Quora Answer: Why did you pursue a PhD in humanities?

The best way to become educated is to follow what fascinates you, what ever that is. If you do that then studying is never an effort because your fascination takes you through the work without effort no matter how hard that work is that is needed. On the other hand if you are studying what you should because you are told that is the only way to make a living, or because that is what your parents want you to do, or for any other reason than you deeply involved with the subject due to your own intrinsic interest in it, then studying is very hard, if not impossible. Now some people can do what they are supposed to do or are told to do and can get through it. Other people find this very difficult. I am one of those people who cannot study unless I really want to know the answer to something. So it just turned out that those intrinsic interests of mine led to a Ph.D. in the Humanities. If my interests had led somewhere else that is where I would have ended up. I guess this is more or less saying I did not choose it but it chose me. I spent nine years in England studying what ever fascinated me and somehow that amounted to a Ph.D. During that time I became interested in Software Engineering and Systems Engineering via Systems Theory and ended up making that a career. Later I did another Ph.D. in Systems Engineering in order to get a qualification in my career area of choice. My advice is to study what fascinates you while you have the chance to study what ever you want in school, and then work out how that allows you to make a living later as you figure out what kind of work fascinates you. If you study many different subjects then you can easily absorb new ones and essentially that allows you to grow into what ever it is that you need to do next along the way.