A Deviation to the Humanities: Why I Shouldn’t, and Why I Had To…
Date:
Art History II & Fiction and Poetry I
Table of Contents
Introduction
If calling itself a “liberal arts school” during admissions isn’t the most ridiculous part of my alma mater, then surely the policy of forcing engineering students to take a heavy dose of humanities courses is.
Just as humanities students often fulfill their engineering requirements by taking the easiest, least painful programming classes—more checkbox than curiosity—we engineering students do the same in reverse. Many of us either care too little about the humanities, or we’re simply not good at them. (I’m firmly in the former camp, and proudly so.) As a result, the entry-level humanities classes become flooded with engineers, leaving the few dedicated humanities students feeling alienated. It’s a case of “bad money driving out good”: when enough people take a class without genuine interest, the quality of discourse suffers, and those who do care drift away.
So there I was, signing up for not just one, but three humanities courses in a single semester. And the outcome? Let’s just say I was more than a little disappointed.
No syllabi. Opaque grading systems. My GPA seemingly at the whim of the instructor’s mood. And the class quality itself—designed, perhaps unconsciously, to cater to students who didn’t really care.
Art History II was meant to expand my cultural horizon, but it mostly left me memorizing dates and names with little context to tie it together. Fiction and Poetry I could have been inspiring, but instead it felt like a guessing game about what the instructor wanted to hear.
I didn’t come away from those classes enriched—I came away frustrated. The frustration wasn’t that humanities are unimportant (they are!), but that the way they were taught to us engineers felt hollow. A box to be checked, a hoop to be jumped through.
And yet, for all my complaints, maybe I had to go through it. Maybe it was a reminder that not all classes are about efficiency or technical growth—sometimes they’re about tolerating ambiguity, or even disappointment. It taught me that just because a subject is important doesn’t mean it will be taught well, and just because something feels like a “waste” doesn’t mean it didn’t leave a trace.