Being a student in the arts means living in a world that doubts the value of what you do. It is sometimes subtle, disguised as small talk or curiosity. “So what do you do with that degree?” “That must be fun, just reading and drawing!” Other times, it is sharper, like a reminder that in a university obsessed with innovation and measurable outcomes, the work of thinking, feeling, and interpreting does not seem to count as much.

But it does count, even if we may not always see it.

When you are in the arts, your labor is invisible. You do not have problem sets or prototypes to show for your effort. You have pages of reading that rearrange your mind in ways only you can feel. You have essays that you rewrite until you hate them, and then love them again. You have moments of quiet panic when you cannot articulate what you are trying to say, and moments of clarity that come too late in the night to write down properly.

You spend hours trying to understand a theory that contradicts everything you thought you knew. You stay up rethinking a single sentence because it does not sound honest enough. You work through your own identity, language and history while trying to analyze someone else’s. That is what studying the arts feels like: the labor of understanding. It is as heavy as any equation or lab report, only less visible. And yet, we are constantly asked to prove that we are serious, to prove that our work is not soft or indulgent. We have to intellectualize our passion until it sounds respectable. We add citations, theories and academic language not only to deepen our analysis but to make it sound like something others will take seriously. We make our work palatable to disciplines that have always had more space to speak. This need to justify yourself is tiring. It chips away at your confidence slowly, making you overexplain, overperform, and overcompensate. It makes you apologize for caring about the things that make life meaningful: stories, art, language, memory, and culture.

There is a deep underrepresentation that follows this feeling. You rarely see arts students in leadership roles or public-facing projects. Our numbers are small. Our classes are quiet. When we do something impactful, it often gets overlooked because it is not easily packaged as innovation or measurable success. There is no grant money for questioning meaning. There is no headline for reflection.

And yet, everything we do ripples outward, shaping how people think, feel and see each other. Work in the Arts builds the framework through which all other knowledge exists. While science asks “how,” we ask “why.”

But the world does not always care about “why.” It wants results. It wants speed. It wants productivity that can be tracked. That is the paradox of being in this field. We study the human condition in a culture that often refuses to slow down long enough to feel it.

It is strange to study empathy and still feel unseen.

There is also an emotional cost to this kind of work that rarely gets acknowledged. When you read about oppression, colonialism or trauma, you carry those stories. You internalize pain that is not yours but sits inside you anyway. You analyze the structures that devalue people like you, and then you have to write about them academically, carefully, without sounding too emotional. The irony is that the very disciplines that teach empathy often demand that we suppress it.

And still, I stay.

I stay because the arts remind me that knowledge is not only about progress, it is about meaning. It is about slowing down to listen, to think, to connect. It is about refusing to become numb to the world. In art, literature, philosophy, and history, I see the blueprint of humanity itself, everything that came before, and everything we risk losing if we stop caring.

I stay because I know that behind every world-changing invention there is a story. Behind every data point, there is a human being. Behind every act of violence, there is a narrative someone believes. Understanding those narratives is what we do. That is why it matters.

Being an arts student means fighting to be seen while studying what it means to see. It means learning to value slowness in a world that worships acceleration. It means creating meaning in a place that does not always reward it. It means choosing reflection over reaction, and that is not weakness – it is resistance.

Sometimes I wish I did not have to prove myself so often. I wish people could just see that thinking is a kind of labor, too. But I am learning that maybe the most powerful proof is to keep doing the work – to write, to analyze, to question, to create – even when no one is clapping. Because what we do in the arts is not loud, but it lasts. It lingers in the way people think and feel long after the noise fades.

And maybe that is what it means to study art, to be quietly revolutionary in a world that has forgotten how to listen.