Did you know UCI School of Humanities majors are defying national trends? As humanities enrollments have declined across the country since 2012, humanities majors at UCI have grown consistently and substantially since 2014.
Although the New Yorker declared “The End of the English Major” in an article last year, English is not only alive and well here, but one of our most popular humanities majors. Several humanities programs have doubled their majors, in part by focusing on making a place for talented students transferring to UCI from California’s community colleges.
“The humanities are a crucial part of UCI’s outstanding undergraduate education,” Dean Tyrus Miller proudly affirms, “and we offer our majors a multitude of opportunities to move out into creative, fulfilling careers after graduation.”
How did UCI humanities majors come to chart their own path? The School of Humanities has launched a number of recent initiatives to discover just what sets our humanities majors apart, collecting both personal narratives from our alumni as well as data on employment outcomes.
Narratives and numbers: telling the story of humanities alumni
In 2023, we launched Generations Unite: UCI School of Humanities Alumni Series, an ongoing monthly series that highlights the career trajectories of our alumni through interviews with current humanities students. The goal of the series was to strengthen our humanities alumni network, and to further contribute to a public-facing conversation about career outcomes for humanities students.
At the same time, School of Humanities paid undergraduate interns began tracking alumni employment outcomes through LinkedIn searches. To date, our interns have tracked 1317 alumni, from a total dataset of 6100 alumni who graduated between 2012 to 2023. We are interested to know their current professional position, first position after graduation and trends around the company and industry in which they’ve been employed. The results of these initiatives offer a clearer picture of the UCI humanities major at both the individual and aggregate level – the positions they pursue, the industries they join.
Over Summer 2024, we began looking closely at a sample of 141 undergraduate alumni who graduated in 2014 to ask: Where are our humanities alumni 10 years after graduation? Our findings reveal other exciting, even surprising, trends.
10-year snapshot: where are our alumni a decade after graduation?
Our sample of 141 undergraduate alumni who graduated in 2014 represent 16 humanities majors – the largest percentage of whom had majored in English, Film & Media Studies and History. We then identified eight industries in which our alumni work: Administration, Business & Finance, Creative & Media, Education, Healthcare, Law, Nonprofit and Technology.
We found that most alumni from this sample work in the Creative & Media industries – a broad category that includes both roles within the entertainment, news, publishing, marketing and advertising industries, and creative roles across other industries (think: a marketing manager at a tech company, or a nonprofit communications strategist). Specific job titles range from Associate Producer to Brand Strategist to Content Marketing Strategist to UX Designer.
The second most popular industries for our alumni are Business & Finance and Education, and the companies our alumni work at include household names like Yelp, Amazon, DoorDash and NPR. We found no significant correlation between major and industry, except in the case of art history (only 1% of our sample, too small to make a meaningful correlation), both of whom work in the creative industry.
Anteaters in entertainment: spotlight on Creative & Media industries
Andrew Almendras (B.A. Spanish and International Studies, ‘09) and Nida Chowdhry (B.A. English and Film & Media Studies, ‘09), who graduated a few years before our selected sample, are two mid-career alumni who showcase humanities at work in the Creative & Media industries. Their stories illustrate the unique opportunities our alumni take advantage of through their relationships with campus faculty and proximity to the thriving economies of Orange County, Los Angeles and California more broadly – where many of our graduates continue to live and work.
Almendras, who grew up in Glendale, is currently Vice President of Marketing Strategy & Planning at IMAX, the global entertainment technology company specializing in large-format immersive theater experiences. Almendras credits his Spanish major for his aptitude for languages, novelty and exploration. These interests uniquely positioned him to lead projects in Mexico and Asia with The Sheppard, the boutique marketing agency where Almendras cut his teeth.
“I like to explore and try new things. I like to build, I like to see things grow and I like to unlock potential,” Almendras explains.
At IMAX, he helps the company evolve and grow their brand. Almendras finds value in working for a global company that centers human connectivity through the shared experience theaters provide.
Chowdhry is also remaking the media landscape in her roles as writer, director, actor and executive producer. An Orange County native and first-generation Pakistani-American, Chowdhry understood media’s powerful impact on worldview from an early age.
“Growing up as a brown, Muslim girl, I had a fractured sense of identity and I knew that media had something to do with that. Media has a powerful impact on how we view the world,” shares Chowdhry.
At UC Irvine, with the support of her humanities professors, she developed her interest in media as a tool to shed light on underrepresented stories. She also took advantage of her proximity to the entertainment industry through an internship with the BBC, and later, as a production assistant for Dancing with the Stars. In 2016, Chowdhry would realize her own vision of media by cofounding Stranger Magic, a production company aimed at bringing a more diverse range of stories and storytellers to the table, with friend Yumna Khan. Stranger Magic launched their first show, Unfair & Ugly, on YouTube in 2018. Chowdhry has worked on studio television projects for Netflix, Disney and HBO Max, among others, and her award-winning feature film Anxious is currently on the festival circuit.
The future of the humanities
This 10-year snapshot of humanities alumni, as well as the stories we’ve collected through our alumni profile series, are a step toward providing a more comprehensive picture of the UCI humanities major and their impact in the world after graduation.
It’s perhaps no surprise, given the generous, entrepreneurial spirits of Almendras and Chowdhry, that the popularity of Business & Finance and Education careers follow closely behind Creative & Media careers. We plan to highlight these industries, as well as additional findings from our alumni tracking initiatives, in later installments of this series. To read more about where alumni work, visit our website.
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