“What do you want to major in?”
If I had a dollar for every time I heard that question during my senior year in high school, I’d be a millionaire. The excitement about heading off to university in a few months caused quite a blowout with students trying to find other classmates who were gonna study in the same field. I remember that I would nervously force myself to reply in a seemingly silent tone: Political Science.
Political Science – A stereotype
Political science was a rare major for students to pursue at my high school, with me being the only one from my graduating class to go down that line. The common stigma that people have about politics is that you have to come from a family that is either rich, powerful, or both to actually end up as a politician.
Therefore, if you weren’t a Clinton, like me, my previous classmates assumed that you would be working in Starbucks or a small office job with your Bachelors of Arts in Political Science framed and hung on a cubicle wall. In short, if your surname didn’t happen to be “Kennedy”, chances are you’re gonna be working a part-time shift making coffee.
Why is political science so important then?
In the few weeks that I have spent at the University of British Columbia, my courses have taught me that politics is more than a newspaper headline or a corruption scandal, but a broad study of how humans, the state, and ideologies interact and influence internal and external entities. It’s an analysis of why events like wars happen, how does it affect the people, what should the governance do about it, and when should certain resources be allocated.
For example, in the famous book ‘Persepolis’ by Marjane Satrapi, a graphic narrative of Marjane’s accounts of Iran during the 1980s and later, the Islamic Revolution, a political coup d’etat, brought about new religious leaders to the state and imposed a cultural requirement that women must cover themselves up by wearing a burqa and a veil. On a sociological point of view, this statewide issue of altering the culture can be viewed differently by using a method called “sociological imagination”, a term coined by Charles Wright Mills. Sociological imagination is to alter one’s perspective of a milieu, therefore we can see the requirement to wear a burqa and veil as something restrictive to Marjane Satrapi during her childhood in Iran, because her personality was to be rebellious and free, instead of caged and closed in. Politics is able to influence the sociological and psychological aspects of a nation.
As for me?
I have learned that there’s nothing limiting or shameful about being a political science major. Though it may be an undesirable and uncertain path to many, those who do decided to walk down this paved road will find that political science is an examination of humans that is closely related to how society functions and what individuals will feel – a true social science.