If you are a humanities grad who graduated without a path, how did you reset?
TLDR: If you are a humanities grad who graduated without a path, how did you reset?
I wrote this post originally for my college's reddit page, so sorry if this background seems specific but I would really love this reddit's input! For background, I’m a May ’26 Columbia grad who majored in English and Business Management, and I’m wondering if any humanities graduates have been in a similar situation and could offer some perspective.
For background, I started college pre-dental, thinking I wanted the stability, impact, and intellectual challenge of dentistry/oral surgery, but got Bs and Cs in my prereqs despite my best efforts and ultimately switched to English. I loved my lit classes and initially considered academia, but eventually realized the state of the field wasn’t a risk I wanted to take. I worked random internships, one at a charter school and one at a market research firm, and across both sophomore and junior year recruited heavily for consulting. When that failed, I began looking more into film and media my senior year, completing two unpaid film development internships. While I interviewed with some cool/high paying opportunities throughout college (consulting firms/media fellowships) and got to final stages for my dream job in media consulting then was rejected, nothing panned out, and after months of post-grad job searching/networking, I’m now choosing between a temp advertising job, a business development/cold-sales role, and a project management position in Wisconsin that is more stable, just extremely long hours and would mean leaving NYC and my family.
I’m pretty disappointed, as I feel like I spent college wavering between stability/money, passion, and being in a place I loved, and somehow ended up with neither. I realize realistically if I could have succeeded in my STEM classes, I would have pursued that, as I always wanted something with growth potential, reasonable stability, enough income to live comfortably in NYC, and some intellectual stimulation/feeling of impact or prestige. I’ve considered law school, but with a lower GPA (3.76) and my fear of ending up in the same place again post-law school, I’m hesitant to take on more debt and don’t know if it makes sense without a strong chance at a top school.
As a whole, I feel like the guiding ideas I had of what I wanted in life and what I would do to make it happen, have fallen through, I feel lost on how to move forward forward, especially with a largely inapplicable degree: I don't know what I would regret most, missing out on money, missing out on being close to family, or missing out on a career I wanted. My biggest goal right now I think is just to find a stable career, whatever that means, and I just wanted to ask if other English/humanities/any students floundered in this way, what job you took to reset or any other way you rebuilt your path. Thank you so much!