Minutes after Jayant is born, he still hasn’t got his name, his vision still blurry, recognizing his parents only by scent. His ability to discern the words his parents say are limited but they do follow an order- tears of joy, words of love and then shortly after, “My boy will be an engineer like his dada, won’t he?”. This follows in many households, and although I am in no position or objection to this form of parental love at such a nascent stage, this conversation often follows late into a child’s life as well in a manner of coercion.
Even before students know what working entails, what a job is and what they like, parents, relatives and even teachers stifle opinions and keep on bombarding them with orthodox professions to a point where as a student, you can’t see beyond that- essentially you are conditioned to choose your career but deep inside you ask yourself- do I really want to do this? You ignore your voice inside, conditioned to a predefined career and perhaps don’t do you best and one day, you sit wondering- what would it be like if I had listened to that voice within and did what I wanted to do?
And the issue is this forced conditioning doesn’t stop at home- even at school, it is common for teachers to discourage Art Majors amongst others. Many institutions do not support children in their little exploratory ventures, regardless of the field- in an education system where some choices are explicitly discouraged and students are not even supported in attempting to investigate what they like, how are we supposed to maximize utility and do what we are best at? Instead, we are forced to memorize F = GMm/R^2 and do a 200 mark test on it- do not get me wrong, these concepts have revolutionized our world and learning these formulae are important. My point however is that, as a science student, teachers often encourage you to just read the concept without ever explaining the whys, discouraging intuition and as an avid science fan- this is a disaster. Many current methods of teaching adulterate the joy of learning and often we see that people enjoy resort to educational material like science pages or youtube channels because they often dwell further and are more engaging.
Even once we decide whether we are into commerce or science, we don’t know what island we want to settle on in this vast ocean, hence as a student, I decided to research, write articles and make memes about random bits of technology and STEM concepts as a past time, to see what I enjoyed. Eventually I realized this could help a wider audience explore about what they like, so I even started making videos and through this I also realized that I love content creation. With hopes that this may help someone else, you can follow @buzzscience on Instagram or go to www.facebook.com/BuzzScience101 or subscribe to the Youtube Channel if you like videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiTPMjGUgZ0/
Change begins when people discuss and therefore, the pages and all my handles also accept articles written by anyone to help build a thriving community.
Note: The picture in the article was taken by Biswarup Ganguli.