By Emi Gruender
“You going to be doctor like Mommy? Lawyer? Make money, hon-ee,” my grandma chided me lovingly, with a gentle but distinctly Vietnamese tap on the wrist.
“No, Ba Ngoai,” is what I would have said if I wasn’t a coward. “I want to write and perform for the rest of my life. Maybe even teach, one day.” But I didn’t, and simpered at my beloved Ba Ngoai with a sweet expression instead.
“Maybe, Ba Ngoai.” I replied. “We’ll see.”
Even my 80-something-year-old grandmother knows it: the “S” in STEM stands for stable. Lawyer and Businessman are close enough, when it comes down to it—STEMBL, perhaps.
In the highly-educated and wildly technological Silicon Valley, however, mentioning a career in STEM—or other highly rated careers like Lawyer or Psychologist—is sure to earn an approving nod. Education is the path to success—and I daresay this holds true—but the skewed amount of majors leaning toward STEM-related careers despite a lack of passion or even basic enjoyment for the given subject worries me. Take Comp-Sci majors, for example. How many of them are doing it for love of the craft? How many of them are doing it because they believe it will be a fulfilling career? And how many of them are doing it because they believe there’s a six-figure salary waiting for them on the other side of the rainbow, in the hands of some mega-corporation that needs computer science engineers stat?
When I was younger, I ping-ponged from career interests like…well… like a ping-pong ball. Perhaps Barbie is to blame for some of it.
“I want to be an astronaut!”
“I want to be a rocket engineer!”
“I want to be a movie star!”
But the one I settled on, the one I was really happy with, was a teacher. With a career in creative writing on the side, of course. But when I told this to some of the adult figures in my life, they reacted less than positively.
“You don’t think I would be a good teacher?” I asked.
“No, no, Emi,” they said. “It’s just not a very stable job.”
I still have no idea what they were talking about, to this day. But that reaction stuck with me from third grade onwards. Maybe I didn’t want to be a teacher, after all. I was curious. And good at science. Maybe I could be a scientist? An engineer, maybe.
“I want to be a scientist.”
My answer to that age-old question changed that day. Scientist in what, specifically? I had no clue. I made little contraptions in my room to pulley items up to my loft bed. Was that what engineers did? I liked looking at plants. Was that what plant scientists did?
It didn’t matter, in the end. When I saw adults beam down at me for my plucky reply, I beamed back. If I wanted to be a scientist, or a doctor, or an engineer; it didn’t matter. That was a job for smart people, and I was declaring that I was going to be one of them. Even in third grade, I knew. If I had revealed my secret desire to help people as a teacher, or entertain people as an actor, I would meet that same teeth-kiss and less than shining response from these all-knowing adults.
“Are you sure, Emi?”
“It’s really hard to make a living with that, Emi.”
Now that I am a junior in highschool—I clearly know that. I know the risks of pursuing a career in creative writing or performing. But back when I was in third grade, when I was told the world was my oyster only if I picked the right career out of a sea of wrong ones, it was crushing. I stopped writing in my journals and notebooks as much.
“If I can’t do this for the rest of my life,” I thought. “I might as well not do it at all.”
In Silicon Valley, there’s not much we can do to change the clear favor of STEM-related careers over humanistic ones. It’s what Silicon Valley is built upon. Changing foundations proves not so easy as a personal-evidence-based Op/Ed in a small highschool newspaper. But I can at least aim to change your opinion: let children dream. And if they grow up and decide they do not want to take the “S” for stability, let them.