It's always one of the first things a person asks whenever meeting somebody new at college. It's the question that usually immediately follows, "What's your name?" or, "Where are you from?" The query I'm referring to, of course, is, "What's your major?"
Majors really define us university students. In many cases, it segregates us as well. Every college seems to have its own stigmas. The students in the business school are pretentious, the communication students have an exciting future ahead of them as drag bums, the engineers are nerdy, the liberal arts majors are outspoken (see: annoying), and the natural sciences majors are trying to think of plan B when med school doesn't pan out. Just because these statements aren't valid doesn't mean most of us don't subscribe to them.
To put the endless resentment and arguments to rest, I sought to decipher which college is indeed superior to the others.
I could have done this perhaps by sifting through various admissions numbers and test scores, but I really wanted to get to the bottom of this conundrum, and you can only learn so much from numbers (if you're a communication major, anyway).
Thus, I determined that the only acceptable way to unequivocally declare a winner was to have students from different colleges engage in a daring contest of skill and intellect. Fearing the legal implications of an arranged knife fight, I decided to settle for the next best thing - I gathered six students from six of the most populated colleges at UT and had them play a game of Trivial Pursuit.
The colleges represented in the game were Liberal Arts, Natural Sciences, Business, Engineering, Communication and Fine Arts.
The game began with the six eager students having fun, but it quickly devolved into a war of attrition after questions such as "What is statistically the safest age of life" (10) and "What's the shortest word in the English alphabet that contains the letters A, B, C, D, E and F" (feedback) were drawn.
The game itself ended up lasting more than two-and-a-half hours. Mind you, this was after everyone agreed halfway through to award a piece of "pie" whenever someone answered a question correctly rather than when they landed on the space that served as the category's headquarters. Throughout the contest, cries of "I'm sick of this game!" and "That country doesn't even exist anymore!" and "Have I mentioned that I'm sick of this game?" reverberated from the participants.
The unequivocal highlight of the game occurred when the business representative, whose name I will omit for obvious reasons, incorrectly guessed who wrote the diary of Anne Frank. If you don't know the answer to this question, kindly roll up the newspaper you're holding and whack yourself in the head a few times (The answer starts with "A" and ends with "nne Frank"). Although I didn't consult with Jenny Barrow, the Natural Sciences major, about this, I believe the medical term for the episode would have been referred to as "a brain fart."
When all was said and done, representatives from three of the six colleges had acquired five of the six necessary pieces of pie to win (Communication, Engineering and Natural Sciences) but ultimately it was Audrey McKenna, the representative from the College of Liberal Arts, who came out on top by correctly identifying which park's entrance was graced by the Roosevelt Arch (Yellowstone National Park).
Some may say this experiment proved nothing and that it was, by all accounts, pointless. I commend these people on their keen observation skills. The one thing I can honestly say I did discover from this grand trial was that I should have been much more daring as a 10-year-old.
In truth, the only thing more frivolous than the experiment itself is the argument that sparked it. The fact is, you can't expect one person to represent a college, because every college has such a diverse base of students. This is why the stereotypes that surround each college and the argument over which one is superior is simply absurd. This isn't to say some students aren't more intelligent than others at UT, but a student's major is not a judge of their academic prowess.
Conveniently enough, on the side of the Trivial Pursuit box itself, there was a quote by Alexander Pope that put it best: "What mighty contests rise from trivial things."
Rather than attempting to create an unfounded hierarchy through our chosen areas of study, let's embrace the similarities we share through our membership at this University. While all of us have varying interest and some of our majors offer the possibility for more lucrative careers, the fact is that for the time being, we are all students at the University of Texas, and our similarities with one another far outweigh our differences.
Some students should hold their head a little higher when they say their major from now on, and other students should perhaps tilt their noses a little lower when they announce theirs, because at the end of the day, we're all Longhorns, and there's nothing trivial about that.
Treadway is a radio-television-film sophomore who knows who wrote the diary of Anne Frank.
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