<p>I’m a junior at Stanford, and perhaps you can guess from my username that I’m an EE major. Like nearly everyone at Stanford, my friends come from everywhere on the spectrum of techie to fuzzy. I also think that many of the experiences people described of “mocking people’s majors” is much more tongue in cheek than anything. For instance one person was at a career fair, and suggested it smelled because there were lots of engineers there. I didn’t take that as an insult, I found it funny and, more than slightly true. I would like to make one point that I feel no one has discussed yet here:</p>
<p>I believe much of the condescension techie majors have towards fuzzy majors is because required courses here are definitely skewed to the advantage of humanities oriented students. There’s 3 quarters of IHUM, 2 qtrs PWR, an additional Humanities requirement, an additional Social Sciences requirement, 2 education for citizenship and 1 year of world language. Contrast that with just having to take one “math” class one “science” class and one “engineering” class. I put those in quotes since everyone who wants to get rid of the requirement easily knows which classes to take (such as stats 60, cs 105, etc) and honestly these courses are barely at the high school level in terms of difficulty, let alone Stanford level. While I agree that there are some easy ways to get rid of some of the fuzzy requirements theres no backdoor when it comes to IHUM and you have to be lucky to backdoor your way around PWR. This naturally builds resentment amongst some techies since simply by virtue of requirements its easier on humanities majors. </p>
<p>One of my closest friends in an English major. If it were her choice she would never take a techie course in college. Just as, if it were my choice, I would never take a class that required me to write papers or read long texts in college. While I would say we are pretty extreme as far as Stanford students go, I also believe both desires are perfectly reasonable. It has nothing to do with viewing those classes as useless, but those domains simply aren’t where our interests lie.</p>
<p>On another related note, I DO believe it is a widespread view on campus that techie majors are more difficult (not as widespread that those majors are more useful however) than fuzzy majors. I would say my fuzzy friends are the first to be like oh wow you major in EE that’s so tough. I hear that at Princeton, part of the reason grade deflation was implemented was so no one would be at a disadvantage, grading wise, when it came to picking their major. I’m not saying that we should have such a policy at Stanford. However I do think that the fact that a more humanities focused school like Princeton suggested that humanities majors were more lenient than others raises some serious questions.</p>
<p>Finally, I find it sort of a joke that people here think certain majors are more marketable than others. I know I used to feel that way as a freshman, and maybe first qtr sophomore year, but truly speaking as long as your major teaches you how to think critically you should be fine in the job search. Yale for instance is very skewed towards the humanities, yet their graduates don’t seem to have trouble finding jobs. I mean sure an English major probably can’t be a software engineer without taking CS classes, but its not as if there aren’t other employers out there besides Google and Facebook (which by the way hire humanities majors for other operations important for their business, such as marketing for instance) </p>
<p>For more on this topic I believe the Stanford Review wrote a three article sequence on the humanities at Stanford. It was pretty interesting and you should be able to find it online.</p>