I graduated in 1991 with a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and a minor in Computer Science. My advisor was proud. My parents were less so.
The job market received this combination with the enthusiasm of a shrug. Philosophy, it turned out, was an excellent preparation for asking deep questions … like why won’t anyone hire me? The Computer Science minor was a footnote nobody asked about. So I did what any freshly minted critical thinker could do: I took whatever work I could find.
While friends landed at ad agencies, PR firms, and respectable companies with business cards and 401(k)s, I spent a few solid years running pizzas to apartment complexes and debating the ethics of bad tippers. It wasn’t glamorous, but I got very good at it. Friedrich Nietzsche never said anything useful about a slow Tuesday night rush, but I managed anyway.
Then the internet arrived and rewrote everyone’s résumé.
Suddenly, that dusty Computer Science minor wasn’t a footnote…it was a foot in the door. I understood networks, I knew how to talk to developers, and I wasn’t afraid of the technical side of a conversation. Companies scrambling to get online needed people who could bridge the gap between the engineers and everyone else.
That’s where the Philosophy degree quietly revealed its long game. Years of dissecting arguments, constructing logical frameworks, and wrestling with ambiguity had turned me into someone who could think (really think) through problems that had no obvious answers. And the early internet had nothing but those.
Turns out, the degree that launched a thousand pizza deliveries was exactly the right preparation. It just needed the world to catch up.
