Posted 9:20 AM by Blah blah

More Foreign Affairs on Tiger Cafe. A Liberal Arts Boy at Heart.
Why Some Women Leave Science/Engineering.

More foreign affairs stuff coming up: the ideological roots of Islamic terror, Richard Holbrooke, Thomas Friedman, etc.

It seems like only 3 people reading this blog actually care about and reply to what I post about foreign affairs and politics. Doesn't anyone care about history or current events? It's amazing how people don't care about politics till it kicks them in the butt. After all these fascinating, dramatic issues, it's hard for me to go someplace like Rice Bowl Journals and read the talk. It seems so trivial, so petty. Oh well---I'm posting these things more for myself to read than for anyone else.

During the first Gulf War, I was actually taking an upper division class in Modern Middle East History, taught by this excellent professor from Harvard, Ira Lapidus. We read books like Thomas Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem and Fouad Ajami's The Arab Predicament, both excellent, lyrically written tales of Arabs and Jews and their mutual dramas. We learned about the Iranian revolution of 1979, the fall of the Ottoman empire, the formation of Iraq ("created one weekend by the stroke of a pen"), and so on. I remember marvelling at Middle East history, thinking how much it was a huge soap opera packed with deception, passion, intrigue, espionage, diplomacy, business, religion---all there!

And I wasn't even a history major. I was an engineering major and took only three liberal arts classes in college. I regret that. I never took any English class in college. I only took this history class, a Russian literature class, and a Greek classics class by an excellent prof from Cambridge, Mark Griffith. On the side I would write in a diary because I am so addicted to writing and refused to turn off that artistic side of me.

Among history, English, and engineering, I'd pick history and English every time. With the exception of the excellent electrical engineering department, the way they taught engineering at my school was dry, mechanical, formulaic. I was bored stiff. Outside of class I rarely hung out with other engineers, preferring to talk to English, film, business, humanities, science, and law students.

I was dating a scientist, a wonderful girl who gradually shifted from studying physical chemistry to biochemistry. She was very warm and sweet and couldn't see herself going further in physics and math, which she found "cold." She, like MANY girls in science and engineering, ultimately preferred her life to be around something "warmer," as she kept saying. I'm not surprised when they trot out the statistics of how many women leave science and engineering for other fields. It's fun to study it, but to do that kind of work, staring at your test tube or computer day in and day out, working in isolation 12 hours a day, coming in on Friday nights and weekends to run that next experiment or next program---all of that can really suck after a while. And there's the idealism behind it, the question of whether you are really making a difference in society or not. Some people end up realizing that the business world actually helps and affects more of people's lives than they thought, that they can continue their scientific impulses elsewhere or with human beings instead of test tubes or petri dishes.

And they jump ship. Some are lucky enough to find their passion keeps going in science or engineering, and I commend them.