Majors and major pains in the…neck

This past weekend, I had occasion to go camping with several Carnegie Mellon students. Things… This past weekend, I had occasion to go camping with several Carnegie Mellon students. Things were cordial and I had a good time with them. However, six beers apiece later, I suddenly decided to get something off of my chest.

“You know, you Carnegie Mellon kids do too much damn homework. You don’t know how to have any fun,” or at least it might have sounded like that, I kind of forget.

A friend of mine from CMU instantly responded with something like “Well, you won’t be having much fun when you are pumping my gas some day.” Touche, my friend.

Still, I managed to brush off her insult; it isn’t anything I haven’t heard before.

On this campus, and on campuses all over the world, there is a massive and unaddressed prejudice that exists amongst the student body. This discrimination is not based on anything as obvious as political affiliation, or as inflammatory as race. The prejudice I want to talk about is the one between science majors and pretty much everyone else.

You probably know at least one example of the kind of person I am talking about – they go to great ends to distinguish themselves. It is that guy or girl who will rip out your soul and spit on you for complaining about the 100 pages of reading you need to do for class. Their retort will be formulaic, swift and devastating.

“OH YEAH?! I have 84 hours of physics/biology/math/chemistry/computer/engineering homework due tomorrow and then I have a lab and a test and a problem set and a graph and a robot due the day after that. You have no right to complain, fairy boy.”

Geez. OK. At any rate, the disrespect is real, and it is there if you know where to look for it. It is in snide comments my science-majoring friends make about me having to find a real major and their over-simplification of the work I have to do.

I forget who it was, but some science major once told me that the hardest thing I have to do is go for a walk in the park and then write a paper about it. Another told me what I do is useless and a drain on society.

But once again, their argument suffers from a lack of thought. English majors, and, really, writers in general, write the shows they watch on television and the movies they skip doing homework to go out and see. We compose the lyrics of the songs they hum along to, and, yes, we probably pump their gas and serve them coffee when they visit Starbucks.

The truth is that we all have a lot of work to do, just of a different kind. Doing 14 hours of computer work will not help a religious studies major figure out his beliefs, nor will it help a studio arts major produce her greatest work. There are so many worthy majors at this college, and the only ones I don’t respect are the ones whose students do not enjoy what they are doing.

The anthropology majors, the history majors, the German majors -very few of us liberal arts people are going to enter into professions where we are well paid. But I would argue that while you science people are in some cubicle in 10 years, leading a life not that different from “Office Space,” we will be the ones with awesome jobs.

Sure, we will live in our studio apartments with 19 other ex-liberal art majors, but our lives will be artsy and meaningful, and we will have lots of artsy, meaningful sex.

Nobody can really say which profession or major is the right one, because it is different for everyone. To quote “Family Guy:” “This is life, so have a ball. Because the world don’t move to the beat of just one drum, what might be right for you might not be right for some.”

Maybe we are all busy looking for the truth on this hunk of silicon called Earth, oblivious to everything else as we spin through time and space, nothing more than mere blips on some divine radar screen.

And it pisses the hell out of me when one blip gets arrogant and dismisses the work and struggles of another blip. Blips who believe that they alone struggle and have problems are showing their own immaturity and lack of intelligence. Empathy and understanding are two traits which successful people have in abundance.

And now if you will excuse me, I have a homework assignment which requires me to go out and run naked through Schenley park and then compose haiku about it.

Sam Morey would like to thank the nine people who sent him e-mails last week praying for his soul. To send him more, e-mail him at smorey88@hotmail.com.