A CS and an English concentrator walk into a bar (or, "A Hopeful Tale")
It was a Wednesday night. I was huddled in the depths of the GCB, nursing a watermelon Pilsner. (This scene would be more poetic if the weather had been stormy and if I had been drinking pretty much anything but a watermelon Pilsner, but alas, as a journalist I must maintain my commitment to the truth.) I was sitting across from a good friend of mine, one who studies CS and had just emerged from his dark cave (at least that's how I imagine it) in which he'd completed 10 hours of coding. There I was, a senior English concentrator, fretting about my thesis and pondering profound things like what I was going to eat for breakfast the next day. Fortunately, this mindset was about to stop, for my friend and I were on the precipice of one of those deep conversations — the kind that sleep deprivation, near-death experiences, and beer seem to induce.
That's when it began. The classic STEM/Humanities moment of "I don't really get what you do." I should start off by saying that although I study English, I was also pre-med for my first two-and-a-half years at Brown. Whether for that reason or by coincidence, I have a lot of friends in STEM fields. They're great people, but sometimes I feel like I haven't had the chance to explain why I study English, why I think it's important, and what I think everyone can get out of it. On the other hand, I am entirely illiterate in CS. But this Wednesday's conversation over watermelon Pilsner was exceptionally productive, especially in light of the gap between humanities and STEM concentrators that seems to exist, at least to some extent, at Brown. I felt like I finally got to communicate the benefits (and drawbacks) of my studies and to explain where I come from as a student in the humanities. Our chat went something like this:FRIEND: I think I'm going to drop this lit course I'm enrolled in.ME: Really? Why? I thought you said you really liked the professor.FRIEND: I do, it's just that I feel like some students in the class are trying to show off all the time, and throw a lot of big words into their comments. Plus, the professor expects you to have opinions on the readings.ME: Huh. Well, you've seriously offended my existence as an English major with that last one.FRIEND: It's just that he'll be like, "Don't you see how this worm evokes the garden of Adam and Eve?" and I'm like no! No, I don't.ME: Okay, but sometimes there are patterns in texts, significant enough so that we can draw conclusions from them. And I'd bet that most writers do think about this stuff. You can tell because they, like you, have studied earlier writers and analyzed texts. So then they start thinking about what goes into a text, and they have this whole background of literary devices to work with. Actually, what I like about poetry especially is that since it's so centered around form, you know that a lot of the choices were intentional, like: that poet decided to put a line break there, or an extra space there.
FRIEND: Huh, yeah, I agree with you on the poetry thing. It is much more obviously intentional.ME (IN MY HEAD): Oh my god I just earned points for poetry with a CS major f*** yeah I'm the best I'm the best I'm the best!!!!!ME (OUT LOUD): Also I can tell you that a lot of students in the humanities, myself included, get really nervous about what they say in class because they feel pressured to make really profound and novel comments. But it's also okay to make blunt comments — in fact, sometimes they help ground the conversation. I actually think you might really like Class X, because the professor who teaches it is really good at getting students from all disciplines to engage with the material, and he runs the class in a much more direct manner than a lot of other lit courses.FRIEND: Hmmm, yeah? I've heard good things, maybe I'll check it out.ME: It's a 9 a.m. though...FRIEND: That's okay! I'll try it anyway.ME (IN MY HEAD): More points for Meghan! I just got Friend, who has the most erratic sleep schedule and is rarely up early, to commit to shopping a 9 a.m....Time passes. Chatter echoes off the walls, weird throw-back music plays, and at the end of the night people try to give away the dregs in their pitchers of 'Gansett. At 1 a.m. the bartenders kick everyone out, and you can almost hear "Closing Time" playing in everybody's head. Then, as we're leaving GCB...FRIEND: Meg, thanks for that conversation.ME: *surprise* The one about English?FRIEND: Yeah, it was really helpful.
TO BE CONTINUED... (hopefully with a conversation that teaches me a little bit about CS)