As a College of Humanities and Social Sciences major, I have received my fair share of judgmental stares when I tell people of my inclinations toward humanities at an agriculture and engineering university; never mind that this university is just as renowned for its humanities and social science disciplines as it is in its STEM disciplines. STEM superiority, as I like to call it, is especially prevalent in the weeks leading up to exam time, as students mentally compete with one another to see who has the heaviest workload.
It’s no secret that there’s some contention and competition (whether friendly or not) between those majoring in one of the STEM fields and those majoring in one of the humanities or social sciences. In January 2011, President Barack Obama released a statement essentially saying that more money needed to be put toward pushing students to study in the STEM fields; he allocated $250 million toward improving STEM-specific education across the country to get more students involved with better education.
In this increasingly technologically advanced age, I can understand why schools everywhere want to push students into one of the STEM disciplines. It’s important for this country to keep up with the rest of the world, scientifically speaking. With this increased attention toward the sciences and mathematics, however, comes a decrease in attention toward the humanities.
What is important to keep in mind in this constant push toward STEM with diminished allocation of funding toward the humanities and social sciences and what people are forgetting is that these disciplines are not mutually exclusive. That is, STEM researchers cannot achieve prestige in their field without at least a basic understanding of language and rhetoric; conversely, humanities and social science researchers cannot be taken seriously in their work without knowledge of statistics, basic mathematics and approved research methods.
It’s confusing to me, then, as to why so many students — whether STEM or CHASS — express such abject aversion to the supposed “opposing” fields. As a double humanities major myself, I can acknowledge that STEM students do have a more time-intensive workload when it comes to problem sets, labs and practical application. I can also vouch for my own disciplines and say that although I don’t have 10 impossible-to-solve math or science problems, it is rather difficult to write two to four fully articulated papers with different subjects a night.
It’s extremely difficult to quantify a workload; some work, although easy, is incredibly time-intensive, while other work is difficult, but perhaps requires less time to complete. That the STEM students — more often than not, engineers — feel that their workload is foremost in time intensity, as well as difficulty, discredits the time and effort other students (humanities students) put into earning their degrees.
I could go on about the relative unfairness of job security in the STEM fields as opposed to the humanities or social sciences. I could also go on about income levels — it is true for the most part that those working STEM careers get paid more than those in humanities and social sciences.
What it really all boils down to, though, is that during exam time, instead of complaining off of one’s high horse about how much work one has in comparison to others, it may be beneficial for students to collaborate and help each other out to get the best results possible. This conflict between STEM fields and humanities and social science fields only allows for one more avenue of division, discrimination and exclusion amongst people.
