At Smith’s Oct. 2022 Fall Career Fair, I sat behind the name tag table to catch my breath after sharing my resume with multiple employers, allowing me to overhear a conversation by a pair of Smithies that had just entered and finished their name tags. One student looked through the pamphlet of employers before turning to their friend to say that as a music major, they felt none of the employers were appropriate for them. I was struck by our different predicaments at the career fair: me, a STEM major, exhausted from talking to potential employers versus the other student, a humanities major, who saw the same room as devoid of opportunity.
If you’re a current science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) major, does this story make you feel more confident in your choice of major, or even superior to the humanities major? If so, I want to challenge this assumption that there’s an impermeable wall between STEM and humanities majors — one that allows you to look down on the career prospects of those on the other side. People who contribute to the world, a group which includes all of us, need humanities/liberal arts education to thrive and humanities majors to flourish if we want a world worth building, researching and living in.
One way that the humanities help us understand the world better — and those with a better understanding of the world are better able to build for it — is by providing context; so, I’ll look at the context of the STEM acronym itself. It was first coined in 2001 by administrators at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) who worried that the U.S. did not have enough students studying technical subjects to support a 21st-century workforce with more high-tech jobs. Now, in 2022, tech and “nerd” culture has taken over mainstream media and the companies that host those high-tech jobs are the huge financial generators of the world economy. Computer science and engineering majors especially are greatly desired by employers and can often boast high salaries not long into their careers. The NSF’s STEM campaign seems to have been successful in its goals. But what else is true about the world in 2022 and where do the humanities fit in?
In 2022, misinformation campaigns run amok on global technical apps which has resulted not just in broken trust in institutions, but lives lost. People who deify tech and rationality fall for trends and pyramid schemes like Bitcoin, web3 and meme stocks. Now, I’m not saying humanities majors can or should come to the rescue and save us from tech’s villainy. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and a major tech villain in my opinion, majored in philosophy after all. And, as STEM majors, we need to take responsibility for the people, ideas and products we promote and create without assuming this is someone else’s purview.
That said, if tech is not immune to cultic bubbles around toxic people and ideas, then these bubbles would be more easily punctured if STEM and humanities folks had not just more cross-pollination of ideas and critiques, but more solidarity generally. Without solidarity, though, we will have a STEM community that believes we are immune to critique and not in need of reflection because we chose a letter from a government acronym for our diploma in the hopes of more zeros on a paycheck. And without communication between STEM and the humanities as well as reflection by people in STEM, we might allow the trend in defunding humanities classes to continue. Tech companies and researchers will continue to be irresponsible. If both of these practices are allowed to take hold, STEM majors are going to be wildly disappointed when the “real world” after college is one that’s lonely and desolate despite all those zeros.
In the real world, we have to work together to create solutions to wickedly complex problems. No matter your field, you’re going to need to rub shoulders with a humanities major at some point if you want to build something that people want, need, will invest in and use constructively. And outside of a scientific or technical career, your world may depend on finding inspiration in poetry, music or a novel to maintain your sense of wonder and balance in a life that also includes performance reviews, grant writing and other career pressures.
Most importantly: there will be people in a position to determine whether or not your future work matters; the number of those same people who will also care to find out what your diploma says before they make that decision are going to be fewer than you think. What they will look at is how you speak and build an argument for your cause as well as how whatever you’re creating or researching fits into historical precedents and larger movements in human culture. It doesn’t matter how genius your artificial intelligence resume-sorting algorithm is if its output is just a re-branding of phrenology. The idea that you can successfully pursue worthwhile STEM-oriented goals without humanities knowledge and skills is a false one. That wall between STEM and humanities majors should be looking pretty flimsy right about now.
I understand that the STEM/Humanities divide is very real in academia when it comes to who gets funding and what jobs are available at the career center. As a STEM major who chose Smith in part because I wanted a well-rounded education, it’s worrisome to hear my peers in the humanities talk about their departments being decimated while I know STEM departments that are growing. But instead of taking pride in being on the side that seems to be superficially, temporarily winning according to some metrics while failing abysmally in ways that matter, I call on my fellow STEM majors to choose solidarity. Solidarity with our fellow Smith humanities majors means first listening to and supporting those seeking out career support from the school.
Just as importantly, STEM majors need to remember to reflect on our choice in major, career and what we’re really determined to pursue during and after our time in college. What do you really need to understand to accomplish great things? Who can help you do those things? And why would you exclude a group from your current or future team by judging what major is on their diploma?
I believe this reflection can facilitate change in the conversation between Smithies on either side of the “wall” between STEM and the humanities. This way, current and future Smithies will benefit from an alumnae network that is more widespread and robust. And that network will exist in a world worth working and living in long after that supposed divide ceases to matter.
