Allen Lew's Thoughts

So once again I’ve taken a long break from updating this thing. I guess it’s time I do so.

I did what I normally do during Spring Break, which was go home and see my family. My father’s side of the family always gathers together during break time, so I definetly had to come down for one day. Plus I’ve had a great deal of paper writing to do this semester, so I had to make sure to get a great deal of that done, and vacationing somewhere would not have allowed me to do that. All that paper writing, though, made me wonder what it would be like if I majored in a more paper orientated major in the humanities or something.

After spending 4 years on the Berkeley campus, I’m honestly starting to hate the whole concept of majors. For people who pick them well, that’s great. However, I’d honestly like to do a variety of things, but majoring makes people so focused in things that it seems to make people study something so much that just grow to hate it. Or sometimes they get so into their major, they seem to devalue everything else. I don’t know. Perhaps if I tried a more flexible major (i.e. Interdisciplinary studies) maybe I could avoid this conundrum and strike that balance. Or maybe I’m just dreaming.

I loved how Ed Helms of the Daily Show describes how he picked his major at Oberlin.

I was a geology major through my sophomore year. That took me to the Bahamas for a month for “research,” which was great, but it also showed me how completely uninterested I was in geology. I wanted to change majors, but I had limited options because I had been through two years of course study already. So, out of desperation, I opted for Oberlin’s “Design Your Own Major.” I cobbled together a number of theater, computer science, film studies, and art classes in a Hail Mary attempt to graduate in four years. Somehow the committee bought it and thus “Film Theory and Technology” was born. I am the only person in the world with that major…and for good reason.