The Vine: July 11, 2002
Dear Sars,
I felt just like Go Back for four years when I went through B.S., round one. My undergraduate institution sucked the joy of science right out of me. But I was able to renew the joy, and didn’t have to give up science after all!
I did all the things you mentioned (all excellent suggestions, of course). However, one thing that surprised me at the time, was that none of the academic advising office couselors at my university had a clue as to what it is/was like to be a science major (they were B.A. liberal arts degree holders, a degree with very different challenges certainly). As a long-time science major and budding scientist, I can offer some tips that’ve helped me bring back the joy.
1) Find a study group, preferrably with other people in your major. These people can also provide a social life. Hours of homework don’t seem so bad if you’re spending these hours with your friends. Think of it as diminishing the suffering by sharing it.
2) As soon as possible, find out about undergraduate research opportunities in your department, or related departments (I started when I was a sophomore). Find a research group with people you like; consider approaching a professor whose class you enjoyed. At this point, enjoying the company of the people in the group is likely to be more important than whatever the actual research is. You may find you like the research, but more importantly, you may find you do not, which means you can quickly eliminate it from your list of career interests. It is possible that you will learn more science in this manner than from any of your classes. You can earn credits for these activities, or get paid (instant summer job!).
3) Related to #2, find out if your department or college has a mentoring program. They can pair you with senior undergrad or grad students who know how it is. (Joining a research group pretty much gives you an instant mentoring community, though.)
4) If at all possible, limit your credit hours to around 12-15. In fact, if you have the flexibility to do so, consider alternating half-time, full-time between semesters. Will it take more than four years to graduate? Yes. But you get to keep your sanity and enjoy your work. Oh, and you know, have a life. So many people these days take five or more years to graduate that it’s no longer really an issue. And it’s better to take longer and be an A student than graduate in three years with straight Cs.
5) Related to #4, as a science major, your primary time suck is classes with labs. The hours you spend in lab prevent you from doing other important things, and frankly never struck me as an equitable trade off in credit hours. Try to limit the number of classes with labs to one per semester (two if you have to). If you find yourself limited in your choices from your department in a given semester by using this method, consider taking more math or computer science classes. As a scientist, you can’t have too many of those.
6) Find a non-science interest. I’ve found nothing helps maintain sanity like not thinking about science for awhile. It keeps the bodies from piling up in the lab. Do you have an interest in fine arts or languages? Take at least one non-science class per semester if you’re attending full time. I took so many philosophy classes they thought I was a major. I also got a minor out of it.
The summary is, there is hope. Remember that if it were easy, everyone would do it.
Kindergarten sucks too, it just sucks differently
Dear Sucks Too,
Good advice. A lot of people bite off way more than they can chew during the first year of university and make their lives unmanageable; these hints might help Go Back manage a bit better.
Sars,
I’d second everything you said to Go Back regarding getting her head together/priorities in order. I’d only add a couple of things. I offer this as 1) someone who had essentially the same experience my first year of college, and 2) someone who teaches at a university now.
There are a couple of hard truths at play here that Go Back would be ill-advised to ignore. Firstly, college just ain’t high school. The rule of the day is not to make sure she or anyone else feels comfortable in her academic pursuits. I went to a school affiliated with a major teaching hospital and highly esteemed med school. They didn’t give a rusty rat’s arse if you came to college loving chemistry and biology. You had to jump through the hoops of a couple of gargantuan weed-out classes to pass muster. If you couldn’t, all the better — fewer upper-division students to tend to. Go Back really needs to make some decisions about what’s important to her in the long haul, while considering whether the hoops in the immediate future are worth it.
The second bit of advice is something that I didn’t really take to heart ’til I was well into grad school: the only person responsible for your education is you. I’d type that again for emphasis, but then you’d have to edit more. This is a corollary to the first bit (that this isn’t high school). Either you take responsibility for your education, with all that implies — what to take, what you put into it, what you want out of it, how you prioritize — or you don’t. Having done the latter, I strongly recommend the former. I know this seems facile and simplistic, but the longer I teach, the more honest I’m having to get with myself regarding the abilities (and role) of a teacher; much as any student might like it to be otherwise, the responsibility doesn’t lie on the prof.
So, if Go Back wants to study science, fine. Study science, and good luck. But to make that decision, some serious (and seriously honest) thinking needs to happen. If this is what’s in store, is it worth it? I hate sounding like I’m saying “the ends have to justify the means,” since I’m a huge advocate of knowledge for its own sake, but if Go Back is passive about this, s/he’s not only going to lose the love of the subject matter, but self-respect, health, well-being, and rest of the college experience will suffer. Trust me on this.
Been There, Done That
Dear Been There,
You know, I considered mentioning that, at the college level, a lot of the science courses first-years take exist partly to separate the wheat from the chaff — but then I dismissed it as too harsh.
Doesn’t mean it’s not true, though. College is a time to try things and see how they go, and to ditch them if they don’t work out, because you have more room to do that as a uni student than you will later in life, but you do have to actually ditch the things that don’t work out instead of forcing yourself to follow a course of study because that’s What You Did in high school. You have to start ruling stuff out. I didn’t love acknowledging that I’d make a sucky reporter, but it needed acknowledging, and once I stopped trying to jam myself into that role, I felt a lot better.
If Go Back wants to stick with the sciences, I suppose she’ll have to sack up and try to get through it, but everything about it is making her miserable, and the reason I advised her to see a counselor is that I don’t think she’s in a space where she sees her options clearly — related fields she might like to study instead, ways to massage the workload a bit, and so on. Yeah, it’s kind of “high-school” to expect someone else to tell her what to do, but she needs a third-party opinion — and I don’t entirely agree that it’s not the institution’s job to attend to her academic comfort. Strictly speaking, a university is a business, and Go Back is a customer. Yes, she needs to assess the situation and choose a path like an adult, but the school has a responsibility to see that she doesn’t drown and to give her a little help in that department if she asks for it.
Off-topic just slightly — my mother still goes around saying that she doesn’t know what she wants to do when she grows up. A charming way to come at it, I think. Not knowing exactly where to go with your life doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve gotten lost.
Sars,
After years of reading I finally have a question of my own to pose to you.
What is the proper etiquette for keeping photos from past relationships? My current boyfriend and I have some that are quite, ahem, explicit of him and a past girlfriend. Should we toss them? Burn them? Snicker over them? We really are not sure what should be done with them, so we decided to ask for an opinion and to abide by it, even though we are sickos and are enjoying the photos.
Shutterbug
Dear Shutterbug,
The polite thing is probably for your boyfriend to get in touch with his ex and offer them back to her; if she declines, and asks him to destroy them, throw them on the George Foreman and consider that the end of it.
The human thing, on the other hand, is to keep them and continue pointing and laughing. I mean, let’s face it — other people’s butts? Funny.
There’s a karma issue here, though. How would you feel if you knew an ex of yours not only still had pictures of you two doing the Posturepedic polka, but spent Sunday nights snerking at them with his new girlfriend? Best to chuck them, probably.
Sars —
This question goes months back to your usage column. I am a newly minted lawyer, which means: 1) I get up much earlier than I used to; 2) I wear a tie more; 3) I get yelled at more; and 4) I write more — lots more. In fact, much of the yelling is related to the quality of what I write.
I already have The Elements of Style; other than that, is there a specific dictionary and usage guide you recommend?
Law Talkin’ Guy
Dear Guy,
My personal Bible is Bryan Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage. Garner is a legal-writing maven by trade, so you might want to pick up a few of his other tomes too (he edited the latest edition of Black’s, so he’s got the chops).
Since you’ve already got a shopping cart open at Amazon, throw in the Chicago Manual of Style — many people prefer the MLA, but it’s aimed more at newspaper journalists, I think, and the Chicago Manual is more accessible. Also, pick up the latest edition of the Webster’s Collegiate and/or the OED Condensed if you don’t already have a standard dictionary.
Still hungry? William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, heavily inspired by E.B. White, is an excellent reader for writers of all levels. My high school forced us to read it once a year, and I’ve kept up that habit.
If you really want to go off the deep end with the writing reference books, read this.
[7/11/02]
Tags: boys (and girls) etiquette grammar workplace
