When meeting new people, it’s inevitable that the conversation will lull into the last resort of the vaguely interested with someone posing the question, “So, what are you studying?”

When I tell people I double major in psychology and women’s and gender studies, I usually elicit one of two responses: “Oh, that’s cool,” or, “Oh, that’s cool, so, like, what are you going to do with that?”

Though I know exactly the path I plan to pursue with both of these degrees, I tend to shy away from sharing because, really, it’s not anyone’s business.

Typically, I follow the example of my peers and retort that I’ll frame it or smash the patriarchy and change the world. Unsatisfied with this sort of response, my conversation partner will either leave or change the subject.

But I want to know why anyone is interested in what a stranger at a party is going to do with his or her life anyway.

Maybe students in the hard sciences have myriad connections in the humanities and social sciences and constantly seek to help their right-brain friends. That would help to explain why no one ever asks fashion and textiles students what they plan to, uh, do, with their lives.

Unfortunately, this is probably not true. 

Science, technology, engineering and mathematics majors probably hear regularly about how secure their jobs are and how they won’t need graduate school to earn a six-figure salary after college. Meanwhile, some of these same STEM majors express some sort of superiority complex by sporting uncreative t-shirts that boast the best part of being an engineer is not being a liberal arts student and not having to work at McDonald’s (yeah, really).

Why is it that some STEM majors feel the need to put their liberal arts friends down? Is it because they might eventually make more money than us? 

Why is it that some students who have heard someone else say, in a snarky tone, “What are you going to do, be a counselor?” feel the need to repeat that phrase?

And what’s so bad about being a counselor, anyway? These engineering students seem to harness their own inner-counselor every time they say, “You know you’ll have to go to grad school, right?” 

Could it be that these finance students, these engineering zombies, these STEM whatevers feel an incessant urge to criticize the decisions of us liberal arts students because they envy what we have? And if so, what is it that we have?

We have our education—a rich one. We get to read about Betty Friedan and William James and D.T. Suzuki and Allen Ginsberg. They read about velocity.

We get poetry and opinions. They get formulas and rigid answer keys.

We’re studying for our own betterment. They’re studying for a job.

I don’t mind that I have to go to graduate school because it’s four more years of learning the things I want to learn. It’s engulfing myself in the topics of my choosing with like-minded people who feel as strongly as I do about the topics I study.

So to all the people who have ever asked me, “What are you going to do with that?” I leave you with two questions:

Why don’t we see STEM students in graduate school more often? What, in your eyes, is the purpose of education, if not just to get a job?

And to answer that popular question: Whatever the heck I want.