The Creativity of the Scientific Method

Class, study, sleep, repeat. Most STEM majors have this mantra down to a science with schedules planned out to the millisecond of where they will be, what they need to study, and even how long it should take to complete an assignment. This is absolutely not a unique quality of STEM majors, just something that we may have perfected. Our time is spent differently than most other majors. I can attest to this first hand since I am an English and biology double major.  Most other majors will spend hours on a paper or a large group project. My education major roommate constantly deals with multiple group projects involving presentations and perfecting the perfect powerpoint while trying to find time for everyone to meet. The STEM majors' idea of a group project is to spend a minimum of six hours a week in a laboratory environment with their partner. It is a blessing and a curse that we are forced to spend time together, but it also means we cannot leave and have to do this on top of completing the work for their other classes.  

Another area where STEM diverges from the humanities is in writing. Language and writing are not areas where most STEM majors excel. Lack of communication is something that many STEM majors work to improve. I mean, how can you be a doctor if you cannot confidently ask a patient what hurts? Or how can you be an engineer and work with clients without being able to send emails and conduct meetings?  However, style works against science when it comes to writing. People who write creatively know how much we stay away from the ideas of telling instead of showing the reader what we want them to see, using passive voice since it takes emotion away from a piece of work, or using a clearly defined structure since most writers like to experiment. In contrast, most academic writing pushes away from the creative elements and focuses more on the bare bones of language and writing.  This means that we use passive voice, we tell the reader everything that was done in very blatant terms, and structurally there is little change from one paper to another. As an English major as well as a person in STEM, I struggle with this, wanting to put my own thoughts and emotions into something but finding that I have to switch it off. This is because in the sciences it is condoned and even applauded for finding the quickest and most effective way to put our ideas into words. I find myself flipping this switch in my mind every so often when I am presenting a topic for an English class only to go back and realize what I wrote was made for a lab report and not a close reading essay or a creative writing piece.

As stated previously, in STEM most of the description of a piece is done through telling. This is either describing what the results were or how an experiment was conducted. Our version of showing is through images and graphs. Most science majors are all partial children because we enjoy having figures and images in our papers; it makes the paper more manageable. As we enjoyed seeing the red and blue fish in Dr. Suess, figures and graphs give us that same joy and knowledge into the experiment being presented that helps us visualize a result or a conclusion.  

No matter how much the simplification of language can confuse and irritate the English major in me, this form of writing is chosen for a reason. Science itself can be complex with its own vernacular lexicon with words like gluconeogenesis (which, to translate, is the process by which our body processes glucose and makes energy for our bodies to run). The experiments themselves also involve a myriad of descriptions mostly due to how certain organisms need to be in specific conditions, like a different temperature, habitat, and food. So, to get to the point of our arguments, research and scientific writing in general cut straight to the point. They remove any and all floral language that may make another person’s writing worthwhile and instead present what is being done in a point blank way.     

On the other hand of this argument, STEM and the arts are a lot alike. They each have their own type of creativity; it’s just in different aspects. STEM majors will spend hours perfecting the perfect experiment from the way the petri dishes are laid out and prepped to the way an organism is plated. This is the same way English majors perfect the meter of a poem with purposeful enjambment or a writer inserts a classical allusion so that it involves itself with the literary canon. This can overall show the kind of artistic purpose that is needed in both majors to bring their works to life.  

November 2021