Transcript

SPEAKERS

Betselot Wondimu, Scott Muir

Betselot Wondimu

When I got the inbox from you talking about like, “Hey, we have this initiative, we're trying to amplify humanities,” immediately, I was like “I'm on board.”  [laughs] Because this is something that a lot of students don't have in their frame of reference. They aren’t thinking about what they can do with an English degree. They aren't thinking about what they can do with the religious studies degree. They aren't thinking about what they can do with an anthro degree. The things that are presented to them as possible are really limited and constrained. 

Scott Muir

I would first love to just hear about how you chose to major in anthropology.

Betselot Wondimu 

This first one might be like the longest answer of the conversation if that’s alright. 

Scott Muir 

This is What Are You Going to Do with That?, a podcast of stories of everyday folks from diverse personal and educational backgrounds, about why they chose to study the humanities as undergraduates and how that education prepared them for fulfilling careers. I'm Scott Muir of the National Humanities Alliance, an organization dedicated to promoting the value of the humanities on campuses and in communities. I lead the Study the Humanities initiative, which, with generous support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, makes the case for the value of undergraduate humanities education. If you're listening to this podcast, you are likely either a humanities major considering a humanities major or deeply invested in the education of someone who is. The title of this podcast likely won't surprise you. This may sound familiar.

Betselot Wondimu

“I remember, even with the support of my family, there were jokes being cracked all the time by, you know, more traditional folks in my family saying, what are you going to do with that? What are you going to be?”

Scott Muir

It's an age old question, but one that has taken on greater urgency since the Great Recession of 2008. For those studying the humanities, it may sound less like a fair question than a suggestion that what you are interested in studying is impractical. Here's the strange thing about this phenomenon. The evidence does not support any of these assumptions about the limited career prospects of humanities majors. In reality, career outcomes data show that humanities majors are employed at rates comparable to other majors, earn competitive salaries, and are satisfied with their careers. What's more, labor market experts predict that the value of the higher order human skills developed through studying the humanities will increase as more technical tasks are automated, and the challenges confronting leaders go evermore complex. Nonetheless, the myths persist. But so do the humanities majors, who keep choosing to study what they love, finding success on their own terms. On this podcast, we’ll ask what drives these students to study the humanities in spite of these myths. How do they handle questions from their families? What do they gain through studying the humanities? And how do they forge their own career paths in the absence of a linear one? I've been reaching out to folks with humanities backgrounds working in a wide range of fields to learn how they've answered these questions. In this first episode of What are you going to do with that? We hear from Betselot Wondimu, who was pulled off a pre-med path by big, burning questions that led him to major in anthropology. Let's return to his story now.

Betselot Wondimu 

Both my parents are Ethiopian. They immigrated to the United States in 1996. I was born in 1997 in Maryland. Born and raised here. For a lot of people from working class backgrounds, from minority backgrounds, it doesn't feel like the humanities are an accessible thing to them. Because the dialogue that goes around is like, “it's not practical to study a humanities [discipline] if you want to put food on the table when you're an independent adult.” And that dialogue is sort of coming from, like as a parent, if you’re a parent, wanting to make sure that your kids are able to sustain themselves and be independent and to take care of themselves and support themselves. Sure. And so it’s almost coming from a fear of the unknown. Like not really understanding what is capable of being done if you go into some of these fields. People haven't really seen how studying a humanit[ies discipline] has had a successful outcome for people from working class or minority backgrounds. But there are a lot more clear examples of how studying medicine or law or engineering has had a successful outcome for people from these backgrounds. So it seems like the safer path to go down. So from a young age, I had it in my head that I was going to be a physician. And this idea came from sort of my status as a child of two immigrants who prioritize education and stability in a career, along with my own interest in learning about the human body and the scientific method. So that was sort of my starting point for what I wanted to do in my life. And as I continued to grow through middle school, and especially high school, I started to realize that there was this thing called inequity that exists in the world, right? So it just comes up as you get older. And it was tied to a lot of factors that late in history in the modern day that I was observing. So these ideas became more apparent as I grew up as a young black person in America, as I observed the way that people of different backgrounds were treated in the United States. And as I observed, there's this burden of disease and like allocation of resources that was unfair, like unequal across the world. So as I was growing up and learning about how these conditions were reinforced and existing in the world, some of my interests started to change and the things I started to pay attention to started to change for the most part.

Scott Muir  

So what were some of the influences that made you start to pay more attention to those things?

Betselot Wondimu

Yeah, so I think for me, a lot of it came from life experiences. I've been back to Ethiopia four times in my life during my childhood. And I remember the last time I went, I was 15 years old. And that was the first time that it really hit me: “Yo, we are like in a developing country right now.” And there are factors, there's like blatant homelessness, there's blatant poverty, like everything is just like in your face in a way that it isn't in your face in the United States, even though those things clearly exist here. It's like really in your face when you go to this different country, right? So when I came back from that trip that really propelled me to go into these readings, sort of doing my own self-learning and research into why these disparate conditions exist.

Scott Muir 

What were some of the things you read? Do you remember any of the things that made an impact on you?

Betselot Wondimu

A lot of the work I was reading, especially in high school, came from historical figures in the civil rights movement in the United States. So I was reading…the autobiography of Malcolm X just completely changed my life when I was like 15 or 16 years old. Because it was like a firsthand account of how the racist legacy in the United States is impacting people's lives on the daily. I was reading a lot of James Baldwin, he was more of like an analytical approach. And he really just broke everything down in a very clear way. When we're thinking about how I came upon anthropology, I was sort of in this headspace when I was searching for knowledge about like power structures and the legacies of colonialism and slavery and racism. And I kind of just stumbled upon anthropology as I was doing sort of this quest for knowledge. This was way back in like the early 2010s. So I was in high school doing my own readings on the internet, doing Google searches, trying to figure things out. For a lot of the time that I was trying to do this self-learning thing about how to understand the way our structures operate in the world as it is now. It felt kind of lonely [laughs]. It felt kind of lonely, because I wasn't sure if there were a lot of other people who thought the same way that I was thinking at the moment, or if there were other people that saw some of the patterns and inequities that I was seeing as well. And I knew at the time that I was a teenager, I was a young person. So maybe I'm just looking at it the wrong way.

My first two years of college, I was a pre-med student. And the longer that I stuck around in the college environment, and had chances to work in research labs, research settings, and have conversations with professors and other students about their experiences in research and academia. I started leaning away from the idea of being a physician, and more into the idea of becoming a researcher. Because it seemed to have more of an effect in creating the big picture change that I was hoping to create. Asking bigger picture questions that are your own questions that you can develop on your own. That seemed really enticing for me, because it could have implications on a lot of things that are beyond an individual person or an individual community.

Scott Muir

Right? Yeah, you had systems-level questions, you wanted to make systems-level changes and seeing research as the way to do that.

Betselot Wondimu  09:42

Exactly. Yeah. 

So the first anthropology courses that I took while I was in college are what allowed me to confidently make the change into research and pursue anthropology as my major. And I really felt comfortable making that switch, because in some of the first courses I took in anthro, the theories and the frameworks that are in anthropological approaches and methods made me feel empowered to understand the bigger picture, complicated questions that I was trying to make sense of in my head. And an aha moment that I can give, I remember taking these intro to cultural and medical anthropology courses and realizing that there are already terms for ideas like structural violence, cultural relativism, embodiment. There are already expressions, terminology, and decades of research behind these concepts that I was previously thinking about very loosely and abstractly. And I didn't really know how to make sense of it before. But when I came across these terms, and learned that there were decades of research behind these things, it made me feel a lot more empowered to move forward and make even more sense of them and make even more actionable change using them as a foundation. But to stumble upon these classes and see like, hey, there's an entire universe of research that examines these questions, that felt good [laughs]. Those foundational terms, a lot of those foundational ways of thinking and theories, they help you make sense of the way that human beings behave. And how human beings operate when they're[, say,] thrusted from where they've been for many years and put into a new environment. That's the example for assimilative stress. Once again, it's this idea of demonstrating that these ideas that you have aren't crazy, and this is something that you can do, for real. So when I was trying to learn more about anthro as a major, I kind of just cold-called, cold-emailed rather, a professor named Christina Getrich at the University of Maryland. She's a cultural anthropologist in the Department of Anthropology. Had never met her before. I read her bio on the UMD website and I saw that she was an anthropologist examining Latino health disparities. And in this moment of changing immigration policies in the United States, and how being a part of a mixed status family has implications on your well-being and mental health, and things like that. So I read her description and I was like, this is really interesting. So I sent her a cold email. And she was kind enough to sit down with me as a prospective student. She had no connection to me, no obligation to me. And she sat down with me and told me more about the work that she's doing specifically, and more about the field of anthropology as an academic discipline more broadly. And that was sort of her attempt to let me know like, “hey, some of these interests that you have are possible to explore more deeply if you use anthropology as a tool to do that. And that conversation was one that gave me the green light to start the process of changing my major, and formerly pursuing anthropology. So I think one of the great advantages of studying a humanit[ies discipline], especially as an undergraduate student, is, you have a better chance of having professors who give you more of a personalized educational experience. And a better chance of having professors who will take an interest in you as an individual, in your future and your career goals and your aspirations. Because the coursework in the humanities pulls from aspects of your background and your identity and like the diversity of thinking in a way that STEM courses might not, which has implications into the work that you end up producing, and how you feel about the field moving forward. So, I think a lot of professors understand that and are more willing to maybe even sometimes tailor the material you're learning to you as an individual wherever possible.

Scott Muir  

I feel like you put your finger on something really important, which is like, it's not only because the classes are smaller, or whatever, it's because humanistic inquiry is personal. Just the nature of the inquiry is much more likely to make them be like, “What questions are you bringing to this? What is it you want to know?”

Betselot Wondimu 

The biggest benefit to me of studying something that you're personally interested in, and that you have this desire to answer these burning questions that you might have, is: while you're in like student mode, the act of studying or dedicating so much time to an assignment or paper, and making sense of the questions that you've been asked, it feels a lot less like work and a lot more like a personally enlightening experience for you, right? When you actually feel invested in the material that you're examining or the material that you're studying, you feel a lot better about putting your head down and grinding when the time comes to do that. And when you have that sense of intrinsic motivation, you feel like all the work that you're putting into it is also for you and your own growth. It's also contributing to you and your own personal development and the way you see the world. And the way that you see the world changes maybe. And I think that's the best way to view education. Because the process of learning should be like a lifelong process. If that motivation isn't there. If you don't have so much passion in what you're learning about, if you feel like it's like a means to an end like you said, just that fact alone is inherently distracting. It disrupts how deeply you can go into a subject matter, because you're constantly constantly being reminded that like, “Hey, I might not really care about what I'm studying right now.”

Scott Muir 

The powerful intrinsic motivation that Betselot describes has indeed propelled him forward. He excelled in his studies, graduating with a double major in anthropology and public health, and earning distinction for his anthropological research. He quickly landed a top notch entry-level position as a public health analyst at RTI International, a leader in public interest research. Let's listen to Betselot explain how the knowledge, skills, and dispositions he developed as an anthropology major, helped him land the position, excel in his role, and experience fulfillment through his ongoing quest to better understand and reduce public health disparities.

Betselot Wondimu 

A lot of what I've been doing for the past year, given my background, I've been a part of a lot of like the qualitative cores and the teams on projects at RTI. So being involved in creating interview guides, semi-structured interview guides, with stakeholders and clients that we're working with. Participating in those interviews, taking notes during those interviews, data analysis and thematic coding on the back end. So I've been able to see the level of care that is given to some of the qualitative data collection and analysis that happens in public health settings. And I think that it's taking a positive trajectory. It's being taken more seriously and being valued more. I think my involvement in anthropology in undergrad gave me an edge, for sure, in landing the position. Because I imagine that a lot of the people I interviewed with, I feel like they understood that I had a background in public health as an undergrad. But I also had a unique, bigger picture, critical perspective that I picked up while I was in an anthropology major. And both of these backgrounds sort of coalesced into why I wanted to join this behavioral health research division at a large research institute. It was those things I was describing before: an appreciation of mixed-methods research and an appreciation of humanizing public health questions. So for that reason, I think things like—life histories, in-depth ethnographies, interviews with people, open-ended questions, semi-structured interviews—things like that are really important to giving people the flexibility to let you know, like, “Hey, this is what I think is important. And this is what you should be exploring as a researcher. If you say you care about this question, I'm giving you the answers.”

Scott Muir 

It's almost like everyone's a teacher, from an anthropological perspective, right?

Betselot Wondimu

That's exactly it. Everyone's a teacher, everyone has valuable information to present. You just have to know. If you're a researcher, and you're trying to make sense of like any given question, you have to have the self-awareness to know that this person could be a teacher, this person could be a teacher, it doesn't matter what their socioeconomic status is, it doesn't matter how much education they have, it doesn't matter where they come from, they have valuable information that you can learn from and that you can benefit from. I think they saw that a lot of those ideas came from my background in anthropology, and they appreciated that. 

Something that's fun about the humanities, that's fun, and equally, like scary, is you can do whatever you want to do with a degree in the humanities. There's so many directions that you can go in with it. Whereas with other degrees, like in STEM, it's kind of just like one path that you go down, and you know that you want this or you know that you don't. But there’s just a lot of structure to it. But with the humanities, you sort of have to create your own path and craft your own path.

Scott Muir 

Yeah. I like how you articulated that. It's fun, it's exciting. It's also maybe a little bit scary or intimidating. But maybe actually unfolding and learning and adapting and finding new interests, developing new skills, that that is both more true to life as it really has been, but also like, will continually, increasingly be with the changes that are coming.

Betselot Wondimu

Yeah, yep. I definitely agree with that.

Scott Muir  

I feel like you've already said a lot of things to this, but if you have any, any kind of closing thoughts on: would you recommend students interested in the kinds of questions you have, in the kind of work you're doing in public health—it sounds like you would probably encourage them to study the humanities–like what would you say to convince them that that's a good use of their time?

Betselot Wondimu

I definitely would encourage it. It all starts with the intrinsic motivation in the beginning. If that’s there, I definitely encourage it. Standing on their own ground, any field in the humanities, I feel like it's gonna make you a more well-rounded person having studied a humanit[ies discipline] at length. But also, especially in my situation, I really appreciate the interdisciplinary nature of the humanistic field I'm studying. It can be combined with pretty much any other field to create a new angle of asking a big picture question. That's also a really good thing. Anything you can think of, there's so many directions that you can go in once you have some foundational background knowledge in any given field in the humanities. It can be applied very widely. So I think that's really important. I think that's a big selling point. And it's also just fun [laughs] to study human nature and emotion.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

humanities, anthropology, studying, questions, learning, public health, people, background, intrinsic motivation, humanities majors, thinking, anthro, read, research, field, professors, life, major, united states, interviews