Study what you love

From what I want to study to what kind of world I idealize, there is no doubt that my first four months of independence have changed me, and the distance with which I now view those experiences, having just returned home for the holidays, affords me new and revealing perspective on my first semester of university.

Firstly, an academic dilemma has fostered just as much self-examination as my social conundrum. I came to school with the intention of majoring in international relations; my very decision to come to Trinity was based partly on their unmatched IR program. I’ve always been interested in and passionate about issues of international scope. It has always struck me that perhaps the most important issues facing humanity require solutions to be implemented at the international level. Thus, studying international relations seemed like a good idea.

The study of international relations at U of T is divided among the Departments of History, Political Science, and Economics. Cool, I thought, I like the sound of all of those. Four out of my six first year courses were dictated by my choice to major in international relations. I like one of them. The others — introductory economics and two political science courses — well . . . appropriate euphemisms escape me. I do enjoy my history of international relations course, but I’ve come to some realizations regarding the other disciplines that I wish I had understood earlier.

Political science, for instance, is not at all scientific. As far as I can tell with my obviously sparse understanding of the discipline, political science vainly attempts to squash the unsquashable nuances of political society into narrow, inflexible definitions and theories, necessarily omitting certain aspects of reality in order to achieve artificial coherency. The competing theories of realism and liberalism stand in irreconcilable opposition, each making their respective claims about human nature and the behavior of states, neither willing to compromise its convictions in the face of opposing evidence. Studying the world from such a normative perspective seems dangerous to me. History, with its focus on empirical evidence and its reluctance to make predictions or to create sweeping theories on the basis of its discoveries, seems a better way to understand why the world is the way it is.

Economics also shares this focus on empirical data, but unfortunately, it’s just boring. Again, my views are undoubtedly limited by my continued naivete and perhaps a bit of wishful thinking, but I suspect that for my purposes, I could achieve a sufficient understanding of economic activity without learning how to manipulate graphs of short- and long-run equilibrium. Maybe I’m wrong. Either way, I hate economics, and any discipline that takes as its starting point the assumption that human beings are always rational arouses serious suspicion in me.

Which brings to me a side point: it’s very easy to “learn” just enough to pass an exam — indeed, to get an entire degree — without actually learning anything. My economics course is a perfect illustration. The material is dry and the professor drier, so I don’t do the readings, don’t go to class, cram for two days before the exam, memorizing only that which I know I’m going to be tested on and nothing else, and I always manage to pull off a solid mark. Not a great mark, but enough to pass the course and go on to take more economics courses if I wanted to.