I’ve spent much of my free time these past few weeks researching internships for the upcoming summer ó it seems premature, I know, but many applications are actually due in November. Surprise! The barrier I keep butting up against for these internships is not that a stipend isn’t offered or that I would have to find my own housing (though these are certainly problems I’ll have to solve when the time comes). Rather, I’m finding that I’m not qualified for many of the internships because I haven’t taken “appropriate coursework” in the area. For instance, I’ve never had the opportunity to take a book-publishing course or advanced journalism, which rules out the possibility of spending a summer with Scholastic or Time Magazine ó lofty goals, I know, but it would have been nice to at least qualify to apply for them.
I do understand why this is the case. We are a small college, not a university teeming with tens of thousands of undergrads. We benefit in countless ways from attending Wooster, but our all-encompassing liberal arts education is sorely lacking in originality in some regards. In some schools, for example, food science is an actual major, and can prepare students for entering the field in ways that a degree in a general science simply can’t do.
At the same time, I also have a friend of a friend who once designed his own major in his greatest passion, broccoli. He went on to achieve great success working in close contact with his most beloved cruciferous vegetable ó but what if no researchers wanted to study broccoli at the time of his graduation? With such a specific field of study, he ran a huge risk of driving himself into a corner.
I’m not suggesting that Wooster add a class in the Chemistry of Broccoli (in fact,† I would prefer that we don’t), but it would be nice to have some more variety in our classes.
Kris Fronzak is a Viewpoints editor for the Voice. She can be reached for comment at hkfronzak@gmail.com.