TIFFANY NG, BusinessInsider.

Building your own major is not for everyone, but it's a sign that precarity is the new norm. Students who graduate with unique degrees that they designed themselves gain the ability to pivot.

And in today's environment of rapid change and AI-induced job insecurity, resilience in the form of flexibility is key.

Schools like RIT and NYU are working to prepare students for uncertainty. Students, then, decide whether to sink or swim.

Between 2019 and 2021, there was a 3% increase in the number of students graduating with individualized studies degrees.

And 19% more students graduated with interdisciplinary degrees in the 2020-2021 academic year than did a decade ago, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

With majors like Chaos, Human Computer Interaction, and Architecture and Food Theory, students aren't just crafting these degrees for fun. Where customized majors used to be about specialization, today, for many young people, forging a unique educational route is about adapting to a constantly transforming job market.

Reader, what more is there for me to say about this?

To study something is to be fascinated with it.

What I find interesting in Tiffany’s article is the specific majors the university graduates had.

Human Computer Interaction.

Architecture and Food Theory.

Chaos Studies.

It reminds me of 2014, when I sold myself and my family on the idea I could have a career in the film industry.

I did, for a brief period of time, before I realized I too had to learn more about human computer interaction at Per Scholas.

The troubleshooting methods I read, and studied, and later trained others in, were very helpful to me in my writing and life.

As Kara Swisher said in her commencement speech recently, The Rewards of Stepping Out of Line (Podchaser transcript):

KARA SWISHER:

When you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash. When you invent electricity, you invent electrocution.

Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technological progress.

Adults can understand this easily. And the truth is, far too many of these founders and innovators of the last age have been careless, an attitude best summarized by the ethos on Facebook office posters, “move fast and break things.”

I know it's a software term, but I still think it reflects a deep seated childishness.

Children like to break things. I would often say to anyone who would listen when I visited Facebook, they thought they were so clever. I would have preferred move fast and change things, or move fast and fix things.

ACTION POINT: The next generation must flexibly “move fast to fix things.”