I’ve been a “math girl” for 5-ish years now, and I always will be. It brings me way more joy that it should to graph a particularly gruesome trigonometric function or to repeatedly apply the chain rule to take a complicated derivative. I know that sometimes I’ll get the answers wrong, but that doesn’t bother me. Each problem is like a little puzzle that I get to tackle. Therefore it was logical that after being dubbed “math goddess” in high school, I declared a double major in Mathematics and Hispanic Studies in the first month of my sophomore year at Davidson.
I took four years of Spanish in high school, and I’ve always thought it would be awesome to be able to speak a foreign language. At first I figured that “Hispanic studies” was just a way to sound fancy. However, within two weeks of declaring my majors, I somewhat impulsively decided to go abroad the following semester and simultaneously started to learn what “Hispanic studies” actually meant.
Through a combination of Spanish and Latin American literature and culture classes and generally living in a foreign country, I quickly learned during my semester in Spain that speaking a language barely scratches the surface of understanding another culture and relating to its people, even in Western cultures that at first glance don’t look too different from our own. Simply studying “Spanish” would leave out so much. In America, I would barely touch history or English classes with a ten foot pole. I never felt any need to analyze a book I read; books are just to read for fun, right? Wrong. Reading Cervantes and Lope de Vega served as a window through which I learned old Spanish customs and history, and before I knew it I was going to historic homes and museums in my free time just to learn as much as I could. I wanted to know everything I could about literature and art and film about the Spanish Civil War so that I had a better frame of reference on issues that are still relevant in Spain today. Instead of just enjoying these things for their aesthetic or entertainment value, I was beginning to appreciate all of the context they were created in.
I got back to Davidson in August ready to buckle down and double up on math classes. As always, there is something familiar and comforting about manipulating numbers and solving problems. But in spending hours every night working through homework problems, I realized that finding a solution to a differential equation is a very, very, very different thing from what I was doing last semester. Math is universal, but it doesn’t require any interaction with other people. I’ve used math to connect with other people by tutoring and teaching because I’m very much a people-person. But that’s what I have chosen to do with math, not what it does inherently. The humanities on the other hand are exactly what they claim; they’re a record of humanity. They open doors to other peoples and given us an opportunity to see another side, another perspective, another life, and I have come to adore that about them. Liberal arts, you’ve won this math-loving people-person over.