I'm sitting at a shady picnic table in front of Tresidder Union, surveying today's career fair. Computer hardware firms line the paths to my left. Software company representatives huddle under their umbrellas straight ahead. To my right, management consultants talk signing bonuses like NFL recruiters.
I have to agree with the friend who says, "You come here and immediately think that these are the only jobs there are." Here in the heart of Silicon Valley, as we hear 16 times a day, the career fair is one more blow to me and my fellow liberal arts majors.
It's not that I don't like computers. I once tried to use a typewriter to write a grade-school paper. I should have just carved my essay on three-ton sandstone tablets -- it would have been easier. I'm not opposed to money, either. The newspapers I write for pay me, and I pay Helming's Auto Repair to get my car back. But I wonder about those students who, drawn by dollar signs or pressured into studying something "useful" or pre-professional, suppress their interests in the humanities, arts, theoretical sciences or public service.
The tug-of-war between the liberal arts and practical education isn't new. I recall a high school teacher relating what his grandmother said to him when he announced his chosen major: "What are you going to do, make history for a living?" Fortunately, I've been blessed with parents (a political science major and a communication major) who told me to study whatever I wanted -- they think that I should enjoy college, and are confident I'll be successful in whatever I choose. That's what their parents told them, too.
Not only have I found my own fascinating academic path as a history and American studies major, I've managed to spend several quarters editing the Daily and just finished a year as trumpet section leader of the Band. Though I've been admonished by professors to sleep more at night and less in their classes, I've been able, given the freedom to go my own way, to stay pretty relaxed most of the time.
But too many of my friends get stressed-out trying to live up to someone else's expectations, or coping with needless anxieties of their own. "My parents wanted me to be pre-med," says one, who is now working for the University. "I even took Bio 31 twice -- getting a C twice -- to keep them happy, took the MCAT and applied to 20 med schools."
Another, a biology major, told me: "I feel like I would be 'wasting' my Stanford education if I got a job in a biotech company or decided to teach instead of going to grad school or med school. I think it's a self-inflicted pressure, though -- my parents have pretty much told me to study whatever I want."
There can be pressure from the University, too. One friend, a junior majoring in Slavic languages and literatures, recalls what the teaching assistant said at the first small-section meeting of Introduction to Economics, a class for which students actually have to do very little math.
"He tells us that he thinks engineers have what it takes to do well in his class," she says. "And I don't? Just because I have chosen to dedicate myself to the humanities for the past three years suddenly means that I didn't finish two years of calculus in high school?"
Then, she says, "he tells these impressionable freshmen that there is a hierarchy of academics: you start with physics, and if you can't cut it in physics, you drop into engineering, and if you can't cut it there, you drop down into biology and chemistry, and if you still can't make it, you drop down to statistics and economics. If you can't cut it there, you fall to social sciences, and after that, it's all the same fuzzy s---. . . . I really wanted to stand up and punch the guy."
The truth is that Stanford graduates tend to be fantastically successful in whatever they choose to do. We demonstrated that even before we arrived: as high school students we all participated in band, sports, student government, math team, knowledge bowl, scouting and National Honor Society while pulling a 4.0 GPA in AP and honors classes -- in order to get into Stanford. And it's true that those companies at the career fair are happy to pay the newly minted Stanford grad a lot of money. If those jobs were really what I wanted to do, sure, I'd take $50,000 a year, worldwide travel and a company car.
However, as my friend in Econ I puts it, she didn't come to one of the finest educational institutions in the world to learn how to get a BMW and have a bunch of money under her belt the year after she graduates. "There are people out there who truly love crunching numbers," she says, "and there are people out there who want to become doctors so they can save the world. But as for those who do things just for money's sake, I hope they learn to live life before it's over."
For a start, let them pursue what they're really interested in doing. Things will work out. After all, Einstein's parents probably weren't thrilled when he quit the Swiss patent office
Evan Nordby is a senior from Bainbridge Island, Wash.
