Those worried about the value of studying the arts and humanities, particularly at the postgraduate level, take heart: Google wants you.In a boldly titled talk at a conference at Stanford University last week, Damon Horowitz, director of engineering – and in-house philosopher – at Google, discussed the question of “Why you should quit your technology job and get a humanities PhD”.

Dr Horowitz was one of several Silicon Valley executives exploring the theme at the BiblioTech conference, an event that united academics with entrepreneurs and senior managers from some of the world’s leading high-tech companies.

For Marissa Mayer, who was the 20th employee taken on by Google and is now its vice-president of consumer products, the situation was clear: “We are going through a period of unbelievable growth and will be hiring about 6,000 people this year – and probably 4,000-5,000 from the humanities or liberal arts.”

Companies such as Google were looking for “people who are smart and get things done” from every possible background, she said, yet the humanities had a particular relevance.

Developing user interfaces, for example, was at least as much about knowing how to observe and understand people as about pure technological skill, she added.

Read full story in the Times Higher… and another bit I particularly love:

Others speakers developed similar themes. For June Cohen, executive producer of TED Media, anyone who had studied for a PhD, however seemingly irrelevant the topic, had “learned stamina and focus and how to listen” – and those skills would always be valuable to employers.

As long as PhDs were regarded as essentially academic qualifications, commented another speaker, many people were likely to feel like failures because there were never going to be enough academic jobs, particularly tenure-track ones at elite universities, to go around. Yet the reality was that PhDs offered transferable skills, that many people with doctorates went into business, and that universities needed to acknowledge and celebrate this.

• research skills, including the use of information and communications technology;
• excellent communication and writing skills;
• independent work skills of self-motivation and time-management;
• high-level analysis and evaluation skills.

Studying history improves the depth and range of your personal transferable skills including:

• critical reasoning and analytical skills, including the ability to solve problems and think creatively, often through doing extensive reading;
• intellectual rigour and independence, including the ability to conduct research using different types of tools and sources, gathering, sifting, interpreting, analysing and organising information;
• marshalling an argument, including evaluating, selecting and ordering relevant evidence and formally communicating findings in a structured, coherent, clear and persuasive manner, both orally and in writing;
• self-motivation and self-reliance, with the ability to work without direct supervision and manage time effectively, but also the ability to discuss ideas in groups.

Taken from Prospects Careers. See also QAA History Benchmarks.

1. Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies and they all wrote in hydraulics. They lived in the Sarah Dessert. The climate of the Sarah is such that all the inhabitants have to live elsewhere.
2. Moses led the Hebrew slaves to the Red Sea where they made unleavened bread, which is bread made without any ingredients. Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments. He died before he ever reached Canada.
3. Solomon had three hundred wives and seven hundred porcupines.
4. The Greeks were a highly sculptured people, and without them we wouldn’t have history. The Greeks also had myths. A myth is a female moth.
5. Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock. After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline.
6. In the Olympic games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled biscuits, and threw the java.
7. Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he was going to be made king. While dying, he gasped out: “Tee hee, Brutus.”
8. Joan of Arc was burnt to a steak and was canonized by Bernard Shaw.
9. Queen Elizabeth was the “Virgin Queen.” As a queen she was a success. When she exposed herself before her troops they all shouted “hurrah.”
10. It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented removable type and the Bible. Another important invention was the circulation of blood. Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes and started smoking. Sir Francis Drake circumsized the world with a 100-foot clipper.
11. The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespeare. He was born in the year 1564, supposedly on his birthday. He never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. He wrote tragedies, comedies, and hysterectomies, all in Islamic pentameter. Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couple. Romeo’s last wish was to be laid by Juliet.
12. Writing at the same time as Shakespeare was Miguel Cervantes. He wrote Donkey Hote. The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained.
13. Delegates from the original 13 states formed the Contented Congress. Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin discovered electricity by rubbing two cats backward and declared, “A horse divided against itself cannot stand.” Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead.
14. Abraham Lincoln became America’s greatest Precedent. Lincoln’s mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves by signing the Emasculation Proclamation. On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the theater and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving picture show. They believe the assinator was John Wilkes Booth, a supposingly insane actor. This ruined Booth’s career.
15. Johann Bach wrote a great many musical compositions and had a large number of children. In between he practiced on an old spinster which he kept up in his attic. Bach died from 1750 to the present. Bach was the most famous composer in the world and so was Handel. Handel was half German, half Italian, and half English. He was very large.
16. Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.
17. The nineteenth century was a time of a great many thoughts and inventions. People stopped reproducing by hand and started reproducing by machine. The invention of the steamboat caused a network of rivers to spring up. Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick raper, which did the work of a hundred men. Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for rabbits. Charles Darwin was a naturist who wrote the Organ of the Species.
18. Madman Curie discovered the radio. And Karl Marx became one of the Marx Brothers.

“They offer an extraordinarily vivid glimpse of a time which will soon not be accessible to living memory. Not only that, they provide evidence of how astutely Mass Observation pre-figured many later intellectual and methodological developments in social research especially in oral history and life history research, in feminist and working class history and in the kind of social research which privileges what we sometimes call the ‘ordinary person’ and the importance of studying everyday life” Professor Dorothy Sheridan, Mass Observation Archive.

I would particularly recommend these wartime finds:

• War Begins at Home (1940)
• War Factory (1943)

“For example, though I’m confident I’ve spotted every reference in the Virgin ad, I had to turn to Google when I began to hear political commentators describing this current economic crisis as “worse than the recession of 1987”. I couldn’t remember that recession at all. Beadle’s About, yes, Black Monday, no. And it’s not just me. When my mum talked about the war, she never mentioned fascism or appeasement; it was all George Formby, powdered egg and drawing a line down the back of your legs so you looked like you had stockings on. Thus, when we look back at the current recession, for all its apparent horrors, we might remember it very differently. It might not seem so important. It might just be outside on the news stand. I think it helps to consider that.”

Frank Skinner Article, The Times, 13th February 2009