MANILA, Philippines — Most of us choose our college courses in view of the immediate future. Options such as Economics or Computer Science or Legal Management readily give us an idea of the careers they will help us pursue.

An investment in a college degree is an investment in a future career or profession. This, in turn, determines practical things — Will we eat three times a day? Which neighborhood will we live in? Will we be able to send our own kids to college?

Presumably this is the major, if not the only, reason our parents bother sending us to college.

I chose my course on the assumption that the degree one graduates with is the career one ends up pursuing. But this wasn’t quite clear to me in fourth year high school. All I knew then was that I didn’t know what career I wanted to pursue. So my decision boiled down to two choices: Public Administration in UP, or Business Management in Ateneo.

Eventually I chose the course with the higher potential financial pay-offs, but I didn’t so much compute the values as listen to my father paint a picture of my alternative futures with a colorful narrative of his own.

A course in philosophy or any of the humanities had always been at the back of my mind. These stirrings, if you will, had been there throughout my junior and senior years in high school, manifested in my failed attempts to read my father’s copies of Marx, and Aristotle, relics from his own college days.

It is just that I had never taken them seriously, at least not when I was at the dining table filling out my application forms. I think I was always afraid of the question, which my parents were liable to ask, “What will you do after college if you took up Philosophy? Be a philosopher?”

During dinner that night, I asked about pursuing a degree in Creative Writing or English Literature, just to test the waters. My father summed it up this way: it’s great that I have these kinds of aspirations, but I don’t need to major in them in order to nurture them or make them come true. Take John Grisham, for example.

It was in August of last year that I dreamed up the idea of doing a minor in Philosophy or Creative Writing or English Lit. I was in Antipolo, staffing for the 16th annual Ateneo Heights Writers Workshop, and we volunteers had the chance to interact with the panelists.

We were on the subject of the humanities courses and how so many of my batchmates were taking up extra units of English, mostly to prepare for law school. I remember speaking about my interest in it, and a remark made by one of the panelists stayed with me: that sometimes people go to school for their minors, especially when their majors aren’t sufficient.

I saw the truth in that statement. There were days when I really did not want to go to class, but never on Tuesdays and Thursdays, because I always had Philosophy then. In my freshman and sophomore years, when the drive to be lazy was arguably much stronger, there was always consolation in the fact that I had Filipino 14 or Literature 14 for that day.

I never did end up taking that minor. Part of it was financial constraints, another the fact that I was not able to finish my mandatory work practicum in the summer. So I dropped that dream altogether.

On some very odd nights, I still dream of how things might have been if I had decided to pursue a different course altogether. Maybe a college degree can be a different kind of investment, apart from preparing one for a career.

My fears were confirmed when my project management teacher last year talked about how he hired a Philosophy graduate over a Computer Science graduate for a computer company he used to work in. Sometimes I think to myself: that could have been me.