Education for a Life AND a Living

Contrary to some of my peers, I actually do know what I want to end up doing after I leave the University of Texas. Like Eric I want to be a businessperson and engage in the busy world of international and domestic corporate interaction. That was a lot of big words right there, which makes me realize the importance of my background in English even as I write this optional discussion board. Being a Business Honors student, I reject the criticisms that vocational education in business, communications, or engineering simply “[serve] the needs of corporations” (Palaima 324), where the studies of the Liberal Arts are “afterthoughts or not thought about at all” (Palaima 324).

While within UT’s Business Honors Program I am being trained in a vocational manner, the Liberal Arts curriculum is instituted as requirements for my BBA. Many of my required courses for Business intersect with obligatory classes in Plan II: economics, six hours in one field of science, government, English. And those are just the corresponding courses I’m currently taking. But while Business Honors leaves these requirements behind around junior year to focus on purely business, Plan II will help me pick up this slack and broaden my overall knowledge and views of the world. While the Liberal Arts give a student an “education for a life, not a living” (343I), my particular combination of Plan II and BHP give me both the education for my life in addition to the education for my living. I think this is fantastic; I have no problems whatsoever attending a fifth year in school to achieve these means. Both programs offer me unique opportunities in learning which I am dying to take advantage of.

Plan II prides itself on being a program that emphasizes a tight-knit community. “Small classes and a common curriculum develop a sense of intimate community among students” (343J), the website boasts. Plan II biology and the freshmen seminars are examples of the opportunities presented only to Plan II students. I feel that Plan II will be that ideal “City of Green Thoughts” that Giametti describes. I feel everything about this program appeals to Giametti’s theories on a liberal education. The Joynes Reading Room or Plan II office could accurately claim: “Here green and growing ideas – by patient tending and work, by their open exchange and clash, by the sheer pressure of untrammeled thought – create over time a conversation that, laden with a passionate commitment to values and reason, becomes civilization.” The bases of knowledge rely on the studies of society, history, ethics, and humanities – the Liberal Arts education that Plan II gives its privileged students. But I consider myself more privileged than some because my combination of Plan II and BHP will not only train me for a future career, but a future life.