from pacific coast to no coast

I wouldn’t say that the transition to college was particularly difficult, but I won’t say that it was smooth either. There have been rough patches. I have had to make decisions between art and science. It is impossible to do both and take other classes. The university system seems to ask, “How can you possibly like art and science?”

For me, art has constantly been put on the back self, forced to be a hobby. There was always the promise of college. In college I will have time to take art. In college I will frolic with unicorns under the rainbow streams and it will be warm year round. Clearly I was delusional.

Aren’t we, as college students, here for a liberal arts education? Emphasis on the art. I took a seminar that was supposed to integrate the two; however, it just left a sour science-superiority taste in my mouth. I suppose that is what you get when you take a class from a chemistry senior seminar professor.

There is always choice. It is either or, not both. But it is not all on the scientists’ shoulders. I took art classes over the summer at OTIS in Los Angeles. The courses were for college credit, but I was there more to kill the sheer boredom of a travel-less summer. On the first day of my graphic design class, we went around the table with the mandatory name and school.

Me: Hi. I’m Hannah Dean. I just graduated from Harvard-Westlake and I will be a freshman at Northwestern University in Chicago in the fall.

Milkka (aka my crazy graphic art teacher): Ooh, what’s your major?

Me: Um, I think biology.

Milkka: Oh. Then why are you here?

Me: Uh, because I like art too?

Apparently art cannot tolerate science either. Oh, and classically, I was the only person who was good at science or math.

It is almost tragic, if you think about it. If you like art, you are stupid. If you like science, you are not creative. Both artists and scientists are incapable of coming off their high horse and understanding that a person can like both equally. It is an endless tug of war. I suppose it is the ageless battle between humanities and sciences, but how is it that there has not been an armistice?