Stop telling me Social Sciences aren’t real degrees

Look, we get it. We know you have that lab report due in tomorrow and you’re still going to go to Bridge tonight. We get that you have to study an ungodly amount to even scrape a pass. And we get that the Natural Sciences are old and proud disciplines. But do you know what? The social sciences and humanities are older. So stop looking down on us.

Everyone who studies a Social Science will have had it. We tell someone we’re reading a Politics with Philosophy degree, and the usual response is a smirk with “what can you do with that?”.

Well, believe it or not, there are options aside from the being the first Asian Prime Minister or going into teaching Philosophy. And here is why:

The Social Sciences are exactly that, a science. So our work is subject to the same rigorous method that you uptight bastards employ. I.e the Scientific Method. Yes, the subject matter is different, instead of reacting chemicals or perhaps some quantum shit we study people, their language and their behavior. Why do people behave in certain ways? What social structures define such behavior? Fuck knows but the point is that to find the answer, one needs to be as disciplined as any natural scientist would need to be in order to find the results.

So that is what good Social Science is about. Of course you’re always going to find people who don’t take it seriously. So yes, we have our Stephanie who would’ve taken Sociology because she thought it was an easy pass. And yes, we have the occasional Tom who studies Philosophy because he thinks “there aren’t any wrong answers.” Screw them. The rest of us know how much work we have to put in.

It’s not easy

In Semester One, we expected it to be relatively easy-going compared to  later semesters, but no. Instead we were confronted with such delights as Formal Logic and Truth-Tables, dissertation length assignments and enormous group projects. And those are just the simple ones.

Don’t be fooled, one really can’t  chat shit about such things. You have to do a shit-load of out-of-hours reading to even begin to comprehend them. And, forget about just describing the stuff  – one has to marshal the opinions of long dead philosophers while providing your own spin on things. So, that means a ton of reading archaic English passages. Which is fine. But then you also have to unpick the text to see what the meaning is behind it. Which is fine. But then you remember that certain authors wrote 400 years ago, so you have to deal with casual mentions of slavery or women as property. Exciting stuff.

Shut up – I can science

We understand that you have lab time, lab reports, scientific essays and presentations (we have essays and presentations too, you know?). And it all seems rather hard, but just because you have the privilege of studying natural science, don’t put others down because they learn scientific disciplines in a different way.