Getting a STEM degree solved my financial problems, but I find myself actively trying to fill a curious void of human understanding and development that I feel I missed. Undergrads looking to develop their understanding of the wider world may leave fairly empty-handed after completing a STEM program.
There was a point in my math undergrad when I seriously considered pivoting to study English. I was a writing tutor at the university with an interest in literature who wanted to follow his heart. But, in debt and more than halfway done, I nixed the idea.
Since college is a business in the US, we students have to consider that in our planning. There was not much choice but to study for a degree that had a promising return on investment (ROI). There’s no shame in that. The ROI is one of the reasons STEM careers are pushed so feverishly.
I enjoyed learning science, don’t get me wrong, but I certainly didn’t feel more worldly coming out of it. In some respect, I felt empty. It felt isolating to be in the tech bubble working on such abstract problems. Would my data ingestion app really provide anything to society?
“Two Cars”, oil, by Andrii Frolov
Computer science in particular can really lack in fulfilling real human development and worldliness – beyond financial gain. It’s logic, facts, and tools, and the application of them. Many of the projects I worked on left me burnt, feeling like a robot. By design, the robotic nature of STEM fields is necessary, though. A bridge must withstand certain forces. It must, there is no other option but failure. It’s math, cut and dry, albeit very complicated.
But, us humans, our lived experience, thoughts, emotions, decisions, are notoriously illogical and chaotic – not cut and dry. The majority of real insights that I learned in college about the human workings of our decisions, minds, society and world, came from softer science courses like psychology, or liberal arts ones like English. And now, it comes from studying history, philosophy, and other liberal arts on my own time.
I wouldn’t study linear algebra or topology to understand the human condition, or the society that I live in. That’s not to say that these fields aren’t important – they are solving problems in engineering and medicine – but that they don’t provide a model to use to develop your own real-world human curiosity and worldview on an emotional level, which is ultimately how humans find fulfillment.
Even Complexity Science, the cutting edge, is just more math that’s finding patterns in the structure of structures themselves; it’s unemotoinal by design. That’s super cool, but I also desire to understand how to connect better with people and live a fulfilling life. Feigenbaum’s Constant isn’t helping. It’s worth studying, but if all of my human effort is spent studying concepts like this, I find it hard to imagine that anybody wouldn’t feel somewhat empty.
Feeling full of abstract concepts, but empty in human understanding and development, is a bit how I feel I left college. These abstract concepts can solve problems for us, but they are not centered in the human experience, so at times, they really left me feeling dumb about my lack of comprehension of the real things – politically, socially, culturally, emotionally or otherwise – happening around me.
Romanticizing studying liberal arts is easy to do, but sometimes I think about going back for a year or two and studying classics, before my life is too set up and I will feel awkward in college again, or before I become my own enemy and dig my heels into STEM work too deep and forget about it. The circumstances around choosing a college major as a high schooler, facing tens of thousands in college debt before even starting my adult life, were stressful – and for what it’s worth, I don’t deeply regret my decision to study STEM. Math is awesome. I have a library card and plenty of drive to study liberal arts to help me fill the void.
The Real Crisis In Humanities Isn’t Happening At College
Daniel