<p>I attend an engineering school. Anything STEM is held in high regard here. Why? I don’t know, they get the best jobs and do a lot of reputable things after college where I go to school. From the get go (besides Architecture) the standards for admission are higher for science/engineering. </p>
<p>As an applied math/stats major, things get complicated pretty quickly because you have to learn a lot, apply it fast, and not suck or you risk failing the class. Same goes for engineering. You are super good at critical thinking. At my college we have to take lower division classes and upper-division classes in other areas than our major, which are just cakewalk classes for most. It’s like…why are you trying so hard for this class (non-STEM) in one of my upper-division anthropology/psychology/political science, etc. classes and I study the day before class briefly (or not) and pull out an A without fail. A lot of engineers are terrible at English but the ones who are decent can definitely pull an A off here without much effort if they care a little bit. I personally “tortured” myself winter quarter by picking the hardest professors for my upper-division synthesis courses and owned all of them while a ton of liberal arts majors on Facebook were just asking which professor to take for an easy A. Why not ask what a good professor to take is? This was kind of pompous, which I feel like a jerk for, but I told my girlfriend who has a 3.8 GPA in Psych that I could probably answer any GRE question she has in her Psychology GRE book blindly. 5/6 ain’t bad, but it made her cry saying I devalued what she was learning as she randomly flipped through the book to ask me those 6 questions. I personally like psychology and probably enjoyed the upper-div class more than I did my upper-div Differential Equations class (which happened to have a lot of engineers and physics majors). </p>
<p>My friends that are engineering majors are similar to me in that they find the courses we have to take that are not part of our major/degree program as “fluff”. It’s not really saying that it’s easy overall, just easy for us, I guess. Honestly, I could not do what my girlfriend does because I’m terrible at socializing and helping people. I make a horrible tutor. I think most people just speak from limited experience, obviously they have no experience taking some super crazy lib arts class where everyone who writes a 20 page paper and only one person gets a C. My ME friend tells me about how like 70% of some of their classes are in the low F range, even with curves. Just in my experience it is easy to write papers and get good grades on them than things related to my degree where I have to put in a little more brainpower into what I’m doing. Researching something on the internet, reading about it, and then providing an opinion on it while backing up the claims doesn’t strike me as hard, even though I’ve written 15-16 page papers for my non-STEM LA classes before. </p>
<p>Anyways…what a person finds hard is relative. If you want to know, take pre-requisite weeder courses and if you survive take an engineering class with a good amount of math & physics involved and see how you keep up. I think that’s the only way you’d know for sure. Then again, I did read about some guy who did a history BA, learned all the physics he could super fast, and became a good physicist. I think part of the view is also a bit biased by the small sample populations that come across people’s paths. Sitting in my B-5 elective which was Physics 303 or something a group behind me was struggling badly that were all social science majors that “banded” together and during quiz time with the clickers even though a monkey could figure the questions out (basic arithmetic) they were tapping on my row’s shoulders, full of engineers and math majors. They were just stupid, not a good representation of their entire major/field. But people can often get a biased perspective from experiences like this…</p>
<p>My girlfriend’s brother is an anthropology major, but he can school me in almost everything. He’s a Jeopardy king. He is the guy you want to have on your team for trivia. He’s better at logic games than I am. Quicker at mental math too. Guy can’t lift a box of books to take to Good Will, goes weeks without showering and has to be told to do proper hygiene (despite a near perfect SAT), plays too many nerdy boardgames, texts too much, pretends to know everything and when he is corrected because he is wrong he gets upset. He is 26 and still living with his parents after failing out of college 3 times (previous majors were History, Psychology, and English). Has no job, lazy, and refuses to even do the dishes. In my opinion he is a waste of talent and shouldn’t be wanting to do movie subtitles for a living or working at a museum after he graduates. He should be doing something in science, but he is just so lazy he has selected himself out of it. I think engineering and science definitely involve a lot of hard work and lazy people like him who are reasonably smart enough can get by without too much effort on their part in other areas since he has a 4.0 so far in his new major (somehow they accepted him with like a 1.XX) and is graduating next spring.</p>