Stop being stupid, BScs will always be harder than BAs

You can keep your Dickens


As a BSc student I may not always remember whether temperature effects or affects the results of my experiments but at least I am not affected by my future job prospects.

I sympathise with BA students. I really do. It is difficult to be uncertain about your fate and life post-academia. While it is certain you will find a fulfilling career (and I accept that teaching is only one of many options), your job prospects are less transparent.

Thrown in at the deep end, we see you fighting against the current of your murky career path where you struggle to tell if you’re swimming in mud or shit, so it’s easy to see why you might feel bitter towards those of us floating in the clear waters of employment.

We will sleep easy at night though: we’ve worked for it. All those Monday to Friday 9 til 5s. Hangover or no hangover, we went. We saw. We did. Essay, after lab report, after seminar, after workshop, after poster session, after presentation, we worked our sorry little gluteus off to have those three little letters after our name (that’s one more letter than a BA, for those of you struggling with the maths).

On occasion, yes, we can  help each other with our work. That’s because our degrees are based on fact, not fiction. To state though that we are not opinionated and don’t know how to construct an argument is simply not true.

We are, of course, able to make judgements based on the science presented to us – which is often contradictory. We must, however, back up this opinion with peer-reviewed truths, not throwaway statements. The whole concept of our scrupulously-cited lab reports is to argue that our research was worthwhile and worthy of investment.

This is what hard work looks like

Our arguments don’t end there either. To think essay writing and the mindfuck of creating your own title is limited to the arts is BA-llshit.

Essay writing is as much of a science as it is an art. It requires a structure: a simple formula if you like. You wouldn’t dare forget your introduction, arguments or conclusion. So quite simply to argue that the arts and sciences are independent entities is “pretty stupid”. Science formulates hypotheses, while the concepts of these are expressed through the arts.

For centuries, the petty feud between these two institutions has left a rift in our culture. We whack out and compare our figurative penises, straining and slapping them in anger to try and make them grow. At the end of the day, while yours may have more length and ours might have more breadth, they both perform. The only difference is that we can turn you off by explaining the detailed theory behind the performance, while you can eloquently sex it up conveying to a wider audience how it looks, feels, tastes, sounds and smells.

STEM subjects allow us to achieve 90 per cent in some coursework. We could probably do the stats and work out that we have a significantly higher probability of achieving a higher grade than you (p>0.05). And yeah, we are allowed to be proud of that, because as has already been pointed out, it’s all relative. At the end of the day a First is a First and we’re allowed to be as proud of our 90 as you are of your 71.

Despite this, BSc lecturers, although often perceived to be slightly on the spectrum, are actually emotional beings. So if their sterile agar dish growing the latest antibiotic has become contaminated scuppering months of research, our grades might also take a hit. Emotion is a human phenomenon. It is not limited to “creatives”.

BSc students actually get to leave the library

Both BScs and BAs are inescapably bound together. As BSc students we rely on Religious Studies and Philosophy to show how our findings are considered morally, History to see where we have gone wrong scientifically before and how we have progressed, Politics to understand the feasibility of implementing our research and English Literature to help us express what we’ve learnt and educate.

Yet without science and technology there would be no debate.

Boxing science and art students into categories goes against everything the arts stands for. To state you are either academic, or creative is fundamentally wrong. Just because I understand the theory behind GM doesn’t mean my comprehension is limited to solely that, it is well within my capabilities to also understand the controversy around it, and more importantly why it is controversial.

To suggest that you can’t be an academic creative, or a creative academic is naïve. It’s like saying “I’m gay and you’re straight” with no in-between. There is no scale of academia. It’s just a generic term that incorporates the whole of education.

So if BA students want to carry on taking the Orwellian view that all degrees are equal, but some are more equal than others, then don’t expect us BSc students to change our “Dawkwinian” view that natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.