My major and academic experience thus far is a joke

I miss the hard sciences. I always liked math and science, and I was fairly good at them. But it's been three years since I've done a calculus problem, and longer than that since I did anything science-related at all. I thought I had the right idea. We were all told in high school that no one knew the English language anymore -- that writing had become a lost art. Here I was thinking I was doing the right thing, getting involved in the humanities. And now, I'm here lost in a crowd of soulless dumbass humanities students, discussing god-knows-what with the end product being a whole shitload of nothing.

At the end of the day, that's what bothers me most. Someone who's a math major can have a sheaf of papers with completed problems or proofs. Someone who's a chemistry major can have a lab report, based on a real experiment where you actually were personally involved in carrying it out. What do I get? A bunch of brackets and underlining in some book about the internal politics surrounding Harry Truman's budget battles? A whole lot of nothing. Not only that, but then I have to participate in a discussion of that whole lot of nothing, and listen to idiots try to make something... out of nothing.

I like to think of humanities being on a plane -- there's in infinite number of things you can read/write/think about, and indeed a lot of it is interesting. But what you read in PSC 003 (Intro to International Politics) is just as comprehensible as something I'm reading now in my Honors ESIA Senior Seminar -- it's on the same plane. By building up a "background" in whatever topic, you're really just focusing your energy on one part of the same plane -- often unnecessarily.

With math and science, I feel like it's linear learning. You learn something, you progress down a structured path, getting to things that are more complicated while still being forced to know all the basic stuff. You can't understand Taylor or Mclauren series without understanding basic concepts of algebra. Conversely, I can forget everything I learned in PSC 003 and still be able to pull out an A in my senior seminar.

This is, I feel, the essence of why I am so upset. I could completely disregard every course I took freshman and sophomore year. I had plenty of good courses (my proseminars with O'Gara and Winstead come to mind). And even with those courses, they were philosophy, which is totally useful in underpinning an argument. But mostly, I don't have to remember a damned thing about what I learned in my early classes. So why the hell was I here? Why did I waste my time?

Furthermore, now everyone is part of my major. Where I thought, in high school, that getting into humanities was something that our society needed, now I'm adrift in a sea of oblivious humanities students who can all talk better than I can, and will therefore get all the jobs for which I would even be able to apply. Not only that, but we as a country are brimming with these touchy-feely assholes, and now we're in dire need of people who actually know how to build infrastructure, develop new technology, and keep the scientific revolution rolling. I feel like humanities programs just cultivate people who can just bullshit their way around whatever screening process is in place. No real knowledge is required. And no real product results. I have the real knowledge, but I'm not very good at convincing people that I do. And in humanities, that's all that matters -- being able to convince people of things.

And now it's too late. It's taken me three years to realize that I miss math! And I miss science! I miss structure, and rules... theorems, axioms, processes. I'm sick of bullshitting. I'm sick of talking. I'm sick of reading. And I'm horrified that when I get out into the real world, knowledge of the collegial model of presidency, the 1953 Berlin Uprising, or the three levels of analysis will be nothing more than parlor tricks... things I can say to appear smart in front of others. It has no real application.

In the end, it doesn't matter. Because in May, I'll get my degree for my two majors, and everyone will be happy for me. But I'll be wishing the entire time that I stuck with real academics instead of whatever I'm wading through now...