel that I am bringing them along on the journey that I’ve taken, from a dropout to the heart of elite academia. We ought not teach undergraduates solely to become graduate students, however. At Columbia, I teach students to find their interest in world history for the first time, and while doing so, I inculcate in them widely transferrable skills for white-collar jobs such as: their persuasive writing skills, their critical use of evidence, and their ability to defend their positions live in-person. My course for 3rd year undergraduates at Columbia is an example of this approach.

A humanities education, though, has a place in the lives and training of students other than those going into business, finance, or consulting. All people from all walks of life have much to gain by understanding the wider world beyond America’s borders. They must choose with which corporations they will seek employment, where across the whole planet they may live and work, what languages to learn and use in the course of that life and work, and perhaps most importantly, how they will vote at home in this country. Language courses, civics, geography - these all help in such efforts - but a wide-ranging education in the gradual or sudden formation of the polities and cultures that now dominate our global world is irreplaceable. Only by understanding the genealogy of a given polity or organization as it presently exists, will students be able to interact with those entities in a truly informed manner. My course for community college students exemplifies this latter method of preparing adults for their first or their newest careers in a global labor marketplace.