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The summer before I got to Columbia as a freshman, I decided that I wanted to go to medical school. Looking back, the nine seasons of Grey’s Anatomy I watched that summer played no small part in that decision—Patrick Dempsey’s hair is the reason that thousands of pre-med students are suffering through organic chemistry at this very moment. But truly, medicine seemed like the perfect career for me. I knew that I wanted to go into a career that was STEM-related and I also knew that I wanted to have a positive impact. And ours is a society that paints doctors not just as people who have a positive impact, but as real-life heroes. It wasn’t until I took the class Marginalization in Medicine, with Professor Samuel Roberts, that my view of medicine changed. The more I learned about higher rates of maternal mortality in Black mothers, the more I learned about people dying from treatable diseases due to lack of healthcare, the more I learned about ways that access to medicine is used as a form of subjugation, the more obvious it became that health is both a biological and a political phenomenon. Health is at its core an intersectional subject, which is why we need an understanding of both science and humanities to deal with it.
If Columbia teaches one thing, it’s to value intersectionality. After all, the entire rationale for taking our core classes is that what we learn in our majors, we’ll apply to our core and vice versa. I was lucky enough to have a CC professor who allowed us a lot of flexibility in our essays and I used to have fun writing my CC papers and trying to see how many other subjects I could pull in to my writing. It was always easy for me to mix my history classes with my core classes. But up until I took Marginalization in Medicine, it didn’t occur to me that my STEM classes also required that I bring in my humanities perspective.
One of my neuroscience professors this spring semester takes Columbia philosophy seminars every chance he gets. When he explained his obsession with philosophy to our class, he said: “There’s no point in learning how a system works if you don’t understand what purpose the system serves.” Understanding how the brain works, that’s the job of neuroscience. But understanding why we can think, why we have emotions, what the point of consciousness is, that’s the realm of humanities fields, like philosophy. There’s intersectionality between so many subjects than might at first glance remain discreet, unrelated fields, and what I love about Columbia is that students are encouraged to take classes in a bunch of different subjects so that we start the see the intersections between it all.
I’ve loved every global core that I’ve taken, and I’ve applied the information that I’ve learned in those classes to my public health and neuroscience degree. I’m grateful that Columbia College makes all students take two global cores because I don’t know if I would have taken these classes otherwise. I learned as an undergraduate that it’s important to take humanities into consideration in STEM classes. But I have noticed that that my appreciation for the intersection of science and humanities isn’t necessarily reflected amongst my humanities-oriented friends, who often find even the idea of their science requirement intimidating. I’m regularly asked, for example, for a recommendation of an “easy science class,” with little to no suggestion that the course could possibly connect to the broader interests of the person posing the question. I have a feeling, however, that our current realities are making all of us re-think scholarship and expertise, as well as the relationships we have with research fields and ourselves.
As this pandemic has shown, science and health, public policy and law, philosophy and art, all have real and important consequences. They also have interesting ways of drawing inspiration and meaning from one another. However, without the key meanings only gleaned from intersectional studies, research is significantly less useful and applicable. It’s no wonder then that so many people are distrustful of research. Every anti-vaxxer, every person who refuses to wear a mask, and every goop-user in some way distrusts scholarship and research. If we’re to change this as a society, we must begin to approach research in a more intersectional manner.