As a first-year student, I have not officially declared my major, but I have certainly declared it to myself, countless times. One day I am an English major and another I am government. One week I want to be an economics minor, while the next I am looking toward women’s and gender studies. I have plenty of time to explore my interests, yet I spend a large portion of time stressing about it nonetheless.
Whenever I turn to friends or family for advice, the most common suggestion is for me to major in something “useful.” I have been told repeatedly that humanities majors are a waste of time. Instead, I should be doing math, science or economics. While people have differing views on what exactly is useful, most argue that humanities subjects are generally impractical pursuits.
Students feel a distinct pressure to tailor their course of study to fields most likely to result in employment. They consider engineering, for example, a pragmatic field because the skill set is more likely to help them find a job, while they consider a field like women’s and gender studies less legitimate because there are not as many jobs specifically for these students. If I even mention the fact that I am interested in the latter, people either make jokes or recommend that I just take a few courses. When I asked a friend who is interested in Spanish why she does not want to major in it, she responded, “I want a job.” Students genuinely believe that unless they abandon their passions for “useful” pursuits, they will end up wasting four years of an Ivy League education on a jobless future.
People joke about the starving humanities major, unemployed and hopeless post-graduation. Students talk about taking a humanities class for an “easy A” and humanities courses often find their way onto layup lists each term. Fields like art history and English often carry the stigma of being somehow less legitimate than their counterparts, such as math and science. But while humanities courses generally have significantly higher median grades than many in the sciences, this does not immediately invalidate any success in the humanities.
Why are the humanities deemed useless? I have taken courses in English, art history and women’s and gender studies, and I found that these demanded more of me than my other, more “practical” classes. Humanities develops the skill sets necessary for success beyond Dartmouth. I learned to observe, analyze, think critically and write. Each of these skills allows one to develop into an effective and productive worker and prepares one for real-world tasks.
In fact, humanities prepare students for an additional requirement of the work force: creativity. Success in any field requires ingenuity and originality of thought. Humanities courses prepare students to assess existing arguments and push theirs one step further. Students develop the natural curiosity necessary to ask the right questions as well as the analytical and creative skills required to solve them.
Dartmouth considers itself a liberal arts college, yet there is a stigma within the student body against anyone who is too involved in the liberal arts. Students feel pressure to abandon their passions altogether or add minors or double majors that will allow them to be more “useful” in the work force. Many students perceive those interested in humanities fields as less intelligent than those interested in physics or calculus. Even during orientation, when students were required to attend lectures, the majority of the lectures focused on medicine and science, while the remaining ones were very broad. No lecture focuses specifically on students looking to pursue humanities.
Humanities courses are deemed less “serious” than courses in math and sciences, which unfortunately deters many students from getting the most out of their liberal arts education. The distributive requirements in place certainly encourage students to take courses outside of their comfort zone, but they do not prevent students from stigmatizing those who actually enjoy earning their distributive requirement for literature or art. If you are interested in the humanities, you should not cave to pressure from others. Instead, follow your own desires.