The Gray Area

People like little boxes. They like to categorize, label, simplify.

The public education system is designed to expose students to a variety of subjects. You are required to take math even if you couldn't solve for x to save your life. You are required to take English even if you find the idea of reading Pride and Prejudice to be boring at best. You take classes in history, science, health, and even physical education. All with the idea that as you learn more you will tend toward certain subjects more than others. But what if that doesn't happen?

After graduation from high school, you have to begin to think about specializing in something. You have to begin thinking about what major you will chose. Generally, those majors are split in two between the math and sciences and the liberal arts majors. There are majors that straddle the line and are considered "soft sciences," but generally people think of themselves as either right-brained or left-brained. The world tends to be categorized into "the analytical" and "the creative."

The closer I get to graduating from college, the more I tire of this false dichotomy. I am an English major, so we generally get categorized under "the creative" types. However, I am actually a very analytical person. I did well in math and science classes, and I'm very organized. I think there also tends to be the belief that math and science classes are harder than literature or humanities. For me, it's just the opposite. I am very good at researching and reading critical analysis in preparation for writing essays, but when it comes to the creative aspect of actually sitting down and writing, I tend to struggle. I thrived in my linguistics class because it was essentially a scientific class. There were rules you memorized and applied to language, and I loved seeing language in such concrete ways.

Even in the sciences, analytical people have to have a spark of creativity. They have to be able to think outside the box in order to discover new things. Breakthroughs come from thinking creatively, not necessarily from staring at facts all day.