I earned my BA in German from the University of Montana in May 2015. I registered as a major because of my interest in fairy tales and folklore, and developed a new interest in Dadaism and feminism in the former German Democratic Republic during my senior year.

I invested four years -- including a semester-long study abroad to Germany and Vienna -- in my degree. I began college hopeful for a career in academia, which is the path my father wanted for me. “Publish or perish,” he reminded me, though I was nineteen and years away from a masters degree or doctorate. “What are you going to do with a degree in German?” people asked. “Folklore studies,” I responded.

My junior year, I began looking into a different career path: library and information science. During my stint abroad, I had to write a research paper worth three credits. I spent hours in the archives of the University of Vienna’s library, and chatting online with University of Montana librarians who helped me navigate JSTOR and other academic databases.

Research became the most enjoyable part of that paper. My inability to settle on a topic was in part due to the amount of research available to me for each of my half-dozen potential topics. As Boolean operators and controlled vocabularies became more familiar, I became more confident in researching independently. And so my last semester of college, I signed on for an internship at the Mansfield Library at the University of Montana.

With the modern and classical languages and literatures librarian, I sorted through a large donation of Germanic studies materials, in both English and German. My stint at the reference desk often coincided with the biology librarian, the government documents librarian, and the humanities librarian. Towards the end of the semester, I applied for the circulation supervisor position at a small Catholic college library. I got it.

It was not the path my father envisioned, but he was proud of me nonetheless (and likely glad that he would not have to support me financially). I answer questions about this decision often: “What are you going to do with a degree in German?” has turned into, “What are you going to do with a degree in library and information science?” Sometimes they follow that query with, “Why did you major in German then?”

I don’t really use my major for my job. Yes, there’s the usual bullet points any humanities major can use on a resume, such as written communication skills and primary and secondary source research skills. Occasionally we need to inter-library loan something from a library in Germany, and my degree is useful there. But my job involves training student workers, using library software, processing course reserves, and doing an inter-library loan.

This doesn’t mean my degree does not have value. A degree was required for this job. I am considering pursuing an MA in Germanic studies in addition to a library science degree, so I can be a languages librarian. But the value of my degree does not come from working in the same field. It comes from being passionate about the topic, from an enjoyable study abroad experience, from pouring over paper ephemera while a nervous Viennese librarian hovered over my shoulder. The process I underwent to earn my degree is what makes it valuable to me.

Cover photo: a section of the former Berlin Wall.