The Divided Self, part 1
When I was at high school, my two best subjects were Physics and English. I loved fiction and drama and I was also rather partial to calculus and formulae.
It was a strange tension even then and it has never really left me.
Whilst geeks often have a fairly wide and eclectic palette of interests, most of my friends still had a single centre of geek gravity.
I definitely seemed to have two and they pulled in decidedly different directions, so I was forever caught between the worlds of Intellect and Emotion.
Outside school, computers were also a major passion and if that had been offered as a subject at school, it would have probably have eclipsed Physics.
Still, being self-taught on that front had it’s advantages as I lucked into a part time job as as a software developer even though I was only 16.
This also paid considerably better than working at McDonald’s or a local supermarket, much to my school mates envy and disgust.
When school ended and it came time to decide about University, I was torn over whether to pursue either an Arts degree with an English major or a Science degree with a Computer Science major.
Whilst you could do conjoint degrees that let you study both Commerce and Arts or Science, you couldn’t combine the two. This was all over 20 years ago so things may have changed a lot since.
The Arts and Science faculties were decidedly separate and jealous parents with shared custody of the Psychology department amongst the Human Sciences (a curious and oxymoronic name – who else could they belong to?).
The Psychology department was obviously traumatised and scarred by it’s parents nasty divorce and continuing mutual distrust. It was very touchy about being taken seriously as a Science. Mislabel the axis of a graph in your assignment and it was an F for you. My Science faculty subjects seemed far more relaxed and less shrill about such matters.
Anyway, it looked like if I wanted to embrace both sides of my nature, it would have to be as two separate degrees so now, the question was which to do first.
On balance, the Science faculty was more dismissive of the Arts than the reverse.
You could cross-credit a fair bit of a Science degree to a subsequent Arts degree but it was very hard to go the other way. Psychology counted in both degrees so that was an easy choice but outside that, you could only do two Arts papers as part of a Science degree if you wanted any credit for them.
And Computer Science was also the more practical choice and much more likely to lead to continued employability.
So I pursued my Computer Science degree adding some Psychology and Anthropology papers alongside it.
In my second year when I wanted to take a further Anthropology paper, I remember the Dean of Science recoiling and asking why on Earth I wanted to keep studying that as if he’d spied a noxious insect stuck to my course transcript.
I got the distinct impression that dallying briefly with an Arts subject was an excusable sin in a curious young scientist. A blind eye could be turned to such conduct.
But by choosing to continue this illicit liaison, he was beginning to harbour serious doubts about my moral character.
Still, it was within the letter of the Science regulations so he reluctantly signed off, shaking his head and muttering as I turned and left.
To be continued…