So, what's your major?

A diploma won't protect your future, but I think I know what will.

My niece just finished her first year at Boston University. Her grades are great; they always have been. But when I discuss Maggie with my sister, our conversations are usually about where her focus and ambitions lie, how she can be ready for the future.

In middle school, Maggie wanted to be an actress or be in musical theater. She is a natural ham with an incredible singing voice. I was excited to have another creative person in our family.

One day, I heard that she had now decided to go to law school, not Broadway. Maggie has always been pretty argumentative, so I guess that made some sense. A year later, when I brought up the law, I got blank stares. It turned out that her ambition was now to be a doctor. Since she got to Boston, she has already cycled through lawyer, surgeon, physician’s assistant, and occupational therapist — and now seems to be settling on something in psychology. Or maybe sociology.

That’s the way it should be at this age, where you flip the channels until you find something you want to settle down with.

When my son Jack was in high school, his focus was art, and he went to a high school that focused on all forms of it. His friends were actors and musicians, and when he got into the Rhode Island School of Design, it came as no surprise to anybody.

As his dad and patron, I teetered between encouraging his creativity to take any form he chose and encouraging him to do something that would pay his bills in the future. I assumed he would study graphic design, which has so many practical applications, but then he announced that he was going to major in painting. I knew that path would be a tougher one to economic independence, but I trusted him and that he would always land on his feet.

Jack has many creative skills. He is also a smart guy — organized and hardworking. When he graduated from college, he didn’t have a particular career path picked out. He landed in Los Angeles a couple of months later and became a freelancer in film production. Before long, he joined the union and spent his twenties working in sets and props. His career path seemed set.

I’d spent a lot of money on his tuition to help him be disciplined and imaginative, self-motivated and collaborative, a dreamer who can produce results. All of those seeming contradictions coalesced in a person who can step into an unclear situation and emerge with answers and results. Art school trained Jack to be a problem solver, and nondenominational problem-solving is one of the strongest skills you can have in the world today, a world in which nothing is clear, everything changes, and skills can lose their value overnight.

When I went to college, I had no idea what I would do for a living when I graduated. By the time I graduated, I still had no idea.

For me, in the late 70s, college was an opportunity to grow up, to explore, experiment, and try things out in a relatively risk-free environment. It helped me gain confidence and become a well-educated person. Whether I was studying Chaucer or Russian politics, theatre or creative writing, I used those four years to deepen and enrich myself as a person and get a sense of what was out there in the world and the things one could do. That gigantic menu was there to browse, without having to place an order at the end.

The skills I developed and the knowledge I gained were designed to help me grow as a person, not just as a worker. Sure, I had classmates who were focused on becoming engineers, architects, or investment bankers, but I emerged open to the world and ever-curious.

My path might have been easier if it had been narrowed for me, if I had a degree that was obviously applicable to a particular industry, but instead, I was a man of the world.

It served me well.

I can’t imagine how Princeton would have prepared me for what I do today, nearly half a century later, long before there was YouTube, Zoom, online courses, or email newsletters.

So much has changed since then.

Kids are trained to see their childhoods as a sort of career, full of extracurriculars that will look good on college applications. College, with its expenses and large loans, is now a fancy trade school designed to provide future security.

But the promise is hard to keep.

Young people’s futures are impossible to define. Maggie won’t leave college, get a job at a company, and stay there until she retires. She might change careers every five years. She might start her own company. Hanging a sheepskin or two or three on her wall is not the end of her education; it’s often just the beginning.

When Jack was confronted with the pandemic and then with the year-long Writers Guild strike, his career began to unravel, as did so many in the film industry. He decided to go back to school and learn visual effects and computer design. It was promised that this would lead to a career in the video game business, but within months of his taking courses, that industry began to collapse, too. There were mass layoffs as artificial intelligence replaced many jobs previously done by graduates of his technical school.

But Jack didn’t panic. He started yet another career, this time as a construction engineer.

It is something I’d never imagined for him, something I still don’t quite understand, but it’s turned out to be a great fit. He’s using so many skills he honed in college. Being an innovator, a collaborator, a manager of large, complex processes, and most importantly, a creative problem solver. The skills he developed to make paintings, then movies and TV shows, are now being put to use building a children’s hospital.

I tell my niece not to stress too much about which direction to take in her studies. She doesn’t need to expect clarity on exactly what she will do with her degree. The future is so unpredictable now that she can afford to be flexible. What matters most is being curious, being open, and, of course, working hard.

I tell Maggie that no matter how much knowledge she picks up in the classroom, no matter what skills she’s taught, everything is going to shift and evolve. The guts she had to step onto a stage at nine and belt out a song to a room full of strangers might turn out to be as useful as what she studied for her bio final last week.

Your pal,

Danny