I’ve focused on the humanities throughout my entire project thus far, talking about how and why it’s important for our society and culture to progress forward. But this week, I took a look at the other side of academia. 

I took a look into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, also known as STEM.  

I had the privilege of speaking to Dr. Erika Syzmanski, a professor who works in the English department at Colorado State with a background in microbiology. 

She had a unique perspective that crossed between both worlds of STEM and the Humanities. 

Syzmanksi is a multi-talented and highly intelligent academic who gave me insight as to why she chose a job that makes a third of the money she would be making if she was doing the same thing as a STEM professor.

Dr. Erika Syzmanski

As a 4-year-old, Syzmanski watched an episode of Sesame Street where a character goes to the doctor. This is when she discovered that she wanted to be a doctor herself. 

She was just 12 years old when she fell in love with microbiology at a summer microbiology camp. 

When looking at universities, she discovered programs that combined PhD and MD degree pathways that allowed for her to become a doctor and a microbiologist at the same time. 

She purposely chose a smaller, liberal arts college as opposed to a large research school. She didn’t want to spend all of her time in a lab. 

She had many interests when she was growing up that translated into her academic career. Even while studying for her undergraduate degree in microbiology, she took humanities classes for her own enjoyment. 

“I took advanced undergrad writing as an elective and I was the only non-English major in the class,” Syzmanksi said. “I’ve always known that I’ve had a lot of diverse interests.” 

She went through a PhD MD program and got her masters in microbiology, but realized something about herself halfway through medical school.  

She was spending a lot of time up late at night writing.

“The most exciting thing about the work I was doing,” Syzmanski said, “was how we made sense of it and how we make knowledge through words. Though I love microbiology, the thing I love most is how we make scientific knowledge accessible, not actually making it myself.” 

Once she made this realization, she walked across campus from her lab to the English department and asked if she could move. She was able to, and she got her second masters in rhetoric and composition. 

STEM in Today’s Age

Syzmanksi’s many interests and curiosity kept her from a lab and brought her to the English department at Colorado State University. 

There’s a line between STEM and the humanities, and Syzmanksi is able to jump rope with it. 

“There’s something just joyful to me about recognizing that in this room there’s a whole set of different worlds going on, to which we have very little access to,” She said. “It’s like parallel universes without me having to go through a wormhole.” 

The metaphorical multidimensional facets of travel that STEM academics explore fascinated Syzmanski, but with the binary expectations of STEM, she knew it wasn’t the right place for her. 

“STEM gets pushed into really really narrow ideas of problem solving.” Syzmanksi said. “Folks aren’t just expected to solve problems, they’re expected to solve them fast. These infrastructures don’t give us time to think because everyone feels under pressure to succeed all the time.” 

Syzmanksi went on to explain how she would make 3 times the amount of money she was making right now if she was doing the same thing in a STEM department in a building that’s just a five minute walk away. 

She chose what truly spoke to her, and the thing was the Humanities. 

Syzmanski’s Jump Rope

Syzmanski has always loved reading and literature, but she does not have the typical English Professor relationship to the humanities. 

She told me that she is completely uninterested in reading Jane Eyre over and over again in hopes of maybe finding out something new about the character on the 15th read. She is more drawn to the power literature has when it comes to our own humanity. 

“The humanities is absolutely essential to all of the problems we face, and not just for problem solving, but for being human, and oh my goodness do I want people to have that.” She said.

The humanities can be how we dig deeper into ourselves as humans in order to solve conflict and see the beauty in life, but there’s an innate problem with literature that’s existed for generations. 

“The humanities has been grounded in an ideal of a human that is exclusionary.” Syzmanski said. 

The humanities has not been about all of humanity, but rather a specific kind of human Sysmanksi pointed out. 

There was a hierarchy established where white men were at the top, they were perfect. Then came women who were imperfect men, then animals who were imperfect women. 

As a society, we have built what the “ideal” human looks like. Syzmanski is a part of a group of people who want to reshape what the human looks like at the center of the humanities, the human that has typically been a white man.

She spoke of an idea that argues that people become killable when they do not seem to know anything of value, whether it be a centric idea of language, culture, or physical appearance. If someone strays from the established idea of a human, they become less than one. 

“It’s also built into this way that people’s languages are systematically erased from higher knowledge and aren’t even studied.” Syzmanski said. “It becomes really easy to discount this group from not knowing anything if you don’t even recognize what you don’t know about them…and that makes me sad.” 

There’s power and identity in culture and language, and if you strip people from these things or refuse to acknowledge these elements of themselves, it becomes easier to dehumanize them. 

So how has the separation of STEM and the humanities helped shape these divides of people? 

“We’ve built up this hierarchy that suggests that scientists are somehow more and better equipped to solve problems than humanists.” She explained. “STEM takes more money than the humanities does. Their grants are bigger…Because it takes more money to do science research, it brings more money into the university, and at some level it looks more valuable.”

However, literature, writing, and reading are all components found within STEM. The two sides of education are not as divided as we think they are, and Dr. Erika Syzmanski is a prime example of this. 

“Gravity exists, yes, but how do you explain gravity?” Syzmanksi said. “How do you make knowledge about gravity? What’s the right way, if there is such a way, to talk about gravity?” 

Syzmanski balances the humanities and STEM aspects of her life. She is passionate about knowing and understanding the world around her, whether it’s the invisible molecules that sit on her desk, or the understanding of cultures that are different from her own, her pursuit of knowledge ceases to exist in one lane. 

“We should find as many ways to know things as possible.” She finishes. “I think that we should continue to be creative and curious people because it’s the thing that enables us to form relationships with each other. I don’t think that knowing things is the point of humans, but we collectively add to the richness of the universe by continuing to be creative.”