The great divide

Even at Princeton, where students in every major are presumably the best and brightest, STEM majors are still viewed as more challenging than non-STEM majors. There has been plenty of debate over whether STEM majors are actually more difficult or indicative of higher intelligence than non-STEM majors, but few people focus on the negative aspects of the stereotypical STEM student. Warranted or not, society puts STEM majors on a pedestal based on perceived intelligence. However, at the same time, it attaches a stigma of overall unattractiveness to the students in those majors — hence the prefrosh’s concern with getting laid as a STEM major. Both the positive and negative aspects of the STEM major stereotype are unfair and inaccurate assumptions to make about individual students. We should ultimately resist pigeonholing people into stereotypes based on their major, in the same way we resist stereotyping based on skin color or gender, and see each student as a unique individual with a unique set of interests and talents that are only loosely related to his choice of major.

“What’s your major?” is inevitably one of the very first questions we ask when we meet someone new on campus, especially as prefrosh or freshmen. When the answer is engineering, math or physics, we almost always view him — or less often, her — as an engineer, mathematician or physicist, but we don’t view history or philosophy majors as historians or philosophers, or even as “humanities majors,” but rather as simply “regular” students. Moreover, we don’t even refer to STEM majors specifically — for example, engineers and pre-meds are often referred to by those names alone — and instead choose to fixate on the concept of “STEM major” as a primary identifying characteristic for students majoring in engineering, math or physics. At most schools, the engineering school is a separate, exclusive program that must be applied to specifically, and one cannot simply switch back and forth between the engineering school and the regular school of arts and sciences. This is usually what creates the division between STEM majors and non-STEM majors, as students will often equate STEM with engineering, and those students are practically in a different school that happens to share the same campus.

On the other hand, switching between B.S.E. and A.B. at Princeton is a relatively easy procedure, and many students do so during their freshman and sophomore years, sometimes even multiple times. However, in general, there is still a pretty clear social divide between the B.S.E., math and physics students and the A.B. students. It seems much more common for the engineers, scientists and mathematicians to become relatively self-isolated groups than for humanities and social science majors to do the same — it’s a stereotype on campus that most of the engineers join Charter and work on problem sets together, the math majors are mostly independents, etc. These statements are based mostly on hearsay and stereotypes, but the very existence of those stereotypes means that we are doing something wrong — why is Charter the “engineer” eating club when every other eating club’s stereotype has nothing to do with choice of major? Perhaps we consider engineering to be an extracurricular activity too, as the other eating club stereotypes are mostly based on participation in certain sports or clubs. Since we often define students by their extracurricular pursuits, B.S.E. students end up classified as just engineers, as if engineering is all they do. The physical separation between the engineering buildings and the rest of campus only contributes further to this divide between A.B. and B.S.E. students.

People generally like to associate with similar people, but by having stereotypes based on something as temporal and trivial as one’s college major — after all, it’s the way of thinking, not the actual material, that most of us will end up using on the job — we carve up a diverse student body into rigid divisions. Nowadays, the most obvious of these divisions is between STEM and non-STEM majors, but other, subtler ones exist as well. At a school like Princeton, where the main focus should be on obtaining a “liberal arts education,” these divisions have no place in the campus culture and can only be detrimental to the goal of creating an environment in which students can benefit from the diversity of the student population.

Spencer Shen is a freshman from Houston, Texas. He can be reached at szshen@princeton.edu.