I like to think of myself as a renaissance man.

I’m interested in just about everything. I like reading Austrian economics and medieval romance. I’m studying to be an actor and a playwright, but I’ve taken enough math classes on the side that I think I’m just short of a minor. I’m a huge fan of sports, although my dreams of being a star athlete faded when I went an entire Little League season without getting a hit. Growing up, I got a huge kick out of history, literature and philosophy.

But there was one subject I never got into: science. I wanted to like it. I read “A Brief History of Time” and said, “huh?” I took a couple years of biology in high school and tried to get excited watching mealworms and fruit flies. But not even papier-mache volcanoes in kindergarten could rouse my unscientific mind.

So I put off taking science in college for as long as I could. Finally, last semester, my adviser told me I had to bite the bullet, so I signed up for Chemistry for the Liberal Arts, dreading the experience.

Geared for non-majors, Chemistry for the Liberal Arts uses issues affecting our everyday lives, such as ozone depletion and pollution, to make scientific concepts relevant. So far this semester, we’ve learned how infrared radiation makes molecular bonds vibrate and how that contributes to global warming. We’ve swallowed complicated terms like electronegativity and hydrogen bonding to see why water is denser than ice. I can now tell you far more about chlorofluorocarbons and unit analysis than you’d ever want to know.

As someone interested in the world and especially in government policy, this newfound knowledge has been eye opening. Up until now, whenever I’d see a headline about increasing UV radiation or carbon trading, my eyes would glaze over and I’d find a different news story to read. I knew this was bad—environmental policy is one of the most far-reaching and controversial issues confronting us today—but I yawned and figured I’d leave it to the experts to muddle through that stuff. Recently, though, I’ve attacked these stories with a vengeance and gotten a handle on their content. I don’t feel quite so sheepish when I read The New York Times anymore.

As you register for classes, I encourage you to sign up for something way out of your comfort zone. If you’re shy, take an introductory theater class. If you’re an indoor type, take scuba diving. If you’re one of those people who actually likes science, take some crazy humanities course. Now is the perfect time to discover something you never knew you cared about.

I can’t say I’ve been made a science junkie. But I’m a better, more informed person for taking chemistry. Turns out, the world is a very interesting place.
 

Nathaniel French is a junior theater major. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].