Three years ago, I trudged up the Slope under a scorching sun and an oversized backpack as I imagined with thrill the day I would graduate.
Flash forward to eight months ago, when I said farewell to the College of Arts & Sciences in true Ithaca fashion: huddled under a dripping umbrella to shelter myself from stormy clouds and cold rain.
Now, with a BA in English, I am continuing my journey toward—to most people’s surprise—a career in medicine.
As I toggled between calculations, laboratories, Shakespeare, and literary analyses, it was undeniable that my STEM coursework was far more laborious than that of my literature classes. Fast-paced lectures sent me scrambling to submit homework on time and to spend long nights at the library; inevitably, more of my time and energy were consumed by my science classes and, gradually, the number of novels I read or writing I worked on outside of my English classes dwindled.
Despite this clash between my two interests, however, I learned to value such interdisciplinarity, which universities often hail as the future of higher education.
