An Appreciation for a Liberal Arts Education

By Cameron Rusin

Hi Friends!

I will put something up about this weekend at some point but I’m not really sure how to articulate my thoughts on that yet so stay tuned! But here are some thoughts I had just now while doing my Making Social Change Happen homework.

Going into the college process, I knew that I wanted to go to a liberal arts school. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life, I wanted a flexible education for when I inevitably change my mind, and I enjoyed humanities classes too much to be done with them for forever. So yay! Here I am at a liberal arts university.

Now that I am a liberal arts student, I sometimes wonder how productive this is. I am an intended STEM major, yet out of my five classes only one is a science class. I enjoy my other classes, but when will I use the skills I pick up in them beyond the class discussions? Sometimes I feel weird and anxious about how little science classes I am taking.

However, I had a realization while writing a thing for my social change class! I’m not sure how to sum this up in a not super corny way, but here goes.

Today’s readings were about climate change and the environmental movement, and I had to write a response to them. In summary, I talked about how climate change needs to be seen as a now problem instead of a future problem, and used the storms that just hit Puerto Rico and the rest of the Caribbean as examples. But how do I know that these storms are linked to climate change? Last thursday I had a guest lecturer in my chemistry class who spent the whole time talking about the science behind super storms. Basically, the hotter the oceans get the more water is vaporized and carried up into a storm and this process is accelerated causing huge displacements of air and water that then get dumped as hurricanes. So yeah, climate change leads to bigger and more frequent storms. Then today I go to my sociology class in which we are starting our unit on inequality. Today was about the inequalities caused by huge corporations taking advantage of the world’s poorest people. Oil tycoons can ignore climate change because the middle of the US is not going to face the worst parts of climate change, Puerto Rico is, but Puerto Rico can’t do anything because its infrastructure is in shambles and its people don’t have the resources to combat America’s richest. Finally, as Puerto Rico is a spanish speaking island, we talked about the recent disasters in my spanish class and how we felt about how the government is dealing with it.

In the past couple of weeks, my liberal arts education took one storm and looked at it from a bunch of angles, which I think is really cool. So no, I probably won’t go on to conduct sociological studies or start nonprofits as by humanities classes are teaching me, but I am learning in what feels like a very wholesome way. This post is not meant to demean other ways of education or put liberal arts up on some pedestal, but I wanted to share my new appreciation for my seemingly useless humanities education, and also the cool stuff that I’ve been learning in class.