I wrote my first book when I was 3 years old. I couldn’t read or write yet, but I had an idea. I told my dad the story and he wrote the words and drew the pictures. Despite its New York Times Best Seller list snub, “Eli and his Scooter” still lives on my desk to remind me of how far back my love for writing goes.
Looking back on my early authorship, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I became an English major. Yet, my path to accepting that my passion wasn’t one in one of the highly-esteemed STEM fields was rocky.
***
My peers and I took a placement test in fifth grade that determined the math classes we would take from sixth grade until graduation. This test was a big deal, and all of us 10 year olds knew it. Less than half of us would be placed on an accelerated track — setting us up for success later on — and the rest would be relegated to being one year behind some of their peers.
I’m not here to harp on the negative repercussions of labeling students by their ability to perform on tests, but rather to speak on the effects of this pressure as I experienced it. When I was in fifth grade, I essentially skipped math altogether, testing out of the required units to theoretically engage with more appropriate material; but instead of learning advanced algebra, we played sudoku and messed around, like fifth graders do. I was never too concerned about the placement test.
To both my parents’ and my own satisfaction, I was placed on the accelerated track — but this wasn’t much of a surprise. I had always placed very highly on testing and could always follow instructions well enough to excel. There was just one problem: I hated math.
Ah, yes. The great dilemma. What does one do when they hate the things they excel at? The logical answer would be to stop doing whatever it is you dislike, but I wasn’t yet an adult with a fully-developed prefrontal cortex. I was a child receiving heaping praise for my work, and I succumbed to the siren calls of academic validation. So, when asked, I always said my favorite subject was math.
As I garnered more and more validation from my teachers for my aptitude in math and science — much more than I was getting for any of my writing — I began to abandon my passion for literature and storytelling. Perhaps it was because excellence in STEM subjects is easily quantifiable, whereas writing has a much more nuanced rating system. Or perhaps math was simply valued more at my school. Regardless of the reasoning, I found incredible difficulty in separating what I had a passion for and what teachers told me I was gifted at. In the grand scheme of a fifth grader’s social and personal development, the forced conflation of ability and passion was inevitable. The things that I was good at became the things I thought I had a passion for.
By the time I reached high school, I had begun to figure out my academic interests. I was a musician, I loved to read, I loved to write and I still hated math. Yet I would tell people I wanted to be an engineer when they asked what I wanted to do in college. My dream career at the time contained nothing of what I loved and a whole lot of what I hated: numbers, problem solving and logic puzzles. I had picked up on the very clear signals our education system had been sending me: STEM was the future, the way to financial security. The forthcoming digital age needed scientists and mathematicians to forge the new technological revolution just beyond the horizon. The arts, on the other hand, were on their way out. Pursuing a career in them was a mistake, a waste, damning the artist to the inevitability of starving artistry.
Fortunately, I dashed my engineering hopes in my sophomore year of high school when I got a C+ in my honors precalculus class. I really shouldn’t have struggled in the class. It was taught by a notoriously easy-going teacher, and the content was much easier than things I had seen in previous classes. But whether my subconscious could no longer bear to continue lying about my feigned love for math, or I simply reached a breaking point in my motivation, I didn’t even try to do well. More often than not, I would come to class without having finished my homework. This, I learned, was not a recipe for success, and it manifested itself in the barely-passing grade that I received. I saw it as a life-altering catastrophe then, but I look back on it now as a wake up call — if I was religious, perhaps, I would say that it was rooted in some sort of divinity — a tell-tale sign that I could no longer gaslight myself into loving something that I hated.
My parents had seen the whole process take place. They nurtured the 3 year old who wanted to write a book. They raised the 6 year old who told everyone he had just read his first chapter book on his own. They also saw the 11 year old who abandoned his love of writing because he thought he was simply better at something else; they saw the kid who lied when he said he liked math. So, instead of getting mad at me for performing poorly in a class, they simply took the opportunity to remind me of my real passion — the passion I had left behind. They sat me down and made sure I understood that my C+ wasn’t going to define who I was, but they also made sure that I understood that I’ve always had a love for writing and literature. After their talk, I retreated upstairs and immediately dug through my desk drawer and found the old, tattered copy of “Eli and his Scooter.” Finally, I remembered.
My affection for the arts began to return. I found myself enjoying my English classes more and rekindling my writing skills. I began writing in my free time again, creating poetry, essays and short stories (none of which were very good, but I digress). By the time I began to apply to universities and consider majors, I had already set my sights on an English degree; but I still faltered. There are people throwing out warning signs for prospective humanities-seeking majors on every corner of the internet: the lack of job prospects, the feelings of regret, the sense of uselessness. The ever-growing notion that a college major’s sole purpose was to set the student up for career success began to slowly seep into my psyche. Maybe they were right; perhaps STEM was the future and the arts and humanities were falling out of favor.
“What are you going to major in?” my relatives would ask.
“English, probably,” I would say. They’d narrow their eyes and look at me sideways.
“What are you going to do with that? Do you want to be a teacher?”
This response was a stark contrast to the intrigue and excitement they had shown my majoring-in-computer-science brother just a year prior. I would leave these conversations feeling disrespected and discouraged, worrying that I was wasting my brains by going into the humanities — that I needed to go into STEM to make a real impact, to do something that people will admire me for.
Now, two years into my English degree, I thank my younger self for staying true to my passion and finding the courage to pursue it. The current reality of higher education is that it is more about career readiness than it is about forming a well-rounded person. So it makes sense that the majors with the most growth are those with sturdier financial outlooks and career-oriented approaches such as pre-med, computer science, engineering and business. And with the growth of these fields comes the decline of studies like philosophy, English and history.
And while college majors can be “popular” and lead to oversaturation of the job market, the trend is fairly clear: you can be a computer scientist or a neurologist, but you can’t be an English-ist. Shooting for a career that sets you up for a clear-cut future is the easy, correct decision for many people, one that promises financial and job security in an unstable world. The stress of not knowing what the future holds is lessened by organized paths to attaining a degree, and the fear of wasting time and money on a degree to simply not put it to use is calmed by the stability of job opportunities in these fields. But while it’s less risky in the short-term, one may run the risk of finding themselves in a career path that they have no passion for, with no escape route.
Not all STEM fields are career-ready, and not all humanities damn their recipients to failure. In fact, success (financially speaking) is only loosely correlated with a person’s college major. Yet, I have presented the binary of STEM and humanities to be a mutually exclusive duo where the issues with one are the strengths of the other. This isn’t the case. All fields of higher education require taking a risk, but the humanities seem to be deemed more risky than STEM fields, and many students are ushered away from the “risky” degrees despite the alternatives not being the safe-haven they’re advertised to be.
I know that a degree in English is risky, too. I don’t have a single career I can set my sights on, and I have to trust that my skills will transfer to whatever path I choose. But when my STEM friends and family members ask, “What can you do with an English degree?” I’ll always respond with, “Absolutely anything.” Because a career doesn’t need to be defined by a college major. It’s risky, it’s less stable — but I’m certainly not destined for failure.
I’ll take my risk. I’ll resist the gravitational pull of a “career-ready” degree. I’ll laugh off looks of admiration my engineering friends get when they say their major, while I just get courteous nods. I’ll ignore the well-intentioned, yet snarky “what are you going to do with an English major?” comments. Because I know what I am.
I’m a kid who followed his passion. I’m a humanities kid in a STEM-loving culture.
Statement Columnist Eli Trese can be reached at elitrese@umich.edu.