Choosing a major: taking the road less travelled

MATT WIEGLE/YH

Nothing you can say and nothing you've ever done can possibly impress any of these people. Whether you were the resident tool, knob, Big Wo/Man on Campus, Brooding Poet, Jock with a Conscience, Lab Coat Larry, Quirky Artiste, Bitter Cynic In Black Turtleneck With Cigarette In One Hand And Copy Of No Exit In The Other, there will be 10 of you, or people just like you, hauling stereos and soon-to-be-confiscated halogen lamps up impressive amounts of stairs come move-in day, and suddenly you're just not so special anymore, champ. This is usually when the heavy drinking and meaningless hook-ups set in, but that's another article and another pint of ale.

One way to set yourself apart from the vulgar herd and maintain a sense of independence and uniqueness in the Yale rat race is in your choice of major. It's a decision that you need not even consider until you are a sophomore—by all means, freshman year should be one of academic exploration, experimentation, and lest one forget, copious drinking—but the greener, more left-of-center majors which Yale offers are worth bearing in mind from the start. As one of several hundred English majors, I can attest that any sense of community fostered by a popular major is probably balanced out by a nagging sense of my own dime-a-dozen status. (I mean, how many essays about "Ode to a Nightingale" does the world need now?) Those 300 or so pre-meds crowding into Introduction to Biology in a few weeks might just feel the same way.

Crowded lectures compose a part of just about any Yale career, but what you learn in those lectures can be applied toward paths less traveled on than the conventional routes of biology or chemistry majors. The medical and technological branches of the University have embraced President Levin's, GRD '74, oft-stated "concept of interconnectedness" among disciplines with two new, innovative programs of study. Last year, the biomedical engineering major—one unusually rigorous in the number and breadth of its required courses—made its debut, while this fall marks the arrival of the new Environmental Engineering program, which students can name as a secondary major in a related course of study.

The biomedical engineering major combines existing courses in the medical and engineering schools, and students conduct experiments using state-of-the-art biomedical equipment at the Yale Medical School. What is more, the program's coffers runneth over with a recent fat contribution from the Whitaker Foundation, which promotes biomedical technology research in the U.S.

Though prospective environmental engineers should keep in mind that their specialized program is, in practice, still an unknown quantity, it promises to take just as audacious a position on the cutting edge as its biomedical counterpart. Students in the environmental engineering major will concentrate on the technical aspects of global, headline-making environmental issues, with the aid of professors drawn from fields as far-flung as history and archeology.

For the more humanities-minded, the newest offering is the much-ballyhooed Ethnicity, Race, and Migration (ER&M) major. Like Environmental Engineering, ER&M is a secondary major taken in conjunction with a related major, which can be any field ranging from English to Political Science to African and African American Studies. The program's February 1997 approval was propelled in no small part by a student-led initiative by the Ethnic Studies Action Committee, whose call for a wider field of ethnic studies at Yale was soon echoed by many prominent professors.

The new program, which interrogates notions of nationality within the context of global migration, combines existing courses in no fewer than 10 disciplines with a newly-created introductory course (the only class specifically required for completion of the major). The fledgling program attained greater cachet with the arrival last year of Jace Weaver, the University's first Native American scholar specializing in Native American history, religion, and culture.

Though Yale finally seemed close to a full-fledged gay studies major last year when Larry Kramer approached the provost with several million dollars and a dream, the proposal fell through when the University balked at establishing an endowed chair in the field (endowed means forever, kids). But the dogged folks at FLAGS (The Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies) still crank out the Pink Book every year, which compiles Yale courses specializing in gay studies and enables any student with an interest in this burgeoning field to map out his or her own academic route. An acquaintance from last year's graduating class, though technically a film studies major, basically considered himself a student specializing in gay studies; his transcript bore it out, and he's in Yale grad school now.

There's no doubt that individual initiative and purposeful straying from the flock can reward the savvy young scholar with an exciting place at the forefront of intellectual thought or technological research. Students in more long-standing majors at Yale have the assurance of vaunted tradition, but those who choose more untrammeled courses may find themselves breaking trusty old molds and creating new ones. I'd even venture to say that such resourceful individuals drink less and don't fritter away their weekends with rueful navel-gazing, but then I'd be engaged in speculation.

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