Books like You majored in what? by Katharine Brooks

Encouraging college graduates to avoid a quarterlife crisis and embrace—instead of dread—life after school, this uplifting guide identifies ways to harness postcollegiate enthusiasm. From managing finances with an eye to the future and embarking on a fulfilling career path to balancing work and personal life, recent graduates will learn how to navigate this opportunity-packed time. Copious anecdotes illustrate the postschool ups and downs experienced by many of today’s graduates and identify common issues and possible solutions—including effective job hunting, evaluating the benefit of graduate school, living at home, and general stress and depression. While acknowledging that this can be a tumultuous and anxious phase, particular emphasis is placed on the positive aspects of the period immediately following higher education, such as career advancement and personal growth.

Driverless cars are hitting the road, powered by artificial intelligence. Robots can climb stairs, open doors, win Jeopardy, analyze stocks, work in factories, find parking spaces, advise oncologists. In the past, automation was considered a threat to low-skilled labor. Now, many high-skilled functions, including interpreting medical images, doing legal research, and analyzing data, are within the skill sets of machines. How can higher education prepare students for their professional lives when professions themselves are disappearing? In Robot-Proof, Northeastern University president Joseph Aoun proposes a way to educate the next generation of college students to invent, to create, and to discover--to fill needs in society that even the most sophisticated artificial intelligence agent cannot. A "robot-proof" education, Aoun argues, is not concerned solely with topping up students' minds with high-octane facts. Rather, it calibrates them with a creative mindset and the mental elasticity to invent, discover, or create something valuable to society--a scientific proof, a hip-hop recording, a web comic, a cure for cancer. Aoun lays out the framework for a new discipline, humanics, which builds on our innate strengths and prepares students to compete in a labor market in which smart machines work alongside human professionals. The new literacies of Aoun's humanics are data literacy, technological literacy, and human literacy. Students will need data literacy to manage the flow of big data, and technological literacy to know how their machines work, but human literacy--the humanities, communication, and design--to function as a human being. Life-long learning opportunities will support their ability to adapt to change.