In the 17th century, Galileo looked through his telescope and discovered that he was no longer the center of the universe. The sun didn’t orbit the Earth, but the Earth orbited the Sun, as it did Jupiter and all the other planets. Everything everyone had believed for so many years wasn’t true.
I first learned about Galileo on car rides to school where my grandpa taught me and my siblings about the world. He had been a physics teacher for more than 50 years, and he met our childlike curiosity about everything and anything with encouragement and passion. We asked him about the sun; he told us about Galileo.
These car rides turned me into a STEM girl. I took every AP and advanced science class my high school offered, got out of social studies by doubling up on math and believed that one day, I might be an astrophysicist. My universe orbited around these subjects. My other interests — music and art — rested at the edges. When I got to college, I eagerly enrolled in multivariable calculus and thought for sure I would be a math major — or a minor at least. I loved it, and I did well in the class.
At the same time, I was taking my first-year writing seminar, a class where we learned to analyze and write about music. At the end of the semester, my writing professor connected me with a company called AllMusic, an American online music database that provides comprehensive information about songs, musicians and music, including reviews and biographies. They offered me an internship to write features about anything I wanted as long as it was related to music. For the first time, I felt my love for music could be incorporated into a prospective career. It was so exciting — the feeling of connecting ideas and stories, relating the past to the present, social justice struggles to present-day issues. Music, history and politics — all the subjects that had been on my periphery — intersected under the umbrella of writing, and I was free to explore the world through this new lens. I fell in love. I wanted to be a writer.
In 1633, Galileo was charged with “strong suspicion of heresy” for his discovery. People were scared, terrified to leave — to quit — their previous understanding of the world and their place in it. His book “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems” was banned, and he was sentenced to house arrest. He died in 1642, still under that arrest.
I understand the fear of the Romans and Catholics who persecuted Galileo. Quitting your prevailing understanding of your place in the world involves change and leaving previously held truths behind.
Math and science were the roots of my identity and my worldview. They helped me order my values and life path. But I quit. I traded in my graph paper for a college-ruled notebook, took history instead of math and joined The Michigan Daily’s Arts section. I got an internship at the Detroit Free Press over the summer and took 18 credits of humanities the following semester.
One day last semester, I sat in a coffee shop, my head buried in a book, when a group of boys sat down at the table next to mine to work on their calculus homework. I popped back up from my book for a moment. They laughed together and pointed out each other’s mistakes and celebrated when they understood the problem and found the solution. They were a team, fighting together toward one right answer.
I suddenly became aware of the stark contrast between my recent academic ventures and theirs. I was spending mornings and afternoons hunched over my laptop in desolate library corners, the blue light burning my eyes, as hours ticked by in silence. I realized then, in the coffee shop, that my personal discovery of writing had made my own universe smaller.
In STEM courses, you can turn to almost anyone for help. There is a common struggle and a single solution (at least at the basic levels). How many phone numbers do I have just from my years of asking or being asked for help with math homework?
The humanities and liberal arts can be a lonely endeavor. No matter how much you discuss the work you’re studying or the ideas you have, it is ultimately your thoughts alone that matter. And the time spent refining, revising, editing, tweaking — those are solitary hours.
I missed my life in STEM, the hours spent in office hours with the professors and students going over homework. I missed the community and group work and shared struggle. I wanted to go back. Does choosing writing mean ignoring an interest in science? Is it possible to explore and specialize at the same time? A computer science major tells me that college is for exploring and to decide what to do with the rest of life later. But my best friend got into the School of Education and no longer has room for her art classes next semester. Does specializing have to equal quitting?
At AllMusic, I thought about this often. There were so many intersections with music and the rest of the world, surely STEM had to be one of them. During my final months working there, I began a series of essays on A.I. and computer science in music. I interviewed creators of artificial intelligence music platforms and the artists who used them. It was fascinating (and sometimes scary), but I still felt like a piece was missing.
Fast forward to the cafe, I realized that it was that community effect and shared struggle I was missing more than the subject itself. The isolation I had become accustomed to on my path toward a career in the arts made me feel as though I was losing a part of myself, turning toward one path while turning my back on another.
Out of fear of my shifting worldview — persecuting myself, in a way, for my own discovery — I signed up for ASTRO 201: Introduction to Astrophysics. We learn about the birth and death of stars, galaxies and globular clusters. And we learn about the expansion of the universe and how 300 years after Galileo’s discovery, our center changed again. Suddenly, we could see other galaxies just like ours. Suddenly, the Milky Way didn’t contain all the stars. Suddenly, our universe was 400,000 times bigger than we ever imagined.
Maybe quitting can mark both the end of a path and the beginning of another. My best friend is so excited to be a teacher and the computer science major took a class on William Faulker. Maybe quitting does not necessarily narrow your options, but can be an expansion and increase your universe in ways you otherwise couldn’t have pictured. Maybe it is wrong to say I quit STEM. Maybe I just discovered a new center.
Daily Arts Writer Aurora Sousanis can be reached at sousanis@umich.edu.