Being a humanities major can feel incredibly isolating sometimes, like your work isn’t taken as seriously or that what you’re doing in your classes isn’t considered difficult or worthwhile by your peers. Not having a direct profit motive already makes humanities look less appealing. As a humanities major, I’m constantly having to answer the question, “What are you going to do with that?” It can definitely become exhausting!
As an English major at FSU, I’ve had the experience of working with an amazing range of faculty from courses to individual research projects. It’s so shocking to hear how these classes aren’t taken seriously.
In my English classes, I’ve had the pleasure of learning about things ranging from convection currents to genetics that are relevant to the works we read. So maybe science isn’t as far away from the humanities as we once thought?
It’s easy to say, “Who cares?” and try and move on, but maybe there’s a deeper issue here that’s worth shedding light on. The humanities and STEM weren’t always separate fields. There was a time when they were united as one.
A long time ago, science and the humanities were a lot closer as fields. They were treated as a sphere of learning instead of as separate disciplines that couldn’t and wouldn’t intersect. Now, however, there seems to be a willingness to study sciences in the humanities, but not so much the other way around. I’ve heard of terms like “technofeminism” that combine feminist theory with technology and the sciences, or seen classes like Eco-Lit (aka medicine and literature).
These classes all seem to be offered in humanities departments, unfortunately. Humanities is a field that requires you to be well-rounded and seek knowledge from a variety of different places to support your arguments and research. This well-roundedness would be a lot easier to achieve if there were more room for collaboration between the fields — a very conquerable task, if I do say so myself.
As someone studying humanities, I still find the sciences fascinating. One of my favorite experiences that I had this semester was sitting next to my friends in her lab as she explained to me what she was doing and why. It’s really fascinating to see the way we all learn!
Whether it’s lab nights with my friend, asking my mom questions about her job as a nurse, or sitting and watching someone code a program next to me, getting to learn and see how my peers in other fields learn has always been a fantastic experience.
If there’s one thing that we all have in common as college students, it’s a desire to learn. Instead of focusing on what makes us different, we should focus our conversations on what brings us together. Life is a lot more fun when you can sit down with people and talk about a lot of different subjects than if there’s just one thing that you can discuss.
My favorite part of the English classes that I’ve taken is the amount of information each of my peers brings to the table. Everyone has their own chain of references and understandings, whether it’s about the history of a theorist or niche facts about how a poem or novel is written.
I could only imagine how much fun it would be if we could expand those conversations beyond the standard group and allow people who’ve studied entirely different things to have a voice in the conversation. The thing that matters more than the title of the major in our degree is that we love to learn and we value community. Instead of feeling a need to seclude ourselves from our communities due to how we feel about ourselves and our passions being discussed, we should be able to share information regardless.
Learning is indifferent to categories; learning is about community.
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