Week 1: Two Cultures

From the 2015 Agar Art Contest: An art piece a strain of S. cerevisiae, infected with a virus called L-A. 
http://www.microbeworld.org/backend-submitted-news/1998

I didn't expect the concept of two cultures to be challenging. C.P. Snow discusses how (Western) society is seemingly split into two realms, the sciences and the humanities, and how that divide is impeding social progress. What I didn't expect, however, was the relevance this concept has had throughout my entire life. 

I was born and raised in Orange County, California. As the daughter of Vietnam War refugees, I have struggled with my bicultural identities as a Sino-Vietnamese American. My family sometimes labels me a "banana"--yellow on the outside but white on the inside. Greater society, however, sometimes doesn't see me as an American because of my physical appearance, leading to questions such as "Where are you really from?" Never fully Asian but also never completely American, I feel like I was undergoing “a struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders, [and] an inner war” as I constantly juggle two self-consistent but seemingly habitually incompatible frames of reference (Anzaldua, 1999). 

UCLA's Franz Hall, home of the Psychology department
http://www.paulrwilliamsproject.org/exhibition/1960s/

In the academic world, I am a psychology major with a minor in education studies. People easily label me as having a North Campus minor, but they struggle trying to box me in based off of my major. Although I will earn a Bachelor of Arts in June, that doesn't change the face that I have had to learn about brain and eye anatomy, which maps onto life sciences. Psychology is even under the Dean of Life Sciences's jurisdiction, so psychology majors stand with all the other majors traditionally noted as life science during the College of Letters and Sciences Commencement ceremony. Franz Hall is even noted as the crossroads between North and South Campus, with the Herb Albert School of Music on its left and the MS Building on its right.

Are the arts and sciences really diametrically opposites?
http://circaedu.com/our-work/case-studies/infographics/

I believe the arts and sciences are important, with no discipline being better than the other. Of course, society, has its own values on what it thinks is important, but I am happy that we are slowly moving toward a third culture that combines what is historically considered two polar opposites. We see evidence of this, such as the med school student who uses art to study and the move away from STEM to STEAM. I can't wait to see what new ideas, improvements, and theories will emerge because of this third culture. 

Sources
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands = La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999. Print.

Lawrence, Hannah. "This Med Student Makes His Own Comics To Help Him Study." BuzzFeed. Buzzfeed. Web. 02 Apr. 2016.

Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. London: Cambridge UP, 1993. Print.

Vesna, Victoria. "Toward a Third Culture: Being In Between." Leonardo 34.2 (2001): 121-25. 

Zakaria, Fareed. "Why America's Obsession with STEM Education Is Dangerous."Washington Post. The Washington Post. Web. 02 Apr. 2016.