Evelyn Vega

Ever since my first day at Bowdoin, I never once doubted what my major would be. I still have a  year left at Bowdoin, but I’ve finished the Government and Legal Studies major with spare credits. What I have yet  to complete, and I’m not so proud about, are my distribution requirements.

Before the new policy that distribution requirements must be met by sophomore year, there were  essentially two courses of action: (1) kickstart your Bowdoin career by exploring five different  skills before committing to a particular area for depth of study, or (2) attempt to exhaust offerings  within one department (success being department size-dependent) only to later begin branching  out academically. Track two is just a way to delay the inevitable: Everyone who graduates must  complete all five distribution requirements. I tend to delay what I don’t want to do, and my  distribution requirements were no exception.

I feared being stuck for a semester exploring a discipline that wasn’t for me, especially after  already finding one that satisfied my academic impulses. I feared taking a boringly easy class or one so far beyond my abilities that it would be incomprehensible. I also questioned the practical value of the requirements. For someone who has long been certain that their career path will not involve science, the idea of studying it beyond the high school level felt difficult to justify (though I do pride myself on surviving IB Physics). This semester, I finally  enrolled in my Inquiry in the Natural Sciences (INS) course: Oceanography.

The class is not designed for humanities majors because it is designed for students who haven’t  yet declared a major. Despite being an introductory class for prospective Earth and Oceanographic Studies majors, it is  remarkably difficult. I wouldn’t flinch to compare its academic rigor to notoriously challenging humanities courses like Advanced Logic, Constitutional Law II or any class taught by Professor Yarborough. Although the difficulty has made the class so rewarding, I chose Oceanography not because I was warned it was hard, but because I’ve always deeply appreciated the ocean and never quite dared to understand it.

There is a level of academic pride tested when grasping an introductory concept requires  exponentially more effort than grasping advanced ones elsewhere. Yet very few classes have  changed the way I live day-to-day life like Oceanography has. While you don’t need to take Oceanography to discover that the interaction between the Moon’s gravity and Earth’s motion produces tides, no other class I’ve taken has prompted such a direct level of fieldwork to test the validity of a seemingly simple assertion. Taking Oceanography, you keep a “moon journal,” which means you will search for the moon every day for six weeks. The moon has always been there, but never had I been so aware of  something so fundamental. In the government and philosophy classrooms I frequent, I think about worlds of ideas whose existence I’ve been unaware of, whereas Oceanography has pushed me to understand the world that has always been in front of me. My “moon walks” have continued long beyond the assignment.

The lab work in Oceanography demands a level of consistency unlike anything I’ve experienced in the classroom. Despite how challenging an advanced humanities class may be, rigor is concentrated in bursts of critical thought, where it is possible, however inadvisable, to compress weeks of reading and analysis into fewer, more intense days. The structure of the research projects in Oceanography makes it impossible to compress weeks’ worth of work, most clearly in the  phytoplankton growth experiment. You must show up every day at the same time to count how many phytoplankton cells you’ve grown. Unlike a book you can come back to, if the time has passed and the data is missing, there is little you can do to repair the way the experiment has been compromised. This level of consistency fosters a heightened responsibility to the process, a lesson  that extends well beyond the lab.

With any college-level discipline, there is a point where taking one more class in a familiar  department begins to yield diminishing returns. Distribution requirements are not necessarily  intended to lead a student to swap their desired career path, but to help students acquire skills that  only a narrower subset of classes instills. For my INS, that meant a daily moment to slow down  and contemplate my surroundings (the moon), consistently showing up to perform a repetitive task and using analysis to supplement experimentation rather than the other way around. The liberal arts only really function when a student is willing to confront unfamiliar skills that don’t come easily, when there is a humanities student in a STEM classroom or vice versa.