Walking into the University of California, Berkeley campus, you immediately sense the enormous presence and influence of STEM. Whether it’s the busy halls of the engineering buildings, labs bustling late into the night, or groups of students coding in Doe Library. It doesn’t help that our Engineering and Computer Science majors are some of the most popular majors on our campus. Nonetheless, I don’t want to restate the discontent many humanities majors have of being surrounded by so many STEM majors—that humanities majors are somehow “lesser” in a place famous for its Nobel-winning professors. Though I can resonate with my fellow humanities majors’ concerns, throughout my time at UC Berkeley, I’ve loved how the popularity of STEM programs here has impacted what my professors have chosen to incorporate into their lectures from English to Philosophy classes.
Especially in Philosophy courses, coding and AI is used as an advantage to our studies. Not that my professors encouraged us to use AI to write for us, professors ask students to interrogate the limits of what AI can know—and, crucially, what it can’t through analysis of theories like the Turing Test and the Chinese Room Argument. Through the Art of Writing program at Berkeley, I helped moderate an event that hosted Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist with a background in consciousness philosophy. He helped break down the impacts of the Turing Test now that AI has progressed while also offering insight about the modern effects of social media. I was given this opportunity to moderate through one of the Rhetoric classes here, a testament to how the humanities courses can offer events for students to actively engage with the content they learn in class, reminiscent of laboratory work in STEM classes.
As a Rhetoric major, psychoanalytic theory is often used as a tool to analyze literary texts, so through my studies, I’ve grown familiar with psychology. My coursework frequently draws on concepts from Freud, Lacan, and other psychologists to examine how unconscious motives influence literary characters. We examine repeated images, metaphors, and symbols not just for how they function rhetorically, but also for their psychological significance. By analyzing why certain symbols trigger feelings of anxiety or desire within readers, we can connect a writer’s rhetorical choices to shared human emotions and experiences.
Aside from the coursework, STEM majors are extra popular here at UC Berkeley, but that definitely comes to my advantage. My Rhetoric classes are typically around 20 students per lecture, which makes it especially easy to connect to my professors and feel included in group discussions. My classes are often smaller than even the discussion sections of large STEM courses! I have to say, it makes it a lot easier to become friends with your fellow classmates with classes these small.
The overwhelming popularity of STEM majors surprisingly doesn’t crowd out the humanities. Instead, it offers an opportunity for integration, prompting humanities students to innovate, collaborate, and think more deeply about what it means to be human in a world increasingly shaped by science and technology.