Overheard walking back from class:
Challenge yourself; major in Biology!
Why do you want to do a social science?
What kind of challenge do you suppose we’re talking about here? And how does this reflect an undergraduate’s understanding of the different scientific endeavors?
Well, nothing new here. It’s the tired ol’ cliche that natural sciences are hard sciences and social sciences are soft sciences (if sciences at all).
What’s interesting is that I often teach sociology (global problems) with a biology colleague who teaches environmental biology and the students tend to think the soc part is the hardest at the end, but they initially come to class with the opposite conception.
I’m sure you’re familiar with the perceived hierarchy that puts sciences higher up the farther removed they are from soggy human reality–you know, chemistry is bad physics, and biology is messy chemistry, that sort of thing. And even within physics, the particle people have looked down upon the condensed matter people who can’t reduce things to their fundamentals quite so easily. (Murray Gell-Mann called it “squalid state” physics, not solid state.) I used to buy into this somewhat, I think that’s what kept me going through a not-so-happy graduate career in physics.
Maybe the perception that an endeavor that requires a special space for the activities–a laboratory–also more obviously requires special skills only available to a certain in-group who have gone through the proper course of study. And a lot more people study social sciences rather than the “hard” sciences–perhaps that also gives an aura of exclusivity to biology vis-a-vis a social science.
Majoring in Biology offers you more job opportunities in the future. The social sciences do not.
I know quite a few people with SS degrees that have gone back to school and gotten hard science and medical degrees. I don’t know anyone who has gone the other way.
I always thought the difference (in perception, at least) was due to the more quantifiable nature of experimental data in the hard sciences versus the soft sciences.
My understanding is that economics was looked upon as 2nd-tier until economists developed the mathematics and statistics to make it more quantifiable (and respectable).
Now if only they could actually predict something…