How the Humanities Pushed Me into Science

A significant portion of my university education was spent in the humanities, and I’ve come to deeply regret this. In this short piece, I’ll briefly describe (1) how I ended up taking the path I did and (2) why I’d have chosen STEM if I could have my time again.

I was something of a target at school. Some of it was racially motivated (e.g. I was often called a “paki” and once blamed directly for 9/11), but I chalk most of it up to social communication difficulties that are probably best explained, in hindsight, by schizophrenia. As a result, I was a frequent truant. I developed gastric issues that had no medical explanation, probably due to anxiety, that kept me off school for weeks at a time. I would forge excuse notes and feign injuries to avoid PE, the subject in which my peers (and some teachers) were most abusive and aggressive.

All the time away made it difficult to keep up with the curriculum. I also struggled to revise because I was so often preoccupied with the events of any given day and the prospective terror of the next. My graphic design teacher, Fred Sparks, advised me to withdraw from the exams because he thought I’d benefit more from no qualification than a fail on my record. I was predicted an E grade in English, the only subject I really enjoyed, despite my best efforts. I struggled to understand what was being asked of me. When the English exam came, I resigned myself to failure and chose to just speak my mind. Surprisingly, I received an A for both English Language and English Literature. Despite this small win, I left school with two As in English and Ds in Maths and Science. While those around me celebrated, I felt a deep panic. It was clear that I wouldn’t be able to attend college. I chose to take a year out.

I spent that year writing poetry (working on the theory that English was my only talent) and, after some encouragement from my father, attending evening classes at Exeter College. I enjoyed studying at night with a mature cohort. It freed me from my concerns about people of my own age, and I met others from all walks of life who drew deeply on lived experience. I chose Classics and English Literature and soon became friends with my English Lecturer. I never sat the exams because she invited me on a holiday across Ireland that coincided with the tests, and I foolishly chose the former. She was unaware that I was seventeen at the time, thinking of me as much older, and was visibly disappointed when she realised I had no idea that she was coming onto me.

After the holiday, I found work as a bartender and spent two very stressful years working in excess of sixty hours a week for minimum wage. One of my colleagues was expecting a baby and had decided he needed to return to university to provide for his little one. This inspired me to quit the bar scene and have another go at A-levels. I was able to enrol just before my 19th birthday. I’d have had to pay for my further education if I waited any longer. I chose English Literature, English Language, and Philosophy, and I was accepted on the condition that I retook and passed my maths GCSE. I left with two As in English, a D in Philosophy, and a C in my foundation maths GCSE.

I met someone in the second year, and we became an item. When the time to apply for university came, I applied to Exeter. My girlfriend at the time had applied to Falmouth. Exeter offered me a place on the Falmouth campus, shared by the two universities. I tagged along when my then girlfriend visited Falmouth on an open day, was interviewed by the Falmouth Faculty by mistake, and received an unconditional offer after I explained that English with Creative Writing sounded much more interesting than English alone, especially given Exeter’s focus on the King James Bible for the entirety of the first year.

Up to that point, the humanities seemed to be the only sensible choice for me. It was, after all, the only thing I succeeded in at school. This was the basis of my A-level choices, which in turn dictated my university choices.

One of the things I remember most about Falmouth’s English with Creative Writing BA was how random the lecture content was. It was explained to us that ours was a combined honours degree, and so the course content would be split between an English degree and a more vocational creative writing degree. Despite this, it was very difficult to follow what it was exactly that we were supposed to be learning. We had lectures on Freudian personality theory (ego, id, superego), cultural theorists like Althusser, Lacan, and Sartre, and often had to write assignments on these disparate concepts. I concede that I was often intensely stoned and spiralling toward my first psychotic episode for much of the course, but nonetheless found myself struck by how little sense the entire process and curriculum made. I remember one module on ‘The Politics of Subjectivity and Identity’ in which we were encouraged to create a multimedia piece. I created a timelapse video of myself cutting out stencils of quotes, which were then painted onto a canvas. The accompanying critical commentary talked about how my being of mixed heritage had shaped my early experiences and how I saw famous quotations as a culture-neutral way of carving out an identity, mirrored in the physical carving out of the stencils. The piece got something like a 75, despite drawing on next to no relevant reading material.

We were recommended a range of texts, some excellent, such as Franz Fannon’s Black Skin, White Masks. It was never particularly clear to me, though, how any of this related to the study of, or creative use of, English language. Looking back, I can see how Lacanian psychoanalysis is tied to Freud’s ideas and fundamentally preoccupied with language, but this was never made explicit, nor was the overarching connection between the theorists, theories, and concepts we were covering. The creative writing element was much clearer. We had seminars on creative techniques and had to read and produce creative pieces ahead of time. That side of the degree seemed to be much more structured and coherent.

I also found myself struck by some of the advice that we were given. When Elfrea Lockley, one of the course tutors, was asked how to know what part of a text to quote in an essay, she responded that finding a quote was easy. One had to only open a text at a random page and pick a random sentence. I acquired this particularly lazy academic habit for some years under this advice, and somehow managed to achieve high grades using that tactic. It was this, and other similar experiences, that led me to wonder if I was an imposter, or if the course I was enrolled on was actually a bit of a sham.

My BA was interrupted by my first psychotic episode, shortly after I’d finished the first of my two dissertations. The course involved a creative dissertation, on which I scored an 80 for some travel writing, and a cultural theory dissertation. I rushed the latter, not long after returning from a psychiatric hospital. I wrote it whilst taking quetiapine, which I found deeply sedating and demotivating. I wrote a nonsense analysis of Asimov’s three laws of robotics in I, Robot, making oblique reference to some of the course material. I can say that now, with the benefit of hindsight. At the time, I thought I was producing something decent. The lecturers must have taken pity on me, as I left with a 2:1.

At this point, I’d become incredibly interested in psychosis. Particularly, language and psychosis. I found work as a healthcare assistant on one of the wards I’d previously been a resident. I also enrolled on a part-time Professional Writing MA, again with Falmouth University, largely feeling that I had to dig my heels in and play to my strengths in English. The MA was marketed as an industry-focused course, preparing delegates for a career as a professional writer. I worked in the NHS while studying and found the balance difficult throughout, namely due to shift work. I was also interested in nonverbal communication and, as I was studying for the FACS Coder certification (a certificate in observing facial movements with a view to determining which facial muscles are active) alongside everything else, chose to focus my MA dissertation on instructional writing. My final piece was a guide for FACS coders that looked at particularly complex facial expressions. It contained many errors, errors that enraged Professor Paul Ekman* (one of the creators of the FACS system). In the end, I deleted the guide and only kept the images.

As you can probably tell, I was very confused about my career at this point. I’d invested a great deal in the humanities and English, yet I felt a strong pull toward the NHS and mental health. There was probably an element of the sunk-cost fallacy driving my decision to study the MA. I was also becoming frustrated with the lack of progression opportunities available to healthcare assistants at the time. The training pathways available now, ten years on, were not a thing back then. I remember seeing an advert from the Trust’s R&D department, encouraging staff to start their own research projects. I had several meetings with R&D, who eventually suggested that I consider attaching myself to a university. As I neared the end of my MA dissertation, I rather impulsively developed the idea of doing a PhD. I sent several enquiries and soon found Professor Dawn Archer, who would become my director of studies. I then left the NHS to work on my PhD, as I planned to recruit patients from my employing Trust and wanted to avoid conflicts of interest.

Starting the PhD was an awful shock to the system. I’d spent the preceding five years in the humanities, doing taught degrees with no research component. I’d now found myself doing a PhD by research in linguistics, a subject I thought I understood. I quickly realised that there were embarrassing gaps in my knowledge, gaps someone with two English degrees shouldn’t have. I had no idea that ‘it’ was a pronoun. I didn’t know the names for any linguistic terms or concepts. I quickly realised that English degrees and linguistics degrees are not the same thing. While they may both be considered humanities subjects, linguistics is very much a science oriented discipline. Linguistics, at least the branches of linguistics I would come to situate myself in (e.g. descriptivist, usage-based linguistics), was based on empirical methods and data. The tools and techniques that served me as an English student were not only useless but harmful to my success as a linguist. Simply opening a book at a random page and selecting a random quote wouldn’t work here. There was nowhere to hide. The skills for which I was previously rewarded, such as using incredibly complex sentence structures and high-register vocabulary, counted against me in this new discipline. Instead, I was rewarded for simplicity and clarity in my writing and thinking. I was fucked.

Not only that, but I was studying formal thought disorder in schizophrenia. A much studied and little understood language syndrome in the context of a much studied and little understood clinical picture. My proposed research involved experimental psychology, something I’d no experience in, and linguistics, something I thought I knew something about but was in fact completely ignorant of. I had to teach myself a number of things, ranging research methods and ethics to experimental psychology, psycholinguistics, linguistics, and psychiatry. I felt woefully unprepared. And this is where I began to realise how little I’d learnt about language in the preceding five years. I was deeply concerned by how little my prior work in the humanities applied to these new fields and methods.

And so began a seven year period of progressively unlearning the bad habits I’d acquired from my earlier degrees, while acquiring the skills I desperately needed to carry out an interdisciplinary, largely quantitative, ontologically positivist and epistemologically pragmatist PhD. Throughout this generally painful process, I often found myself reflecting on my BA and MA and wondering if the differences I noticed were indicators of the differences between the humanities and the social and behavioural sciences. I was learning how to appraise evidence based on their methodological strengths, sampling methods, statistical procedures, and so on. There was no requirement for any of that during my English degree. You quoted what you agreed with. It was that simple. There was no system in place for judging the quality of a source. You constructed an argument based around what suited your argument, whose ideas you liked, and little more. In the humanities, it seems to be much more about how persuasive you are with what you present, rather than the substance of what you present. In more scientific disciplines, there’s no need to be persuasive. You let your reviews, your data, and your chosen methods do the talking. I much prefer the work I did for my PhD and the skills I obtained.

When I look back, the idea of returning to the kind of work I did on my BA and MA troubles me. I’m so used to scientific writing and thinking that I wouldn’t know where to start anymore. Perhaps I’m just not capable of understanding the writing of people like Lacan and Sartre, and the issue lies with me. I can’t shake the feeling, though, that the humanities represents a much older scholarly tradition than the one I found myself acquiring during my PhD. And I wonder about its place in modern academia.

If I could go back to my younger self and share any advice, it would be what I learnt from my PhD. That English is not the only thing I’m good at. That, when pressed, I can do maths. I can do science. And, if my environment had been more forgiving, I would have probably had a better shot at those subjects. I fell into the humanities because it seemed to be my only option, and I didn’t know what else to do, yet throughout my BA and MA I found myself growing ever more suspicious of the practices that the humanities encourages. Only through engaging with a degree that gave me the freedom to teach myself the things I needed to know (and thought I couldn’t learn), did I realise that I’m actually better at scientific thinking than I thought.

I’m not trying to suggest that the humanities is inferior to STEM, but I am sharing that my personal experience has been that in a more structured interdisciplinary context, with a heavier STEM component, I learnt many more useful skills and acquired more field-relevant knowledge than I did during my taught humanities courses. Much of that experience may have to do with how I engaged with these courses, rather than their inherent makeup or qualities. That said, though, it remains my feeling that the humanities can, at times, not all times, but at times, reward behaviours that are counter to academic best practices and standards.

* He was very upset in our personal communications.