Every week, I receive an email from the Lazarus Center for Career Development listing numerous career and internship opportunities for students pursuing business, computer science, engineering and the like, but rarely for fields in the humanities. I’m not complaining; it’s just a fact.
I, like many other students, chose Smith because of its open curriculum and rich tradition of liberal arts. Smith has a wide variety of majors and minors, and student interest isn’t concentrated in just a few departments. While this provides a hopeful picture that Smith places equal value in all its academic disciplines, I’ve found this is not always the case.
We live in a rapidly modernizing world, one that has begun to distinctly prioritize science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education as opposed to fields in the humanities. It’s not just at the college level; there has been a growing emphasis placed on the importance of children learning basic coding skills as early as elementary school. I am by no means criticizing this development; increasing the accessibility of STEM education is undoubtedly important. However, I think this increased incentive towards STEM comes at the expense of overlooking the value of the humanities and the students who choose to pursue these disciplines.
Amidst the push towards STEM education, there’s sometimes an underlying assumption that students concentrating in STEM fields are inherently more intelligent than those who are not. I think at the crux of this disparity is the perception that STEM classes at the college level are more difficult than humanities classes. There is an unspoken academic hierarchy that devalues the humanities, and Smith is not immune to it.
This isn’t a plea for pity for humanities students, but I do want to address some underlying assumptions. I’ve often heard my STEM friends boast about how they could easily fill a paper for an English class with enough “BS” to get by because “everything is subjective” in the humanities and “there is no right answer.” Don’t get me wrong; I love run-on sentences and 50-cent words. It can be discouraging, though, to realize that many students regard what I’m studying as merely supplementary to their far more important disciplines and, in the grand scheme of things, useless.
I love humanities classes at Smith. Every professor I’ve had has been deeply passionate about their subject and that enthusiasm is contagious. Classes are challenging and engaging, and I’ve found that my classmates share this sentiment. It is outside of the classroom, however, that the priority given to STEM as opposed to the humanities becomes more noticeable. Opportunities promoted by the Lazarus Center, for example, tend to be more geared towards STEM majors. Perhaps this is because there are just more jobs available in these fields. That’s a much larger issue than Smith can account for, but it is a truth with which humanities students will likely have to contend after graduation.
Moreover, a great deal of the messages incentivizing STEM are based on financials. We all know that an engineering major will likely make more money at their first job than an English major. It’s not just money though; STEM career paths tend to be more concrete, whereas for humanities, I can hardly recount the numerous times I’ve been told I can “do anything” with my degree. This is true, but not entirely comforting. While there are no rules dictating anyone’s career path, resources like the Lazarus Center exist to provide guidance — something that is scarcely afforded to those of us on non-STEM paths. The broadness of “anything” can easily dissolve into a barely tangible future.
As a historically women’s college, Smith occupies a unique position in promoting STEM education for women. Still, Smith remains a liberal arts institution, which means there is — or should be — something for everyone. But there remains an implicit divide between STEM and the humanities, both on a departmental level and among students.
For those of us whose brains are more attuned to words than numbers, it’s easy to feel left behind. For Smith to truly embody its liberal arts promise would be to ensure that doesn’t happen.
you put this into words beautifully! The age old “you can do anything with your degree!” has given me so much anxiety and I’ve spent a lot of hours hopelessly scrolling job listings. I never attended Lazarus Center events because they never felt geared towards people with my interests or values– they seemed meant for people going into finance, or business, or other corporate, high earning jobs that I have absolutely no interest in. I wish Smith had done a better job making job pathways for humanities students much more clear.