I came into college with the same misconceptions as everyone else. Obviously, I was going to get amazing grades, get involved with a plethora of activities and go on adventures with my friends while we take artsy aesthetic pictures of each other. It was never my intention to go to parties, but I certainly wasn’t going to stay in my dorm room and binge watch House, MD every weekend. One of the bigger misconceptions that I had about college was that my major was going to be taken seriously.
When I applied to college, I was a political science major. At orientation, I put a bad taste in my academic advisor’s mouth by changing my major to international studies and Italian. That taste got even worse when I decided that I wanted to be a history and international studies double major. And though I’ve gone through many panic attacks about what I was going to do with my life after college, I decided that history was the thing that I wanted to devote all of my time studying.
This wasn’t something that I felt like my friends were able to understand. Don’t get me wrong, I love my friend group to death and wouldn’t trade them for anything, but I feel like they haven’t understood why I would devote my life to something that doesn’t have high-paying job prospects. This goes because I’m studying at a private institution, which is admittedly way more expensive than a state school. I mean, we’ve had the discussion about how silly it was to study something that didn’t have a lot of high-paying jobs open (thus putting you into tons of debt), but I had always held onto the belief that this didn’t mean me.
It started to grate on my nerves when they would make little jokes about how easy my major was, and how nice it must be to have so little homework. They were joking, and I knew that, but maybe there was some truth to those light-hearted quips about switching to an easier major between chemistry labs and biology quizzes. Maybe my major, which I struggled with sometimes, was super easy. Maybe I was the problem for not remembering all of the irregular past participles in Italian. Maybe I was stupid for thinking about contractual law too much. Maybe I didn’t belong in college, because I had such an easy major compared to these brilliant girls I had surrounded myself with.
Of course, I didn’t know what to do about this. There were a few statuses that I made on Facebook, passive-aggressively calling out the best friends I had ever had. Then, things got worse, because I had overheard some science majors in the library griping about how you don’t have to be smart to be a liberal arts major. Sure, it came out of finals-induced frustration, but was there truth in it? Was I stupid because I excelled in history instead of math and science?
Like with all of my problems, I turned to my parents for guidance. They’re young enough to be relatable and old enough to be wise and have some life experience. I knew that they weren’t going to outright call me stupid, but I was kind of hoping they would drop truth bombs, and maybe try to convince me to join the dark side of science majors. But instead of doing that, they offered me some advice that I hadn’t even considered before.
The difference between people who study science and people who study the humanities isn’t that one is smart and the other isn’t. People who study science and people who study the humanities are just different kinds of smart.
This blew my mind–not going to lie. In high school, four years of math and science are required. The world compares how people do in science and math, because they’re hailed as the universal signs of intelligence. We tout about the brilliance of people like Stephen Hawking and Thomas Edison (though it should be Nikola Tesla, but that’s another article), but hardly ever talk about brilliant military strategists, leaders or historians. Science and math come naturally to some people, and with more difficulty to others, but we use these as our standards of how smart a person is.
I will never be able to tell you which bonds are the strongest, what symptoms match what disease, or even be able to name the elements of the periodic table in order. If you put a complex math problem in front of me, I wouldn’t be able to tell you how to do it, much less solve it myself. Math scares me, and science just doesn’t interest me. But that doesn’t make me stupid, or less intelligent than my more science-inclined friends.
It did make me feel stupid to hear my parents say that it was just a different kind of smart. It also made me feel stupid to consider switching my major to biology or physics or anything even remotely science-related. Was I really going to give up something that I loved, and something that I felt that I was good at, because of the opinions of people who had never tried to major in what I’m majoring in? Were the words and acceptance of other people really so important that I needed to change the course of my life? Why was I even considering changing my major to something that I wasn’t interested in when I was attracted to the bright light of history like a moth to a flame?
My major and the classes that I’m taking are things that I’m interested in and things that I want to do. It might seem useless to other people, but I love thinking about if the Thirty Years War was better or worse than World War I. I love reading books on how people lived in medieval times. Writing papers comes as second nature to me. I love thinking about if Nicholas II was incompetent because of the way he was raised, or if he was just that bad. Learning about Russian Orthodox iconoclasm is incredibly interesting to me, as is being able to talk about Kievan architecture with some degree of confidence.
Being a history major doesn’t mean I’m stupid, and it doesn’t mean I have it easy. Someone being a theatre major doesn’t mean they’re stupid. Someone being an English major doesn’t mean they’re stupid. Your major doesn’t tell you if you’re intelligent or not. It’s not some badge that you wear, hoping that someone will come along and pat you on the head for being intelligent. Your major is your passion. Your major is what gets you excited about learning. Your major is why you came to college in the first place.
You may think that my major is easy, or that it’s pointless to know the things that my major teaches. You may think that there are no jobs that I could have with my major. You may think that it doesn’t take intelligence to be my major. That’s why you didn’t major in it. There’s not a point of shaming someone because they’re following their passion when you’re struggling to follow your passion as well. While it’s true that all majors are not created equal, it’s also true that no majors are better than other majors.
