By: Sheila Sund

But changing from planning an English degree at 14 to diving head first into a Maths degree 4 years later has shown me a lot about how easy it is to give parts of yourself up, and how much our attitude towards talent and aspiration needs to change. One of the biggest issues with labeling ourselves as belonging to one of two academic camps is the idea that who we are is bound up in what we study.

By removing the idea of being a STEM or Humanities kid, we’re taking off some of this pressure to find yourself in the things you do well, and by extension, what you might earn money in or base your core ideas of identity around.

Without the pressure to live up to a standard of talent in a single area, it encourages students to think more broadly about the world and learn from others, without looking down on the more artistic/scientific sectors as being pointless/soulless like so many lunchtime debates would have it. Taking this categorization away opens people up to being more respectful of others’ achievements and less consumed by their own, allowing us to acknowledge ourselves as far more than an academic category.

To read the entire article, go to Teen Magazine.