The Liberal Arts as a Successful Software Engineer: Is It Worth It?
Jon Sully
12 Minutes
A reflection on how a liberal arts education shaped my career as a software engineer—balancing theory, communication, and lifelong learning.
I had a friend recently ask me an interesting question. Paraphrasing, I essentially read it as, “As an engineer, do you think the liberal arts (and in particular, your specific experience at Denison) helped create a broader world view in you?” and I’ll add my own extension-question, “Do you think the liberal arts is still worth pursuing?”
My first reaction here was ‘boy is it nice to have thoughtful friends! I love these questions.’ But wanted to explore them deeper, so here I write.
As an engineer
The first thing I want to point out is that my friend repeated my preface back to me. These questions were asked in response to “The Medium is the Message?” wherein I referenced a couple of times, essentially, “these dense sociology concepts have been challenging for me to grok, as an engineer”. So my friend giving me the same framework back for the questions they had makes sense, but I think there’s more meaning here.
This isn’t an essay on what it is to be an engineer, but I do think it’s relevant to the liberal arts story in this context. I am an engineer. To me, that means far more than my career track or the work I do — it’s a mindset. I believe I have an engineering mind. That is, I’m constantly fascinated by how things work and inclined to both deconstruct and construct systems. Even with sports, my high school football coach’s favorite instruction for me was to, “stop thinking so much.” I was quarterbacking from left tackle. I saw the whole play as a combination of movements from all the players — I couldn’t simply remember “okay on 27 R Jack I do a down-block”. I had to understand the shape of the entire play.
This didn’t begin in high school, though. I’ve been a tinkerer since childhood! Where a decades-past engineering-inclined kid might’ve been enamored with engines and vehicles, I was building computers and exploring the intricacies of user interfaces. I wanted to know how it all worked. Even now, when introduced to anything new (sorry, friends that I occasionally play cards with) I always want to understand the entire system before using it.
And, as an aside, I’m still very much into engines, cars, electric motors, and how our vehicles of transportation operate!
All of this prefaces the discussion around the liberal arts because, while I was raised in a fairly intellectually diverse environment (we read a lot of various things, talked about all sorts of topics, and the world was open to me), I came to Denison already understanding my inclinations. I knew before I arrived for class that I wanted to study computer science. I came in ‘as an engineer’.
What is the Liberal Arts?
Now, I think it’s worth taking a momentary detour from my experience to point out what, exactly, the ‘liberal arts’ is. Or at least, the idealized version of what it’s intended to be! I like the way Princeton describes it:
A liberal arts education offers an expansive intellectual grounding in all kinds of humanistic inquiry.
By exploring issues, ideas and methods across the humanities and the arts, and the natural and social sciences, you will learn to read critically, write cogently and think broadly. These skills will elevate your conversations in the classroom and strengthen your social and cultural analysis; they will cultivate the tools necessary to allow you to navigate the world’s most complex issues.
Though Merriam-Webster broadly agrees in plainer text:
college or university studies (such as language, philosophy, literature, and abstract science) intended to provide chiefly general knowledge and to develop general intellectual capacities (such as reason and judgment) as opposed to professional or vocational skills
A liberal arts education is one which grants you a tool kit, aimed at enabling you to approach genuinely difficult questions and situations with the right tools. It’s not out to make difficult questions easy; the realities of life are what they are. The liberal arts are built on judgement and reason — thinking critically about both yourself and the world around you — that you might understand yourself, and others, more intimately.
A liberal arts education should also make an individual a stronger reader and writer, but these are side-effects. Reflection, rumination, and the depth of thought required to build this toolkit are born out only in the very spaces of reading and writing.
Getting more specific here, I’ve enjoyed how Denison frames the liberal arts in its own mission statement:
Our purpose is to inspire and educate our students to become autonomous thinkers, discerning moral agents and active citizens of a democratic society.
A liberal arts education is an agreement to spend four years challenging, refining, and honing your beliefs across a variety of intellectual topics in many fields. You may graduate with your major (computer science, for example), but to accomplish the liberal arts degree correctly, you should also find your self. The collection of fundamental and foundational beliefs which undergird your being, each of which having been tried, questioned, and put to the test before the forge of inquisition.
Yes, I’m romanticizing. But also yes, that is the ideal liberal arts experience.
An Engineer Going to a Public University
Liberal arts aside, my personal journey could’ve gone a very different route. Had I chosen to attend a large, public institution, none of the above would’ve likely applied. As someone who already knew what they wanted to study, it’s very likely that I could’ve taken pure computer science courses for my four years. Or at least a very small regiment of general-education classes. This would’ve had both pros and cons.
The reality is that if I had spent four years studying computer science more directly, parts of life post-grad would’ve been easier. Given the number of class slots that four years of just computer science can accommodate, I likely would’ve taken courses that directly applied to my upcoming career. Maybe that would’ve been classes targeting specific coding languages I now use. Maybe it would’ve been project-based courses that push students through using industry-standard frameworks. I can’t say.
All I can say is that it’s not entirely uncommon for an engineering-type to spend all of their years at a large institution studying essentially only that which they want to study: their intended major.
And sure, this will equip you quite well for your upcoming role(s) in industry. But at the same time, this converts the college experience itself into a sort of training camp for industry jobs post-grad. I think that’s a shame.
To Denison
Idealized visions aside, my personal experience with the liberal arts was always in tension. Toward my junior and senior years in particular, I knew that larger institutions would’ve allowed me to study computer science exclusively. I knew that my course load across four years at Denison had to be diverse — I had to take courses I wasn’t interested in.
But one of my professors at Denison taught me something important as I was staring down an essay I didn’t want to write early-on in a class I didn’t particularly have any love for. Paraphrasing, Dr. Cathy Dollard told me the hard truth: you often don’t know what you love until you experience a bit of hardship in actually doing it for a little while.
So, while I didn’t enjoy that essay at that point in time, I found truth in Dr. Dollard’s statement. As it turns out, that geology course ended up being a highlight of my time at Denison. I just didn’t know it would be until I got in and did some of the work to find out.
That course is a caricature of most of my Denison career. Be it my first-year writing course, taught by a theater professor in a black-box theater, a religion course, taught by perhaps the wisest old sage at the university, or a communications course, taught by a passionate legal scholar. Every semester I spent at Denison required me to take courses I likely would not have organically chosen. And each brought their own spark of interesting, compelling learning that I’d have missed out on otherwise.
I don’t want to simply gloss over it, so let me make the clear point here: taking those courses forced me to mull over and think about topics I didn’t know I cared about yet. They taught me to learn; to form rational opinions on unknown topics after considering multiple arguments around them critically. They taught me intellectual humility. They all contributed to a grander goal: to force me to see, and critically refine, my own world view.
Of course, the cost of this path is that I didn’t get to study computer science exclusively for four years. There are only so many hours, so many days, and so many semesters. As the liberal arts courses ate up large chunks of the time-pie, the computer science courses were left with less.
So the computer science department at Denison operates in the only rational way it can: focus on the core theories; don’t worry about the applied tooling and/or industry specifics. Make sure they understand the science of computers first. And that’s the only real path to take — when given a limited amount of time to teach students about computer science, the most rational route is to distill the “how to build a house” into structural engineering topics, not “how to hammer two 2x4’s together”. If you can only pick one, it must be the structural engineering topics, not the applied (how to hammer) topics. And the reason is simple. It may be tough the first year or two, but you can learn the applied topics on the job. You almost certainly will not learn the theory on the job.
That’s been, more or less, my experience as a software engineer. Denison’s computer science department taught me how to think like a computer — how to detect algorithmic efficiency, how to observe different data structures and their uses, and even how to build my own CPU from scratch (physically!). I spent four years learning the theories of computing. Down to the 1’s and 0’s of the lowest-level computer code. It was very cool, often very hard, and very brainy. Living in the theoretical can be tough.
To Industry
The truth is that when I graduated from Denison and moved on to the ‘real world’ as a software engineer working in corporate America, I was faced with a large learning curve. It’s one thing to have theoretical knowledge, but it’s something very different to have applied knowledge.
My first months on the job weren’t easy. Fresh out of a liberal arts college, staring down frameworks and development tools I’d never used, and just hoping to make it. I had to figure out the ecosystem. I (so badly) wanted to be successful. I knew the theory behind algorithms and systems, but I didn’t know a thing about building commercial software. Sorry, what’s a database, again?
What I came to realize was that learning specific technologies, frameworks, and tools isn’t so hard. It takes a little time, but it gets easier. The more you learn, the more you realize how everything ties back to all that theory. The real challenge is learning how to solve complex problems, to think systematically, and to adapt when things change. And that’s where my liberal arts background gave me an advantage.
While my peers had deeper exposure to practical tools, I had spent years honing my ability to think critically, to break down abstract problems, and to learn quickly. I had built a foundation not just in computer science, but in thinking itself. And as I grew in my career, that difference became more and more apparent.
Another key realization: the industry moves fast. The technologies that my peers learned in school? Many of them were obsolete within a few years. Meanwhile, I had spent my time at Denison learning how to learn, how to adapt, and how to evaluate ideas beyond the surface level. My ability to switch between tools, to navigate complex systems, and to pick up new paradigms was built on a deeper foundation than any particular piece of technology.
By the time I had a couple of years’ experience, the initial learning curve had flattened. Not only was I fully caught up on industry tools, but I also had an advantage that many of my peers didn’t: I could see the bigger picture. I wasn’t just a software engineer — I was an engineer who could think deeply, communicate effectively, and navigate ambiguity with confidence.
Long-Term Success
The benefits of a liberal arts education aren’t just seen in those early years—they compound over time. Looking back now, I can say with confidence that my broad-based education has made me far more successful in the long run.
One of the biggest differentiators? Communication skills.
A lot of engineers struggle to talk about their work. They can write great code, but when it comes to explaining that code to non-technical stakeholders — or even to other engineers — they hit a wall. That’s never been a problem for me. I’ve spent my career translating between code and human language, making complex technical ideas digestible for people who aren’t technical.
That skill is invaluable. Whether it’s working with business leaders, writing documentation, mentoring junior developers, or even advocating for a technical decision within a team, being able to articulate why something matters is just as important as how it works. And I credit that ability directly to my liberal arts background. I wasn’t just trained to code—I was trained to think, to write, and to communicate clearly.
Beyond communication, my career has also been shaped by a much broader perspective than just software engineering. My life isn’t just writing code in a cubicle — I’m an entrepreneur, an advisor, a writer, a strategist. I understand business. I understand product. I understand users. And all of that comes from the same interdisciplinary mindset that Denison cultivated in me.
When I sit down with a CEO, I’m not just thinking like an engineer—I’m thinking like a business owner. I can step outside the world of code and think about pricing models, customer acquisition, market positioning, and long-term strategy. That ability to zoom in and out — to shift perspectives depending on the problem at hand — is something I wouldn’t trade for anything.
The truth is, the best careers aren’t built on just technical skills. The best careers are built at the intersection of disciplines — where theory meets practice, where engineering meets business, where communication meets execution.
A purely technical education might get you your first job, but a liberal arts education prepares you for every job after that.
In Conclusion
The short answer is yes, as a successful software engineer, I still wholeheartedly believe the liberal arts is worth pursuing as the means to get to that end. And yes, I believe I have a broader, and deeper, world-view than had I gone a different route with college. The cost is a slightly steeper learning curve into industry, but the benefit is almost certainly learning how to become a life-long learner. To me, that’s more valuable than any industry preparation. I’m confident I could begin in any industry and have the skills to learn it, figure it out, and be successful there.
And if my career so far is any indication, I’d say it worked out just fine.