Leveling the field between engineering and humanities
November 20, 2015
To many, “north of Green” is this untouched, intangible territory crawling with stress and caffeine-fueled engineers. There’s a sense of division between the two blocks of campus: there are the engineering kids up north and the Liberal Arts kids down south, and we’re seemingly on different tiers.
Speaking as a Computer Science engineer, I understand the paradigm that many of my classmates subscribe to. There’s an idea that engineers are high-achieving and pre-professional, while everyone else is just throwing money at useless degrees.
There’s a thriving sense of superiority that pulses throughout our engineering department at the University, hinged on high salaries and large tech companies influencing the way we live today. And while that might have a grain of truth, engineering isn’t the holy grail of academic involvement.
This mentality sucks. More and more, we sacrifice having well-rounded institutions and holistic educations in favor of the engineering movement. We’re putting away our literature, our Thoreau and Emerson, because somehow learning Java and circuitry has become far more necessary to the societal definition of success. And this is a problem.
Other majors might lack the same clear-cut application that engineering holds, but they’re dynamic nevertheless. They teach people about the fine print in our lives. They show people what other people are like, and teach them what life is outside of the classroom.
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This might be because people have stopped seeing the value in a well-rounded education, in favor of salary and security. But statistics show that the job prospects for these same kids aren’t actually that bad.
According to a Georgetown study conducted on graduate unemployment rates by major, there’s only a 1 to 2 percent difference in favor of engineers over social science and other humanities majors. https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/HardTimes.2013.2.pdf
It’s not your major or what you study necessarily that lands you the perfect job; it’s personal initiative and potential. At the end of the day, it’s important to see someone who’s passionate about what he or she is doing (whether that be Malthusian economics or Artificial Intelligence), not someone who took a slew of courses he or she barely cared about to get a job.
Taruni Paleru, a sophomore studying Computer Science and Economics, says, “I hate how divided our school is. It’s so segregated, between the engineering students and everyone else. If I could study what I wanted, I would do Political Science, but that wouldn’t make as much money.”
Yes, engineers do have the highest average salaries, but that doesn’t make other areas of study obsolete. Humanities were the root of academic study for since the beginning of formal education in the times of Ancient Greece. They’re the little pieces that bring together a better understanding of life in general.
As Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times suggests, having a good understanding of the humanities leads us to better understand the human experience, which is a necessary facet to making bigger decisions for companies and government.
The less we pay attention to non-engineering studies, the more we carve away the multi-dimensional perspectives of people well-versed in more human-centered disciplines and thus lose out on a unique perspective. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/20/opinion/why-the-humanities-still-matter.html
As for business students, seen traditionally by engineers as lazy and unambitious, their job prospects are still perfectly fine. Forbes reports that the top hiring rates are covered between engineering and business both.
Large firms like PwC, Accenture, and Deloitte are still hiring thousands of business undergrads, not to mention the litany of tech companies that need business talent to run their operations. After all, a tech company still needs business minds to function. http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2014/01/22/the-college-degrees-that-get-the-most-job-offers/
Apart from job statistics and the corporate outlook on what you study, I am a firm believer in the thought that you should enjoy your education. It’s not about coming here for four years and leaving with a piece of paper; it’s about exploring your interests and becoming a well-rounded human with a better understanding of the world.
That shouldn’t be determined by what websites are reporting has the best job prospects for the moment. If you want to study neuroscience, then unapologetically study those action potentials and epinephrine hormones.
All majors at the University are relevant and people should stop being reprimanded for what they want to study. The education between engineering and non-engineering is different, that’s for certain, but that doesn’t make it inferior. Engineering is only a way to supplement our lives, as with anything else, but not define it.
Saba is a sophomore in Engineering.
