Print“What on earth are you going to do with that?” a family friend asks in reaction to finding out my intended majors during a car ride over spring break.
“I don’t know, I just like them both,” I respond, finally too apathetic to spout any sort of intellectual justification for majoring in biology and creative writing.
Before I even arrived at Columbia, I had a pretty strong idea of what I wanted to study during my four years here. I had applied to schools based on their biology and chemistry departments, and was excited to be coming to a school with such a historically impressive writing department, even if I didn’t know how involved I’d be in that subject. I was one of those eager freshmen during NSOP who claimed he knew what he was majoring in—granted, back then I thought I would be pursuing biochemistry instead of biology. During the icebreakers, I was the one who talked about taking a couple years off before med school to “do something meaningful.” By midterms freshman year, I had already written an excel spreadsheet called “CollegePlanned” that listed each requirement for the Core and my two majors organized by semester; that would calculate my GPA for each semester, each major, and cumulatively. Needless to say, I knew what I wanted to do.
By sophomore year, I had forged yet another ambitious excel file—this one named “LifePlanned”—which gave four or five different projections for the next 15 or so years of my life, none of which included anything about writing. So I started to think, why exactly am I doing this? Why major in creative writing at all?
In fact, having a degree in creative writing offers very little to someone whose goals do include pursuing a profession in creative writing. For example, a degree is not at all required to get published, and even graduate writing schools don’t require students’ undergraduate degrees to be in anything related to writing. And, personally, I wanted to go on to med school and didn’t really see myself writing as seriously as some of my friends in my creative writing classes. When you’ve already spent fifty thousand dollars on college, a life of writing just doesn’t seem very economical.
The summer after my sophomore year my brother graduated from Union College with a B.A. in biology and economics. Sitting across the table from him in a greasy pizza place, I told him what I planned to major in and he told me that I was too logical a person to major in creative writing, and that I was probably double majoring for that reason. Mind you, this is the same conversation in which my brother revealed his post-graduation plans of driving a “Mr. Ding-a-Ling” ice-cream truck for the summer.
Regardless of how illogical it seemed to spend such a significant amount of time focusing on enjambment and comma use during the hours my classmates were spending holed up in Butler learning reaction mechanisms, I pressed on. At the tail end of my sophomore year, finishing up the second of four semesters in which I took over 20 points to squeeze in both majors, I thought it best that I drop creative writing—until my last session of a class called “The Unhinged Narrator” with Jenny Offill.
Jenny came into class that day holding a lumpy brown paper bag. She started talking about the difficulties of studying writing, and how to know if it’s really something you should keep pursuing. She told us to pass the bag around and each take out one figurine. As I watched my classmates pull out small plastic lions and penguins from inside the bag, Jenny went on. “These are your writing icons. I want you to keep them on your desks, and whenever you move or change rooms you ask yourself, ‘would I be OK leaving this behind or throwing it away right now?’ If the answer is yes, then okay—you move on and that’s it, you’re done. If even a part of you says no, then keep it around for the next time you move. This way, you’ll always know.” Lucky for me, as a college student I move in and out pretty often, giving me plenty of opportunities for reevaluation.
Nearly three semesters have passed since then, and after each break it becomes easier and easier to snatch my little plastic narwhal off my desk at home or school, slip it in to my pocket, and move ahead.
The fact of the matter is, even if I wasn’t now considering applying to MFA programs in the fall, creative writing has made me a much stronger biology student than I would have been otherwise. Spending all those hours poring over sketches of protein structures has made me a much better writer. Each subject became my hideaway from the other when I felt overwhelmed or frustrated. I’ve finished poems during orgo lectures and pushed electrons through poetry workshops, where one of my classmates once tried to explain how my poem about winter was a metaphor for the crucifixion.
When I tell people that I might get my MFA in poetry before med school now, they usually give me a quizzical look before asking either “Are you going to write poems about medicine?” or “Oh, like William Carlos Williams?”
I’m still not sure which one irks me more.