In an age of artificial intelligence, global uncertainty and shrinking attention spans, University of Sydney alumni show why the arts and humanities still matter, and how they teach us to think critically and to understand each other better.
There is a particular question that is asked of arts and humanities graduates everywhere. It tends to be asked early, often by a well-meaning relative, and usually with a faint note of panic: ‘But what are you going to do with your degree?’
For artist and educator Cong Yu (BA ’19), curator Anneke Jaspers (MA ’06), and journalist, actor and presenter Marissa Anita (MMediaPrac ’07), their answers have unfolded across continents and careers that rarely fit neatly into a single job title.
They have collectively worked in newsrooms, studios, museums, galleries, classrooms and archives, as well as on screen. They have moved between Jakarta, Sydney, Paris, China and Broken Hill. Their work is different, but it has a common thread – the humanities gave them much more than simply subject knowledge. They taught them how to pay attention to stories and to the subtle complexities that shape human experience.
Exploring cultural complexity
For artist and educator Cong Yu, who moved from China to Australia to study Art History at the University of Sydney as an international student, the intersections of place and identity are deeply personal.
Cong describes the centre of her practice as “layered”. Her paintings and creative work touch on cultural displacement, female sexuality, and Australian identity from an immigrant perspective. She says her education changed the way she sees the world, recalling how as a student she began to understand Redfern not just as a suburb near campus but as a site of Aboriginal history, activism, gentrification and contested memory.
Her studies taught her that images, landscapes and cities are never neutral. They carry histories that should be read carefully.
In a fast-paced world that demands prolific output, Cong still values the experience of having once given her full attention to subjects that to some seem “useless, ancient or impractical”.
“As you get older, your life naturally gets a lot more strategic,” she says. “You become more aware of productivity, rents, jobs, career development.” What studying the humanities at university gave her, she says, was “almost devotional concentration”.
Cong describes this as the ability to give sustained attention – the opposite of skimming in an age of constant distraction. She says it taught her to stay with ambiguity, to accept that “history is never finished” and that “images are not just images” and “landscape is not vacant”.
Cong has turned her humanities training into a diverse creative career – working in the arts industry, alongside developing her own multidisciplinary practice, through painting, teaching and an artist residency in Broken Hill. There she created new work inspired by the Australian desert and contemporary Australian identity.
Her advice to students is both practical and philosophical: life is short, and it is more important to become a person than “some lines on the CV”.
Art as a mirror
For Anneke Jaspers, Senior Curator, Collection, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, contemporary art is not a retreat from the world but one of the clearest ways of understanding it.
“Contemporary art is a mirror to contemporary life,” she says. “It provides us with opportunities to understand the world that we’re living in.”
That understanding, she says, is not passive. It asks audiences to think critically, and to sit with complexity. These are often described as soft skills, but Anneke sees them as civic ones.
“The future of democracy is actually reliant on people having that critical thinking capacity,” she observes. “And I think that the humanities fosters that.”
It is a striking argument at a time when conversations about the value of a degree increasingly focus on cost and career outcomes.
For Anneke, her humanities studies gave her a grounding in critical inquiry and research – skills she now uses as a curator to approach every artwork, archive and collection decision, by asking how it helps audiences to understand the conditions of the present. She notes that curating is an act of interpretation and responsibility. At the MCA, she works across the collection and exhibitions, helping to develop, research, display and mediate works for audiences. Curators may often sit behind the scenes, but their decisions shape what is preserved, presented and understood.
In collection work, she says, the question is not just what appears in exhibitions now, but “what works remain accessible for audiences to come”.
That question travelled with her to Paris in 2025, when she was awarded the Nicholas and Angela Curtis Cité Internationale des Arts Residency Fellowship through the Power Institute, a foundation of the University of Sydney that supports the visual arts. Personally, the fellowship gave her “time and perspective”. Professionally, it gave her something increasingly rare in global work: the chance to be in the same room as the people she was collaborating with.
“The reality of working with living artists is that typically, the best outcomes evolve out of iterative, deep conversations – and you cannot have them over Zoom,” Anneke says. “You need to have them in the studio, and in the environment where people are making.”
Her Paris research also took her to the United Nations’ Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)’s library and archives, where she explored the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage and its relationship to contemporary art collecting. That work opened new connections with UNESCO specialists and affirmed something she had long believed: that Australian art is vital to the global cultural conversation.
Anneke Jaspers, Senior Curator, Collection, Museum of Contemporary Arts. Photo: Richard Freeman/ UNSW.
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Our arts graduates work across many different fields, drawing on skills such as critical thinking, communication, leadership and the ability to navigate complexity.
JJ Fiasson
Bachelor of Liberal Studies (Honours) '08, Master of International Security '14
JJ leads Generative AI at Canva and founded Leonardo AI, the Australian startup that helped millions create AI-generated content before Canva acquired it in 2024. His journey from philosophy and immunology student to tech innovator highlights the value of interdisciplinary thinking in the age of AI.
“I’ve always been fascinated by the intersection of technology and creativity. My studies taught me how to approach problems from different perspectives and to think critically about complex ideas. Those skills have been invaluable in building and scaling technology businesses."
Zara Seidler
Bachelor of International
Studies '18
Zara has built a career around helping young Australians make sense of the news. As co-founder of The Daily Aus, one of Australia's fastest-growing news platforms, she draws on the communication, critical thinking and leadership skills developed through her humanities degree to engage a new generation of news consumers.
"Majoring in government and international relations provided me with a deep sense of curiosity and a critical eye, two things I take into every morning pitch meeting. My degree gave me the range and breadth of knowledge needed to approach issues and ideas with conviction and curiosity."
Martin Wright
Bachelor of Arts (Honours) '18
Martin, PhD candidate and Principal Archaeologist at Virtus Heritage, combines historical and technological expertise to preserve cultural heritage for future generations.
"Whether I’m identifying Aboriginal objects in the field or taking photos for archival records, I rely on communication and critical thinking skills I developed through my degree. While archaeology is a practical, physical career, the ability to communicate clearly and concisely across diverse communities, and to make compelling arguments, is a big part of what we do."
Being human
Marissa Anita, who studied Media Practice in Sydney before returning to her home country of Indonesia to build a career across journalism, television, film, podcasting and public speaking, can identify a single thread binding her diverse career: “Storytelling,” she says.
Marissa grew up watching films, which she says sparked a fascination with people, their behaviours and emotions that became the basis of a career spanning fact and fiction. Journalism gave her access to real human stories, while acting let her inhabit imagined circumstances and derive “emotional learning” from them. To her, while the medium might change, the subject does not. “It’s about being human,” she says.
This perspective shapes the way she interviews people. As a journalist and presenter in Indonesia, she has interviewed presidents, ministers, police and anti-corruption leaders, while her production work has helped to bring attention to issues including sexual violence, gender equality, child marriage and domestic violence.
Marissa says the more she learns about other people, the more she learns about herself. When interviewing subjects, she listens to their stories, watches their micro-expressions and reflects on how she might feel, think and behave if she were in that situation.
“I see interacting with other humans as mirrors,” she says. “Not only to learn about others, but also about myself.”
Marissa’s time at the University of Sydney shaped both aspects of her career. She joined the Sydney University Dramatic Society, performed in student productions and made memories she still holds dear. Studying media at the University broadened her understanding of how stories could be told.
After graduating, she planned to write for magazines but instead joined Metro TV, Indonesia’s first 24-hour news channel. She loved broadcast journalism and later came to see its responsibility as helping “the voice of the people shine”. That meant learning to step back and let people tell their own stories, rather than imposing her own views.
It is another form of attention – listening closely enough to let someone else be heard. And in an AI-driven age, that human capacity feels more important than ever. For Marissa, this is not about resisting technology but about protecting what it cannot replace: the judgement to interpret complexity, the empathy to understand another person’s experience, and the instinct to find meaning in someone else’s story.
Cong sees the humanities as a way to sit with ambiguity and complexity. Anneke sees them as essential to the future of work and democracy. And Marissa sees storytelling and human connection as the throughline of all her work.
Together, their careers answer the question of what you can do with a humanities degree. You can build public trust. You can help audiences to see themselves more clearly. You can carry Australian art into international conversations. You can tell stories across languages, cultures and forms. You can teach, question, interpret, make, listen, and translate complexity into something others can feel. And perhaps most importantly, you can learn to pay attention. In a world competing constantly for it, that may be the most practical skill of all.
Hero image: Artist, Cong Yu. Photo: Fiona Wolf/ University of Sydney.