We get older, but the first day of school never really changes. As I walked through the hallways of one of the older lecture halls on the campus, pondering who would be in my classes and whether the professor in my next class was actually going to teach or just go over the syllabus, I was hit by a wave of nervousness.
I knew this semester was going to be different.
I’ve always been considered a little bit of an anomaly in terms of my academic focus. I applied to the University of Maryland as a physiology and neurobiology major, and the first day I stepped on the campus my freshman year, I walked into Tawes Hall and declared English as my second major.
I’ve worked at the National Institutes of Health for four years, but I’m also in this school’s English Honors program and have had an article published in a major publication. Most people see this pairing of disciplines like the pairing of pizza and chocolate: most like them separately, but together they’re just plain unnatural.
This semester was going to be different because instead of taking a majority of biology classes, where I felt more or less at home, five out of my six classes were English courses.
No longer was I going to be able to arrive five minutes late from my organic chemistry lecture and sneak in to the back of my English lecture just to dash off to neuroscience afterward.
It was time for me to claim my rightful place as a full card-carrying liberal arts major.
As I sat down in my seat and looked around the room, I felt out of place in my plain fleece jacket and black leggings. If you ever wondered where your nutty English teacher in high school got his or her inspiration in outlandish and sometimes ill-advised fashion choices, look no further than any 400-level English literature class. Take a look around on any given day, and you’ll see a mishmash of lime-green combat boots, boldly patterned sweaters rescued from the $2 Goodwill bin, even leggings with the entire text of Hamlet printed on them. If you think these eccentricities would make them more willing to accept other deviations from the norm in others, you would be wrong. To be sure, these students were eccentric — weird, even — but in a way that fit in their own little niche in the larger ecosystem of the campus.
Unlike huge lecture STEM courses in which even your TA couldn’t give less of a shit what your name is, liberal arts classes have about 30 people in them, and as such have a tradition of going around the room on the first day of class and asking you to say your name, major and a “fun fact” about yourself.
Let me make something perfectly clear: I resent the fun fact. For years, students have been forced in meetings and in classes to come up with a fact that distills their personality, experiences and life goals in one singular sentence. It’s maddening in that it’s basically impossible to know what the perfect thing is to say, and this time was no different.
As the teacher came to me, I said “Hi, my name is Isobel; I’m a sophomore double major in neuroscience and English.” As I looked around, I could already tell people were staring at me as though I had three heads. English and neuroscience? Self-conscious, I lowered my head and mumbled an innocuous “fun fact” about being a resident assistant. And my next class was no better. At this point I still had two more classes left in the day and two more torturous rounds of fun facts to get through, and I had a decision to make. Was I going to continue to let it bother me that everyone in my classes was looking at me like I was crazy? (Maybe I was imagining the stares, or maybe I wasn’t.) Or I could suck it up and lean into what makes me different.
In my last class of the day, the teacher looked at me to introduce myself to the class. I paused for a moment, leaned in, and said “My name is Isobel, I’m a sophomore double major in neuroscience and English, and I’ve worked at the NIH for the past four years, which means I spend a lot of time cutting up mouse brains.”
And of course, everyone in the class stared at me like the crazy mouse-killing scientist chick. But I didn’t care, and that’s what made it all worth it.
Isobel Hawes is a sophomore English and physiology and neurobiology major. She can be reached at ihawesdbk@gmail.com.
