Rant: Major Bashing

[Kaizy]

Yeah. It's me. Small world.

Oh, nice to see ya. Hope the next paper is treating you alright.

[Kaizan]

I go to a STEM school that places a heavy emphasis on humanities (1/3 of our courses are in our major, 1/3 in humanities, and the final third is core classes). My school believes that our studies in humanities will help us have a better understanding of our impact on society once we get jobs. Its a bit of stretch if you ask me, but as a musician, its been really nice to get both sides of it to an extent. They are completely different things, each with equally difficult aspects. Some of my studies in engineering have helped my understanding in music and vise versa. People who believe their major is better than any other needs to step back and try to find the similarities, rather than trying to point out the differences. 

[Troj]

Most fields are "hard" or challenging in their way.

If you don't think philosophy's challenging, try just casually sitting down with a text by John Stuart Mill or Alfred North Whitehead.

If you don't think the arts are hard, let's see you make a quality animated film, painting, sculpture, mural, poem, and/or novella--and even more, let's see you finish it in time to meet a deadline!

Hell, even gender studies (a major I like to make fun of myself) requires you to read people who (in my biased, snarky opinion) have built a career out of being intentionally verbose and opaque, and for whom "common sense" and "simplicity" are dirty words. So, you have to be prepared to unpack and understand some high-level concepts and thought experiments.

In some fields, the concepts and theories are perhaps easy to understand or memorize, but the actual work in the real world is challenging.

Even if the concepts in your particular field are easy for you, you still have to put in the hours in terms of reading, writing, and/or research.