Notes from the Field:
Branching out o
By: KT Goyette Art by: Maanasi Shyno The other day, in my off-term extra-fun-with-Latin reading group, my professor asked us if we knew, back in ye early days of high school, what we wanted to be when we grew up, what we had told the adults in our lives when they inevitably asked. “Oh, sure,” I said. “Depends on the year, but I was going to be an astrophysicist, and then I was going to be a biologist.” The other students in the group laughed. I’m not sure if anyone knew that I still am, a bit pathetically at this point, pretending to be a bio minor on DartWorks. (I’ll kill it for sure sometime senior winter, when I’ve failed to take a bio class for five straight terms.) Instead, I’m known as an ancient history major and history history minor, who takes two, three, sometimes four classics classes every term. But here’s the thing. Back in high school, and certainly back in middle school, I was a STEM kid. Even back in my more youthful college days. I spent the summer between sophomore and junior year studying calculus, so that I could take both multivariable calculus and linear algebra senior year. I gave up the chance to learn Greek (Greek!) to take statistics (statistics!). I spent the summer between senior and freshman year (there may be a pattern here) doing every problem in a chemistry textbook I kinda-stole from high school,
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