Upperclassman Polarization

In high school, it is common for everyone to take the same classes, and because of this, students are able to sympathize with each other in terms of work load and assignments, and when I came to college freshman year, I found similar trends amongst students. While we were taking some classes that were specific to our major, many of us had to take college writing, a social science or humanities elective, and other general education classes. It wasn’t until about half way through sophomore year that I noticed the effects of polarization in regards to specific majors start to surface.

As an engineer, I was only taking classes with other engineers and sitting through lectures with engineering professors. With that many like minded people in one room, it is hard to not start moving to an extreme view. We all began to think that our work load was worse than that of any other major, and that if you weren’t an engineer you didn’t deserve to complain. It also did not help that our professors were constantly telling us that we will get paid more than everyone else later because we are putting in some much more work now.

While engineers develop a particularly bad stigma in this regard, this phenomenon of polarization occurs in every major, and it becomes a particular problem when upperclassman have to take general education classes together. By this time in our educations, we have become so accustomed to working with people that think the same way we do that when we have to work on a group project, for example, with people of different majors, it can become a problem. Arguments can easily arise about the best way to approach a problem and the best course of action to tackle it.

It can be quite frustrating when this happens, but it extremely important to work through these problems with interdisciplinary teams because in reality, these are the types of teams we will be a part of in the work place. It is important to utilize the wide knowledge base that is available in an interdisciplinary team, because having unique perspectives can be an advantage when trying to solve a complex problem.