I once took a course called “Intro to engineering”. In one of the first classes, the professor started asking us why we decided to study engineering. The predominant answer in the room was along the lines of “I’m good at math, I’m not good at writing.”
As I sit up late at night struggling over yet another chapter of incomprehensible, quantitative jargon I am tempted to believe that I could have succeeded in the liberal arts for the exact same reason. Writing, the art of crafting ideas and emotions into pages of eloquent prose, has always been one of my strengths and pleasures. And I’m not good at math. Not good with equations, not good with courses that are entirely based on them.
So why did I choose the path I’m on? If I think I could have excelled in English, why did I not take a single course (other than the writing seminar which, by the way, I aced) in the subject? I’ve always believed that non-science courses were useless. By the same token, I have always believed that if I could master those equations, figures and tables, I could call my college experience a success.
After four years, I have learned an important lesson. You can’t fit the square peg of science into the round hole of a liberal-arts minded brain. Although mussar teaches us that a man’s greatest accomplishment is when he learns to conquer those middot which are naturally most challenging to him, I don’t believe that this is true in the realm of worldly skills. God puts everyone on this Earth with a purpose and a mission. Say a man is endowed with certain strengths. If he neglects those strengths, and pursues a vocation which relies on skills which he does not possess, what good does it do? Who is he serving, himself or his God? Is this man doing something noble? I don’t think so.
I wish I could be a great scientist. But I think I’m going to have to settle for being a great me.
