Students at college are very good at comparing themselves to each other. It starts when they get there and they meet a ton of other people that think they're just as smart, if not smarter, than everyone else. In any given conversation, someone may bring up their lack of sleep or higher work load to let others know who's the alpha in this stressed pack.
With all these books, I can stand above everyone else.
At Kalamazoo College, those types of interactions have been named our stress culture because it's very prevalent on our campus. However, even more prevalent on K's campus is something that I like to call "the Battle of Majors"--the events that occur when people of one major decide to hate on another major. Being a liberal arts school, people from different majors interact a lot, causing problems at times.
Primarily, battles occur between science majors and humanity majors. From what I've seen, arguments seem to spring up when one person starts to argue that they have it worse than the person from the other major, indicated by their lack of sleep or something. These arguments also tend to bleed into a notion that science students are pushed to do humanities more so than humanities are pushed to do science. From there, science students tend to develop a superiority complex when it comes to comparing majors, even if very slight and unintentional.
Although all must bow to those with a lab coat on.
In my opinion, these problems stem from the the idea that the difficulty of a class is the same for everyone - some arbitrary concept, constant for all students. There are science majors that look at humanities courses in a condescending way, saying that they're the easy classes. This is based on the fact that humanities classes are primarily discussion-based, where they do most of their learning while talking with other people about their thoughts on a subject. Science classes, on the other hand, have their classes dedicated to having information tossed at the students and allowing the students to grasp it as they please. The problem with this idea is that people aren't taking into account that people's minds work differently because there is no person who grew up exactly like another.
Also, the notion of science students being pushed harder than humanities students to take classes in the other "group" is used as another step that some science students use to make themselves higher above the humanities. In reality, there are simply more sects of the humanities in the school than there are sciences. Plus, classes for any given science class are, for the most part, very linear. To take one class, you need to pass the prerequisite, making science classes very limited to non-majors, as there are only a few classes that every student can take before specializing towards one end. Due to the diversity in the category "everything else that isn't science", humanities courses are more accessible.
Additionally, the concept of scientific superiority seems to be reinforced by society in that science is demanded because people can see the results very clearly. A successful experiment that gets us one step closer to curing a disease or making a car that runs on some renewable fuel is seen and praised much more readily than a book that revolutionizes the way that people see the world or a moving video that makes people more aware to violence against women. We just value products of humanities as something that anyone can do because products of science require training in how to think in a new language that is science. What people don't see is that the person that wrote that book or that video went through years of classes, learning every day how to present their ideas in a way that sends chills down your spine and changes how you see something forever. A writer goes through miles of lead or ink just as a scientist goes through hypotheses like cups of coffee.
The universal symbol for "sleep is only a concept".
Of course, I can't entirely demonize my own Biology major and other people who have devoted their college education to science because of this. But still, it's frustrating to see people take an elitist view on one sect of education simply because it's the route they know and that it's very difficult. The point of a liberal arts college is to learn how to interact with the world with knowledge varying perspectives and aspects of life. Simply writing off the social aspects of life as "easy" makes a person ignorant of life. As social beasts, there is much to gain from learning how intricate life is as a human in a society where we aren't divided into groups as scientists and "the other ones".
