your Sunday read 24th November, 2024

A well-researched original piece to get you thinking.

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Thumbnail Credits: Erhabor Emokpae, Struggle between Life and Death, oil on 2canvas board

Hey Scholar👋

Forgive the controversial statement but:

Disagree with that statement? Me too, though I'm ashamed to say its a rather recent change in my opinion.

Grab a beverage and your reading glasses, let's get thinking.

STEM Vs The Rest - can’t we all just get along

- Written by The Tatler

Hi, my name is The Tatler, and I'm a recovering STEM elitist. When academic life gets tough, some academics turn to alcohol. But me? My preferred coping mechanism was to savour (to revel in) my elevated status as a STEM PhD student. While I perched on a hard plastic stool for 14 hours a day, peering down a microscope, it was comforting to know that, as sucky as my situation was, at least I wasn't in the social sciences (or, God forbid, the arts or humanities). Eventually, even this comfort was not enough to soothe my tired mind and aching buttocks. I quit.

To be honest, it was only days after officially starting the PhD that a small voice in my mind started to wonder if this was what I wanted my career to look like.

The exact reasons that eventually pushed me to leave are less important than the question of why exactly I stuck it out as long as I did.

I told myself, my parents, and my colleagues that I wanted to give it a proper chance, to not give up too easily, and really give it a good go. Looking back three years later, it pains me to admit there was another, less noble reason.

A large majority seem to agree that STEM is the only research worth funding, the only research that actually contributes meaningfully to society, and the only research that will guarantee progress.

Not to sound like a crank, but that sounds kinda cultish.

This narrative is easy to believe (it may seem indisputable) when 80% of jobs in the next decade will require STEM skills. And isn't it true that many of the things that make our lives easier, healthier, more prosperous have come from STEM?

In writing this piece, I wondered where the seed of this STEM-is-superior attitude that had so charmed me came from. It seemed to have been there my whole life—a doctrine that I had believed unquestioningly. These recent government white papers, while not the source of my own prejudices, certainly give insight into how the attitudes are perpetuated.

• This “framework for cultivating the full continuum of STEM education and talent development as a national priority” in the US.

• The UK Government's motivation to become a Science and Technology Superpower “is simple: science and technology will be the major driver of prosperity, power and history-making events this century”

And the wider societal results (ranging from mild to horrific) are these:

1. High school students are choosing Arts and Humanities less compared to 10 years ago, and more students are exclusively taking STEM subjects.

2. (Reddit: caught in the wild) Doing STEM ensures better job prospects (duh):

3. (Instagram: caught in the wild) “Humanities are less rigorous” stereotype:

4. (caught in the wild) seriously, dude, who hurt you?

I'm not proud to think that, at one point, I would have silently agreed with some of these more unsavoury viewpoints. The irony is not lost on me that the reasons that eventually led me to quit were cravings, desires for spending more of my time doing activities that are traditionally associated with “softer” subjects and less time producing objective, quantifiable results from carefully controlled experiments.

Without time for questioning the nature of knowledge ("silly" questions like how do I know what I know? How do I know that what I can see is true?), reading about my topic and, as it turns out, writing, my research experience felt bland. One-dimensional. Unfulfilling.

I'm not sure how universal this is, but every single PhD student and Postdoc I met during my two years in research laboratories saw writing as a chore. Senior PhDs spent their write-up years producing yet more data in the lab and bemoaning how difficult it was to write their thesis.

Reading articles was a similar struggle: one colleague stumbled across a paper that significantly overlapped with their thesis four months before they were due to submit. How could that have happened? They simply had not been keeping up with their field. Silly guy, right? Wrong. It seems pretty clear where we can lay the blame for this:

we do not take seriously enough, assign time to, or simply value the tasks of writing, reading, and thinking in STEM as much as we should.

It's possible reading and writing wouldn't be chores, and we might even be better at it, if we valued what the so-called “softer” subjects contribute to knowledge production.

If you saw this week's Keeping It Real section in the 🍎Academic FYP edition of The Scholarly Letter, then forgive me for repeating myself: there are multiple, perhaps even complementary, ways to reach understanding. We'd do well to remember (or, at least, I would have done better had I not forgotten) that art and science are just two sides of the same coin.

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