For the past month I’ve been working on a secret project; but yesterday I submitted it and I’m ready to share. I am excited to announce that I am participating this year in the Grey Wolf Non-Fiction Contest 2020. They requested memoirs that would be submitted in a new and unique format; so, I submitted a manuscript in progress that alternated between narratives and researched pieces surrounding my experiences in life. The manuscript is currently called ‘The Millennial’ and looks to close the gaps of understanding and misinformation between millennials and other generations who seem to misunderstand us as a group of people. So today I wanted to share one of the essays that I included in my submission about the history and rise of demand for STEM in the millennial generation.

In 2001, the STEM initiative was introduced into schools across the United States; STEM, standing for science, technology, engineering, and math, was the forefront of learning, education standards, and what employers were supposedly looking for. At the time, I was in first grade and I remember hearing things along the lines of; “singing is great, but you need to pick an actual profession”, “drawing is a wonderful hobby but you need to pick something STEM related to be taken seriously”, and “I know you like reading, but you can do so much better”. 

At the time I was avidly involved in a local non-profit singing and dancing organization, read every chance I got, drew almost every day, and loved writing and creating stories. However, from an early age, I got the idea stuck in my head that I wouldn’t make money and I wouldn’t be “successful” unless I chose an “actual profession”. 

It wasn’t until 2016, my junior year of college, that an ‘A’ was added to the acronym by the author John Maeda, changing it from STEM to STEAM. STEAM recognized the importance and significant value of the arts in addition to science, technology, engineering, and math. Adding the ‘A’ began awarding arts its own level of importance in education across the board and changed how the arts were viewed from a professional standpoint. Unfortunately by 2016 I was only one year away from graduating with my Bachelors of Science and had far too many years of grooming for me to believe that I could actually have a successful profession that was not a STEM career.

I am also not the only person who feels a bit cheated by the system, I was reading an article from The Daily Evergreen, a student run newspaper for Washington State University about how the separation of art and STEM affects students, their futures, and their abilities to learn. This was said by Norah McCabe, an associate professor and advisor for the microbiology department “We have many freshmen come to college [who] want to be STEM majors — not because they’re passionate about the topic but because that’s what they’ve been told to study,” McCabe said “They’ve been told to get a STEM degree for the money, and that’s sad. The truth is, if you compare salaries from STEM and non-STEM majors just out of college, you will barely see a difference.” 

Aside from the clear misnomer about people in STEM fields making significantly more than people in the arts, there is also a misconception that the arts won’t help you in STEM and vice versa. The truth is that understanding the arts and having a creative spark is extraordinarily helpful in STEM fields and having a logical and methodical way of thinking can be a great asset to being successful in the arts. When I was in college, I was considered an amalgam; here I was, this STEM student who could keep up in research labs, take difficult science classes, and sort data with the best of them all while being a personable and friendly individual whose public speaking and writing skills were up there along with the arts students. 

People in the sciences have a reputation for not being able to communicate effectively, and why is that? Because they’ve never been taught to. When you remove the piece of learning that has to do with interpersonal skills and creativity, you create someone who only knows how to function within a specific set of parameters.

I never truly understood why I felt like I needed to defend my involvement in the arts as a hobby or why I felt the need to specify that specific science classes were “the hard ones” in comparison to any of my arts classes I took. I can see now that all I was doing was repeating the rhetoric that I was fed elementary school through college. Be successful, arts are fun for hobbies but not realistic career options, and things along those lines.

Additionally, somewhere between when I started going to elementary school in 2001 and when I graduated from high school in 2013, schools started pushing college for everyone as the primary option. 2001 was also the year that the “No Child Left Behind” Act was passed; raising the importance of academic testing as the primary tell of how well schools were teaching their students. And while the intentions were good, standardized tests began to leave more children behind than before. I want to say that this act, in conjunction with the emphasis on STEM, and pushing for college, all collectively created the atmosphere I grew up in and that persevered well until I was already in college. 

When I was in high school, people would ask me what my plan for the future was and my response was always college, then probably grad school, not because I knew exactly what I wanted to do but rather because that’s what was expected of me. It seemed to be the norm that you would apply to college, switch your major a couple times, and figure out what you wanted to do after you got there. In hindsight, that just seems like the worst possible way to move forward with higher education; especially with how expensive it has gotten. We probably shouldn’t be asking the question of “what do you want to major in?” before we ask the question, “what do you want to do?”

Racking up thousands and thousands of dollars of student loan debt just to get a degree that might not even help you get where you want to go in life is absurd. I was having a conversation with someone once and they asked me what my plan was for the next couple years. My response was not an abnormal one, but it elicited a strange reaction. When I responded by telling her that I was going to try and go to grad school, she just asked me, why? I didn’t really have an answer for her, I liked school, and I had been told that the more education you get, the higher you get paid, but I didn’t really have a specific plan in mind. After I told her that, she gave me one of the most valuable pieces of advice that anyone has ever given me. “Don’t get a degree unless it will do one of two things. One, allow you to get a job that you wouldn’t be able to get otherwise. Or two, will allow you to get a promotion and pay raise in a job that you already have. There is no other reason to go into that much debt.”

Nowadays, schools are beginning to understand that college isn’t the best option for everyone. Before it became more of a status symbol it was just training for the job that you wanted to do. There is nothing wrong with learning just for the sake of learning but learning for the sake of learning and racking up thousands and thousands of dollars of debt in the process? Not so smart. Nothing about having a piece of paper stating that you took certain classes makes you better than anyone else. Looking down on professions like plumbing, carpentry, and electricians just because they do not require a college degree is both classist and ignorant. But regardless, as children we were told things all the time like “make sure you study and do well in school or you’ll end up working as a garbage man.”

Society literally can’t function without all professions and types of people doing what they do best, so to look down on someone or a certain profession because they didn’t spend thousands on dollars on an education, while still expecting and demanding the service they provide is hypocritical. 

I understand that change works like a pendulum; first we are trying to focus more on science, then focus more on arts. First college, then trade schools, and so on; but I just wonder from time to time if I hadn’t grown up in the time that I did, if I would have chosen a different degree, a different path, or a different profession.