By Hana Sakurai Wernham, Second Year, English
The bitter rivalry between STEM and humanities students is a tale as old as time. That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s at least as old as academia itself. Well, actually, now that I think about it, education used to be much more interdisciplinary than it is today, and half of the disciplines we have now didn’t exist until about two hundred years ago… Fine, in the scheme of things it’s a newer rivalry, but war is war and I’m here to stoke the flames.
As every good humanities student understands, the truth is subjective and mouldable. In that light, I’ll start with an anecdote that is definitely true. Last year I had a weekly lecture on foreign land – the Chemistry building. It was a day like any other and clad in a Kangol hat and very unique scarf, I waltzed through the always-open automatic doors. I’d been reading some particularly absorbing passages of Nietzsche mid-perambulation which meant I failed to see the close-to-breakdown chemistry student walking quickly towards me in the opposite direction. Before I knew it, we collided, and my mug of oolong tea (yes, brought from home, yes, a sustainable choice) flew out of my hand. I saw it nearly in slow-motion: steeped Chinese leaves dashed over their stack of lab reports like blood on marble.
I should’ve apologised instead of lamenting my now-soaked copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra because an innocent collision quickly turned into a verbal altercation. I tried to tell them that community is the antidote to capitalism, and in fighting with me they were becoming a puppet of the profit-machine. That was when things got physical.
In the flurry of blows, we somehow became tangled in my (lovely) scarf and became, just for a moment, tied together by the necks. We struggled like two trout caught on the same fishing rod. For reasons I still cannot articulate, I was slightly turned on by this (google hermeneutical injustice and save your judgement) but the frisson didn’t last long because I was then pushed to the ground.
Soon, a small crowd gathered and chanted, ‘You pretentious humanities ****! Take your beret and shove it up your arse!’ That was nearly iambic, I mused in between kicks as my vision faded to black.
In the days following I thought long and hard on what had happened. What spurred this blind act of hatred? Could it be, perhaps, my palpable arrogance or frankly comic pretentiousness?
Nah, I wouldn't have thought so. Jealousy is a disease after all – one that STEM students should look into curing in their graduate research. I’m sorry that I have low contact hours and spend most of my time reading in a café while you lot are tied up in labs pipetting liquids into other liquids. Who knew you could get arthritis at the age of twenty? But I’ve seen what happens in the A.S.S. in the small hours – fabricating data when haphazard pipetting leads to the wrong results. What’s it all for?
Look, I could go on forever elucidating the differences between STEM and humanities students and in doing so construct offensive caricatures based on monolith categories while completely ignoring the existence of whole disciplines like the social sciences and medical humanities.
…And that I will! I will circumvent the “intellectual” arguments here (that humanities is less academically rigorous than STEM, that humanities doesn’t contribute to society at large, you’ve heard it all before) in favour of what really matters: the shallow stuff.
One obvious advantage humanities students hold over STEM students is in dress sense. Walking into a 9AM lecture titled Figuring Outsider Masculinity in the Long Victorian Novel is like sitting amongst impossibly fashionable randomised sims, whereas one called Inputs, Outputs and Meta-models is more like a factory line of spectacled non-player-characters.
Sarah Dalton
Maybe that was a bit harsh. I should try harder to get on the good side of the computer scientists and engineers – when the singularity comes, they’ll be made oligarchs while the rest of us cower in bunkers from killer robots.
In all seriousness, we all know that humanities students are better, but I suppose that STEM students aren’t the worst people in the world. Don’t expect me to be dancing off into the sunset with a chemistry student any time soon, though maybe we should stop the infighting while the enemy is still human…
Featured Image: Art Institute of Chicago / Unsplash
Do you think the stereotypes surrounding humanities and STEM students are valid?
