“”I hate chemistry.””

If I had a dollar for every time I heard those words – or said them myself – my worries about tuition payments would be a tiny speck on the horizon behind me. Heck, instead of taking the bus to school, I’d pull up to the Scripps pier in my 200-foot yacht-house – and if an oceanographer complained about it, I’d tell him to kiss my diamond-encrusted foot.

But even though I could make a pretty penny by admitting it, I don’t really hate chemistry. I dislike chemistry. More specifically, I dislike the gulf between the work I do and its benefit to the world. A ditch-digger must get a certain satisfaction at the end of the day, because he’s dug a ditch. It’s right there. But as a lab monkey, all I get is the vague belief that my little test-tube antics may do something, somewhere, eventually, as a tiny cog in some massive machine. My dislike for chemistry is very specific.

That’s why it bothers me when I hear the occasional younger student say that they hate chemistry, railing against UCSD’s general education requirements. They complain that, as literature or economics majors, the likelihood that they will need to use chemistry in the real world is next to nil. Why, they lament, should they be forced to learn the Gibbs free energy equation, or integrate rate laws or calculate charge density on a conjugated system?

I’ve never really understood this argument. For one, the GE requirements work both ways. I doubt “”The Canterbury Tales”” will ever come up in a conversation, but I’ve read them all the same – in Middle English, to boot. I’m sure the Harrod-Domar model of economic growth will come in handy one day – but I’ve yet to see that day.

Furthermore, humanities and social science majors have the option of fulfilling their GE requirements with watered-down math and science sequences for “”nonscience”” majors. Science types, on the other hand, end up in the same lower-division sequences as the real-deal political scientists and Baudelaire-spouting literature majors. Oh, the horrid injustice!

But I don’t mean to complain. I didn’t mind British Literature. I enjoyed the foreign language classes I took. I even felt a little bad for my humanities-oriented friends: My introductory sequences were designed to challenge me, while their lower division classes were meant for everyone.

While my friends were whining about the injustice of their required calculus courses, they should have been up in arms about how the humanities departments can’t afford to have separate classes for majors. They should be enraged that their departments expect no more out of them than they do a casual student.

In “”the real world,”” you’ll come across things you don’t really want to do – but you’ll have to do them anyway. May as well reserve your hate for things you can change.