Emily Crighton
Editor-in-Chief
We’ve all heard about STEM; Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. STEM is where the jobs, the big paychecks and the fate of the universe as we know it are. We hear it all the time – we need more people in STEM. I agree, but we need more people in the arts too.
I’ve been lucky enough to work for the College of Science and Engineering as a graphic design intern for over a year now, and I will be the first to tell you how incredible the work that people in STEM fields are doing is. I’m amazed daily, and I fully realize the importance of what is being done all around me. However, I have a bone to pick with STEM, or rather the way our society treats it.
Science and math classes are being pushed while art and music classes are being cut. As pointed out by an article in the New York Times, a Kentucky governor went as far as to suggest that French literature students should not receive state funding to pursue their degrees.
Encouraging young minds to explore fields in STEM fields is something I will always support, but I cannot agree with discouraging students from exploring other options as well.
What much of our society has yet to embrace is this – science and art are not mutually exclusive, and we need both.
Perhaps as someone still under the umbrella of the university I see the world through rose-colored glasses. My fiancé is a physics major, and I’ve come to terms with the fact that I will probably not be the one reeling in the dough in the relationship. I acknowledge that from where I’m sitting it’s easy to preach following your dreams.
My mom holds a bachelor’s degree in religion. She worked a variety of jobs and was a stay-at-home mom for several years. When my parent’s marriage began to fail she went back to school to become a registered nurse to support my brother and me. Her hard work is one of the reasons I have the ability to follow my passions and, in turn, is one of the reasons I don’t take following those dreams lightly.
I remember feeling ashamed to tell friends and family I was going to school to be a graphic designer. Graduating in the tenth percentile of my high school class, I couldn’t help but feel like I was somehow wasting my potential with a liberal arts degree.
I feared my time working at the College of Science and Engineering would reaffirm my nagging feelings of inadequacy. Instead, I found that being so closely involved with these fields helped me realize the importance of my own in a way I hadn’t been able to see in the past.
Last year for the annual newsletter, I had the opportunity to interview some seriously amazing STEM majors. As a writer, I told their stories to donors who provide invaluable scholarships to STEM majors. As a designer, I create content inviting high school students to investigate STEM. Last year we put on Bengal STEM Day, an event that brought almost 800 high school and junior high students to ISU to learn more about these programs. I made invitations, maps, schedules and signs to tell them where to go.
STEM is great, but we need everyone else, too.
Here’s my bottom line: I am tired of the cliché of the unemployable art major. There are jobs in journalism. There are jobs for artists, historians and linguists, and those jobs shape the world too.
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