Busy busy

I'm currently sitting in a commencement ceremony for a school I was part of in college, before I switched to the monstrous horde of people who studies English. Maybe it's just me being sentimental or snotty (my money would be on the second option, but they're both possible), but I seem to remember the opening remarks for the humanities college as being funnier, more candid and more fluid than the comments in this college of sciences.

We'll get back to that topic a little later, but let's take a short detour for a moment. I want to take a moment to talk about college for some of you who may be in it or thinking about college for your near future. I have had so many experiences recently that have reaffirmed for me that you should do what you love rather than what will make you more money right out of school. Don't get me wrong, it's important to earn enough to live on and pay off your schooling, but it's not the most important thing. The most important thing is to enjoy what you do. I felt like I fit in so much better as an English student than I did as a physics student. And this event is another affirmation of that for me.

So let's go back to the section before on why it's not surprising that the speeches in the humanities school were more engaging. When you spend all of your time answering the question "so what?", all of your statements have a purpose based on answering that question. Scientists, on the other hand, are concerned with collecting all the information they can, sifting out what seems most relevant, and drawing the most probable conclusions based on the information at hand. Both approaches are important in their own realms, but when one of the fields is more involved in the less tangible points, the finer points of the human experience, those points seem more relatable. They tend to hit people 'where they live'.

Putting those points together in a way that constantly emphasizes how that applies to us has more impact than a catalog of important things.

Again, this is nothing against scientists and mathematicians. I was one and am close friends with others; I'm just saying that the specialties fit differently and have different skills, making one of them better suited to make speeches more widely applicable. I'm going to end this here and enjoy the rest of the ceremony.