Philosophy Isn’t (Necessarily) Intimidating. That’s Why I Minored In It (Maybe You Should Too)
By Alex Bonjoc (GU-Q’27)
Alex is a third year student majoring in International Politics and minoring in Philosophy. She loves to read, watch sitcoms, and play cards with friends!
Whenever I tell someone that I chose Philosophy as my minor, the reaction is almost always the same. They pause, sometimes grimace, then come the question: “Why would you do that to yourself?”
I never really know how to answer, I usually say that I enjoy it, which somehow sounds pretentious the second those words leave my mouth (I promise I’m not trying to be). But the judgment doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from personal experience. People think of philosophy as a boring and dense subject with text that’s made more inaccessible by incomprehensible and sometimes defunct languages like Latin and ancient Greek, or old -English..They remember their struggles reading Kant, Rousseau, or Hobbes and deciding that the study of philosophy just wasn’t for them.
And honestly? I get it. I really do.
If you had asked me in high school whether I wanted to sit in a classroom and listen to someone explain Feinberg’s principles, I would have laughed and walked the other way. In that time of my life, philosophy felt distant. It was just an intimidating class I needed to pass that felt, honestly, pointless. I didn’t wake up one day and suddenly start loving it. I sort of stumbled into it once I entered Georgetown. And somewhere along the way, between taking one of my first required core curriculum classes, Political and Social Thought with Professor Jeremy Koons, I realized that philosophy wasn’t what I thought it was. It isn’t a monolithic subject. In reality, it’s a collection of vastly different ways of thinking about the world and the people in it.
What surprised me most was that the study of philosophy didn’t require me to memorize answers from dense texts, it pushed me to sit with questions. It taught me how to think carefully, and how to sit with the discomfort of different thoughts and realities we’d read about. Philosophy stopped being about “white, male, and dead philosophers” and started being about how we justify our own beliefs, the values we carry, and how we decide what actually matters for ourselves and for others.
So, when people ask me why I chose philosophy, I wish I could say this instead: I didn’t choose it because I wanted to suffer through impossible texts that I still struggle to understand, nor to prove something about myself. I chose it because philosophy met me where I was: unsure and intimidated. It showed me that thinking deeply does not have to be scary. Now, if philosophy intimidates you, then you’re likely the kind of person it’s for. And who knows? You might find yourself, like I did, wondering how you ever thought that philosophy wasn’t for you… and you might end up loving it.
“The posts and comments on this blog are the views and opinions of the author(s). Posts and comments are the sole responsibility of the authors. They do not represent the views, opinions or policies of the University.”