As a humanities student myself, there is something quite daunting about the prospect of choosing a career. Knowing that my true passion lies in studying history, literature, art and past civilizations can sometimes feel faintly ‘useless’ amidst an unequal world. Will my knowledge of Renaissance artists meaningfully improve people’s lives? Probably not. And yet, even if my heart lies in these subjects, I often feel drawn towards pursuing a career that will improve people’s lives on a daily basis, make me feel useful, and consequently, valued in society.

This paradigm is probably familiar to many Cambridge students, whose academic excellence often brings with it a quiet pressure to have an impact on the ‘real world’ that goes beyond the textbook. The Cambridge bubble can sometimes have the effect of making the outside world feel strangely distant, as if this circle of academia exists slightly removed from more immediate real-life issues and social realities. As an Art History student, I often find myself wondering how I might reconcile my passion for the subject with a desire for some form of social justice.

“Sometimes, he suggested, it is not about doing great good, but about not doing harm”

This question has troubled me enough to have found myself raising it in conversations with friends at home, whose perspectives can feel refreshingly different from the usual Cambridge career discourse. In one such conversation, a friend, a humanities student herself, admitted that she wished to be engaged in something bigger than what she studies and that she feels drawn to do more than become a literature or philosophy teacher for example, a path predestined by the studies she is doing. When she put this concern to her father, who works in rare book conservation, she asked whether he ever felt like his job lacked meaning or ‘impact’. His response was disarmingly simple: sometimes, he suggested, it is not about doing great good, but about not doing harm.

This way of thinking has since stayed with me. At first, it felt almost counterintuitive. We are raised on the language of improvement and transformation; the aspiration to ‘change the world’ is so deeply embedded in our educational culture that anything less can feel like setting. But beneath this apparently noble ambition lies perhaps a more uncomfortable truth, a personal desire to feel significant, to leave a mark on the world, to be remembered. For many high-aspiring Cambridge students concerned about the state of the world and the demands of social justice, the idea of ‘doing nothing’ can feel morally unacceptable.

There is a powerful sense, often justified, that we each have an individual and collective responsibility to put as much good as possible into the world. I am not suggesting that students should abandon political engagement, stop demonstrating, or withdraw from the causes they care about. Nor am I advocating a defeatist retreat into passivity. Rather, I want to reframe how we think about what counts as a ‘meaningful’ career in a world where low-visibility work is so easily dismissed. For me, the meaning may lie precisely in this careful ethical restraint.

“I want to reframe how we think about what counts as a ‘meaningful’ career”

In practice, this pressure to do something visibly impactful often funnels high-achieving students towards traditionally sanctioned paths that promise scale and prestige. Many find themselves drawn, almost by default, towards the corporate world, broadly speaking, careers in law, finance or technology. In fact, this pattern is strikingly common among many of my friends in the humanities. Drawn towards the well-known routes of the law conversion course or the ever-mysterious world of consultancy, many feel subtly pulled towards roles that carry greater social prestige. When I first arrived in Cambridge from France, I found it genuinely surprising how readily students seemed to accept that they might never pursue a career in the subject they had come here to study.

This is not to criticise or discredit those who pursue such work, nor to ignore the realities of the graduate job market. But is it worth questioning, I believe, whether roles that appear to tackle ‘big’ problems always translate into ethically clean outcomes. What concerns me more is the underlying assumption that smaller, local, or less visibly transformative forms of work are somehow ‘useless’. This rhetoric surfaces repeatedly in discourses about degree choices, where humanities subjects in particular are measured against the perceived market utility of STEM or economics degrees. Within this framework, neutrality begins to look like failure.

And yet, choosing to engage in something modest, something that may not initially appear life-altering, might in fact be a quietly radical ethical stance. Instead of aspiring, somewhat blindly, to ‘change the world’ at any cost, perhaps we should pay more attention to our individual responsibility to minimise harm. In an era defined by overreach and unintended consequences, perhaps the more urgent ethical task is restraint. The question facing Cambridge graduates may not be how each of us can change the world, but how we might avoid making it worse.