Waking up at 10 a.m. for my 11:15 a.m. German class every morning with my roommate long gone has already become an established norm of my collegiate life. As a humanities student, walking up and down the Rabb steps for some daily cardio and diving into 50 pages of archaic English that make me doubt my language skills is how my days go by. One day, while doing the HWL-1 Campus Scavenger Hunt, I was trying to find the new location of the International Students and Scholars Office in the Gerstenzang Science Library and entered the wrong building under Google Maps’ guidance. I thought I entered the backrooms for a second — the blurry orange afternoon sunlight enveloped the hallways with a foreign sense of nostalgia. Restricted access signs, eye wash stations and unknown apparatuses faded this comforting sense of coziness. 

The huge difference in class time, architecture, atmosphere and lifestyle is only the tip of the iceberg of the divergent experiences of STEM students and humanities students at Brandeis. “As a student that has explored the STEM and humanities side, there are multiple instances that show cross-connecting and juxtaposing workloads and class action,” Andrew Wong-Than ’30 shared. He also points out the prominence of “technical theory and memorization” and the heavy workload of labs on the STEM side, while highlighting that humanities courses incorporate a lot more discussion-based activities and focus on the exchanging of different ideas rather than a traditional, memorization-heavy approach. He also highlighted that humanities reflect on societal mistakes we made in the past and change for the future through retrospection. In STEM, we study technical flaws from our past discoveries to invent something brand new. Together, they are both equally important to our world. Anushri Mishra ’30, who expressed interest in sharing their STEM experience, also echoed Wong-Than’s comments on the heavy technical workload. Unfortunately, the author was not able to obtain a formal account from Mishra. In fact, the very reason that they were unable to provide a detailed account of their experience was due to a heavy lab workload.

Madeline Hyman ’30, who intends to major in English with a journalism minor, shared her experience with anthropology and environmental sciences: “I am fascinated by how these fields overlap. While the latter is data-driven and the former relies on a creative, humanistic approach, both are ultimately about observing how we observe. They teach us how humans perceive and adapt to their surroundings to construct real-world solutions based on imagination and constant evolution of thought.” Pia Daliana ’27, a Math and Anthropology double major, shares, “My anthropology classes do require a lot of work in terms of readings and understanding and participation in class, but the brute force that I have to get through one of my math classes is just not comparable.” Daliana highlights that certain undergraduate math courses are taught by graduate students compared to humanities courses that are mostly taught by actual professors. This has made the learning experience more difficult, as grad students are not trained and experienced in teaching the same way that an actual professor would be. Ian Chen ’27, a History major, while in conversation with Daliana, highlights that within humanities majors there are niche differences and approaches as well. They share that, “I’m a historian, and I do a lot of political philosophy. Those are things that require a lot of close reading. But it is a very different kind of reading than what you’re doing in your English classes. I think that if you really want to get things out of your English classes, you can get through English classes very easily. You can be like, ‘Oh, blah, blah, blah, I think the themes are this,’ whatever you can get through, then you can get an A very easily. That’s not the same thing, I think, as studying the text. I think those are very different … like, take an English class that I find interesting; that’s not the same thing as going into this class being like, I want to academically study Shakespeare. Those are different approaches … not everyone who is a humanities major is going to be seriously studying humanities, because the humanities also have a lot of applicable skills in stuff like market research.”

Overall, from my own perspective and experiences, black-and-white comparisons of the difference between STEM students’ and humanities students’ experiences are ultimately not productive and lack nuance. As many of my peers highlighted, STEM and humanities are not enemies but complement each other in their ways of understanding the world and ourselves. Many questions science is concerned with, such as time and space, may spark the interest of a philosopher who studies metaphysics. A new type of technology may trigger a whole set of social changes — seen in history through the Industrial Revolution — that may catch the eye of a sociologist or a historian. It doesn’t matter what we study; what matters is how we use what we study to understand the world around us.