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Over the past few months I’ve been spending more time than usual in discussions about the value and mission of liberal arts education, coming at it from a few different directions. This seems to align with an increased number of articles in various sources (mainstream and higher-ed focused) about the value of the liberal arts. There are a lot of pieces to the challenging problem of explaining liberal arts education. One piece I keep coming back to, though, is my frustration with the phrase “liberal arts majors”, generally intended to mean arts and humanities majors.

If it were up to me, we would insist on being clear that at a liberal arts institution that truly embraces its mission, all of its majors are liberal arts majors. I understand that underlying much of these conversations is a need to defend the value of the humanities and arts, but from my own disciplinary perspective I fear that this lets science and technology programs off the hook for their own obligations towards a liberal arts philosophy.

If done properly, a liberal arts STEM major is not just a STEM major as would be experienced at any institution with some extra gen ed distribution requirements tacked on. The program itself should reflect the interconnectedness of disciplines from across the institution and ensures students can approach problems broadly as well as deeply. Further, taking on a liberal arts perspective ought to change how each course itself is taught; it is a mindset that the instructor should adopt towards the range of interests and priorities their students might have. This might be reflected in pedagogy, in course problems and examples, or even in the scope and specifics of course content.

While certainly not an absolute, it is frequent that liberal arts institutions or liberal arts programs within larger institutions are relatively small entities. This means that the faculty can work together to build a shared vision of a liberal arts education and integrate it within their own disciplinary perspective. STEM faculty have an obligation to provide a robust liberal arts education the same as their colleagues in other disciplines. Falling into informal language suggesting that some disciplines are what constitute the “liberal arts” and other disciplines simply coexist with them works against the unified mission that ought to exemplify a liberal arts education.

There are a series of good quotes in this article about how librarians can get students to start understanding the scholarly frame for exploring information that highlight the general shape of the argument being made:

That exploration is important in learning: “When small children observe and imitate, they are testing the physical world around them and coming up with their own understanding of how things work. Explicit instruction short-circuits that process.”

That various pressures prevent students from seeing library research as exploration: “They are intensely curious about what the teacher wants, if not about the topic they’re researching, and often focus on getting that boring task done as efficiently as possible. It’s not just that there’s no time for creativity, or that they think creativity is a violation of the rule that you have to quote other people in this kind of writing. It’s simply too big of a risk.”

That further, they may not know exploration is the goal, particularly given the rules-focused manner they may have been taught about scholarly citation: “If you learn how to cite a source before you’ve had any experience seeing how scholarly writing is webbed together through these not-so-hyper links, if you’ve never sought a source that you first encountered in another source, this citation business is simply a matter of compiling an ingredients list that’s required by law.”

I’ve been having a few conversations recently about the start of college as a socialization process into academic norms and expectations, and about where and how much of that is required. The theme of how we read and why we read that way has come up, and it does seem to connect nicely to this idea of understanding how we explore a scholarly body of knowledge.

It also reminds me of a goal I need to get back to for my fall offering of programming. While I tell students that they may use Google searching, Stack Overflow, and the like as sources of ideas and even code for their homework so long as they comment where any copied code comes from, I also warn them that homework is written with an eye to what they have learned so far whereas internet sources may draw on the entire complexity of Java, so they may actually find it harder to get code copied off the internet to function within the constraints of an assignment than to go back to the textbook and class examples and think through a solution from there. A colleague pointed out that it might help drive that point home if I create an exercise that shows how the code that comes up on a search complicates rather than simplifies problem solving. I do this already with an exercise reinforcing the importance of reading the description of a method not just its name. So as a small piece to this much larger puzzle, I will be spending some time looking for a simple programming problem that the internet makes much too hard, but looking carefully at the resources you already have in front of you will make easy.

A friend shared this article about university students struggling to read entire books on Facebook, and while there are many thought provoking things here, one quote in particular struck me:

“I would say that it is simply a case of needing to prioritise,” said Ms Francis, “do you finish a book that you probably won’t write your essay on, or do you complete the seminar work that’s due in for the next day? I know what I’d rather choose.”

Reading that sentence, I had the dual reactions of “of course” and “the fact that that’s the decision is the problem”.

I am not going to pretend that I don’t have days (or at this time of year, weeks) when I’m just working to keep my head above water with deadlines. But I also think that one of the “soft skills” that college should help develop is how to manage your time in a manner that lets you both meet immediate deadlines and allocate needed time regularly to longer-term projects. In any job, you could let every day get filled up with short-term tasks that legitimately do need to get done – meetings, emails, forms and reports, etc. But the big, interesting, meaningful projects only get done if they also get regular attention, because by their nature, they can’t be completed at the deadline, or at least they can’t be completed with any level of quality at the deadline.

This skill of balancing short-term and long-term work reminds me of a conversation I saw somewhere (though I am forgetting where) where a recent college graduate was struggling with their productivity when given larger projects to complete and was wondering how to ask their boss to assign them all their work in broken down tasks with daily deadlines. While I applaud the self-awareness to realize their productivity problem, I wonder if more practice in college at balancing the demands of tomorrow’s exam with the need to keep making progress on the book being discussed in seminar next week would have helped them with their professional productivity now.

And I connect this to a struggle I have in my own teaching. Where is the balance between breaking things down into manageable pieces with checkpoints and regular deadlines versus giving students opportunities to practice setting their own agendas and priorities? Certainly the level of the course comes into play, but even at the upper level, it is hard to stand back and watch a student not doing the work they ought to be doing to stay on track. When that happens, my first reaction is to ask if I should add more to my syllabus – more deadlines, more check-ins, more progress reports, etc. Things to make sure students are keeping pace with their work or let me intervene if they aren’t. But if we all do that, isn’t that just adding to the problem, of more deadlines and less practice with setting ones priorities and managing the consequences if those priorities didn’t get you where you needed to go? Do we stop assigning books because students can’t find the time to read them, or do we keep assigning books because it is important that students think about what choices they could make to create the time to read them?

It is the time of year that the media, newspapers, blogs and higher-ed focused venues put out articles on advice to college freshmen. I was thinking of adding to that collection, but it struck me that there’s an audience that could use some back-to-school advice as well but which seems to be largely ignored: sophomores.

It’s an interesting omission, given that missteps, meandering, or general malaise is so common in the sophomore year that there’s an entire phrase for it: the “sophomore slump”. And yet while a Google News search on “freshman advice” returns a top-ten links filled with tips for students starting college (8 of the 10, with the other two being tips for high school freshmen), the comparable Google News search on “sophomore advice” turns up one article of advice for students starting their second year of college, preceded by an article on avoiding the sophomore slump in one’s music career and followed by seven articles about college football and one article with advice for freshmen in high school.

And the evidence that sophomores need advice is based on more than the cliche of a sophomore slump. In talking to a group of near-graduation seniors last year about their college experiences, the students themselves identified that sophomore year can be a bit of a dead spot. Entering freshmen are greeted by ever-growing orientation programs and, at colleges like mine, entire courses their first semester dedicated to getting them up to speed at being a college student. By your junior year, you’ve progressed to far enough in your major that you’ve likely built a relationship with your advisor and have moved into smaller upper-level courses with increased contact and mentoring, which continues into your senior year. But sophomore year, you’ve moved past the safety nets of freshman year and are still working on finding a stable landing in your major.

So what is a sophomore to do? My first advice is: be aware of this and try to be proactive to counteract it. As a freshman, your advisor may have actively checked in on your progress, reminded you about deadlines, or been required to sign off on changes to your courses. As a sophomore, it’s time to take responsibility for your education on yourself, but a big part of that is recognizing those times that, as a freshman, you’d have been required to talk to an advisor and taking the initiative to request that advice yourself if you need it. Yes, you can now decide for yourself if you should switch your programming course to S/U, but that doesn’t mean you can’t ask your advisor if they have any thoughts on the decision. Bonus points if you approach this conversation in the spirit of helping you make a decision about what is right for you given your goals and pressures rather than a request that your advisor make the decision and tell you what to do.

And, as I think about it, the rest of my advice really flows from there – sophomore year is about taking responsibility for your education while learning to take advantage of the mentoring and support around you to be as successful as possible in that venture. Think carefully about who your relationships are with and if they are encouraging you to make the most of your college years. Surround yourself with people who press you to do be your best while also supporting you – whether your friends, your faculty, your coaches, or your collaborators and colleagues. You’re probably getting more freedom to choose your living situation and who to live with; consider this question broadly based not just on who will be fun to live with but who will let you have fun while also being successful.

Finally, now is the time to think ahead and ask yourself: What do I want my senior year to look like? What experiences do I want to be having? You may find that some of the great opportunities you want to pursue take a bit of planning and background effort. I encourage students to look at the college catalog and read the course descriptions of the 300-level courses – there’s a lot of great content there, and if you know as a sophomore that you want to make sure you take Quantum Mechanics before you graduate, you’ll have the time to get the prerequisites worked into your schedule in advance. Do this outside your major as well – if you feel like you aren’t getting a lot out of your general education or elective courses consider if you could be choosing those courses more thoughtfully. This same type of planning applies to goals of doing summer research, interning with a particular company, or studying abroad.