College students seem to divide and judge peers based on the perceived difficulty of his or her major. "She's an English major", they say with all the arrogance they can muster, as they fiddle away with their math notes. This attitude is all too common on college campuses these days, especially with the recent emphasis on STEM classes even in lower levels of learning. Unfortunately, people often view STEM majors as highly admirable — so commendable that all other majors pale in comparison, to the point of being "so easy". They dismiss the arts, humanities and basically any other major that does not use lots of numbers as irrelevant and laughably easy. This is a myth, a complete misconception. There is no “easy” major in college.
Before I have engineers drafting angry passive aggressive emails to me, I acknowledge that some majors are more difficult and work intensive than others, especially depending on one's particular affinity for certain subjects. Disclaimer: I could not be a STEM major if my life depended on it. Chemistry makes me want to bang my head against a wall. Despite this, until I came to college, I believed the same craziness everyone else did. "Put STEM majors on a pedestal and laugh at the English majors" was the common ideology. When I came to college, I realized this was a terrible assumption.
Sure, the engineers are pulling their hair out in the library and the biology majors are memorizing diagrams I cannot even begin to comprehend, but this does not degrade the worth of other students' degrees. The Humanities majors are probably having just as much fun trying to get through the Iliad. Just because one major is difficult, does not render all other degrees easy. We are in such an advanced learning environment that none of these majors are going to be easy. It just can’t happen at a college level. Before you dismiss other students' majors as "laughably easy", spend a day in their shoes.
Unfortunately, humanities majors seem to be ridiculed the most as being an easy major. Did you know they have to take a foreign language? As biology is foreign to me, I bet Greek is quite difficult for STEM majors to learn. If you’re a science person, I bet you would poke your eyes out with how many essays they have to write a month. Don’t even get me started on philosophy; the topic would probably make STEM majors heads spin. We all have our own strengths and weaknesses; don't taunt other majors unless you're the true "Renaissance Man" who can do it all (but at that point you would just be haughty anyways).
As for the arts majors, I will admit, until recently, I thought they had it easy. I am pursuing a digital art minor and took a digital arts class this quarter. The class actually had — wait for it — reading, and it was not light. There were also two quizzes a week. This was not an art class you can slack off on. In the upper divisions, there are art projects that engineers would be baffled at — there are just some things you can’t learn. I believe that artistic talent is one of them.
Despite college being a place of great learning, we often seem to stigmatize and prioritize certain areas of learning as being greater, more worthy, than others. Why is a scientist more admirable, more talented than an artist? We all have our own talents; our minds function in different ways. If you asked the engineer to paint or write a poem, they might fail. If you asked an art major to calculate the velocity of a falling object, they might fail as well. This does not mean that one is more talented, more qualified, more worthy of praise than the other.
Just because you're not memorizing the periodic table for your major, does not mean it is easy. America has seemed to put such an emphasis on people going into STEM careers that they are the only degrees deemed worthy. While I do agree that science degrees require mastery of very difficult topics, this does not provide a basis to devalue other degrees. For certain people, a humanities degree could be vastly harder than a computer science degree. People have different talents, and we must celebrate that. Celebrate the college education it is a great accomplishment, and remember that the next time you comment on someone's major.
