I always consider myself a humanities-based person. I am interested in literature, journalism, and sociology and think computer science and mathematics are the hardest subjects in the world. I did not have a single STEM class through my high school except the required calculus and statistics classes in my curriculum.
Last fall, I took a class “Sex and Gender in Critical Perspective.” My final research paper for this class focused on the transformation of aesthetics in South Korea and plastic surgeries. To complete this research paper, I needed to collect and analyze data in the recent ten years of South Korea’s plastic surgery industries. I found it so hard to reach any quantitative conclusion from a large amount of data if I did not know how to use Excel or other computer science languages. And at that moment, I realized the importance of STEM subjects and that they are useful tools.
This realization reminded me of the reasons why I “hated” STEM classes so much. I remember when I was in primary school, I spent almost three hours every day preparing for maths competitions. I was pretty good at math at the age of 9-12 and won pretty a lot of awards in math competitions. But at that period of time, I was not happy at all. I was so tired as I was forced to learn difficult math questions and participate in all kinds of math competitions by my parents. So even though I demonstrated somewhat math talent at a young age, I decided not to touch math at all right after my graduation from primary school. So I started to reject learning any STEM subjects since then.
However, after entering college, I found how useful STEM knowledge can be. And I realized that I should not refuse to learn any knowledge only because I had a bad impression of it. Every subject is connected to each other, and learning a wide range of knowledge and skills can actually help us solve problems from multiple perspectives and more efficiently.
So I take the class “Applied Data Analysis” this semester and learn to use the computer language R. At the beginning of the class, I felt it was so difficult that I honestly did not know how to calculate the mean value of a small size data. But after two months of training and learning, I can handle a large amount of data right now. Seeing the graphs, charts, and numbers I generated using my computer science knowledge, I develop a strong sense of achievement. My next step is to learn how can I apply R to help complete my humanities research projects.
Attached you can see the project I conducted using R.
