Post-STEM

Life is an unrepeatable experiment with no control. ~Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

I read this statistic the other day on some promotion for GoldieBlox : Fewer than 3 in 10 graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM fields) are women. And barely 1 in 10 actual engineers are women. 

Damn.

Should I be feeling guilty that I self-selected out of STEM? No, but I do anyway. It's hard not to feel like I had a responsibility as a woman who loved and was good at math and science to set some sort of example for girls and I blew it. I recognized it briefly when I was a math teacher, but after college, I never actually walked the walk as an engineer, and I let my degree become just a line on a resume, an unexpected answer that raised eyebrows in the circles of the new career path I'd chosen.

The female classmates I had in STEM are all working in the fields of their degrees, some doctors of either the M.D. or Ph.D. persuasion already or getting there. I'm the only one I know who diverged completely down another path. No woman I knew when I was teaching (as far as I remember) had studied engineering, either.

Being an anomaly is both a blessing and a curse. It provides for a compelling narrative and seems to impress people by proxy. (Like, I must be smart if I studied engineering, which is definitely not the most logical leap, as I've written about before. Sidenote: I notice another logical fallacy when I tell people where I'm working this summer, and they use it as a proxy to assume that I have stellar grades. Spoiler alert: I do not.) However, in law school, I find myself not entirely unique. Several women (and men) I know here have STEM degrees and have similar stories of falling out of love with research.

It sometimes worries me that I do not know how to sustain anything, that my past fickleness is not buried in the past at all. I have lived my whole adult life so far in spurts of college, work, and graduate school, all in very different disciplines, and it's natural to be concerned about what next, I think. What if I don't like being a lawyer? What if I burn out? (That is less a "what-if" than a "what-happens-when".) As much as I can tell myself to cross that bridge when I get to it, it doesn't stop the thoughts from creeping in sometimes. The best I can do is just to tell myself that I have grown so much from that 17-year-old kid who chose bioengineering and the 20-year-old who realized it wasn't what she wanted but was too far along to quit, and maybe it's not so important to know exactly what you want to do, so long as you're continuously figuring out what you don't want to do. In no way does this mean law is a default; it's something I actively chose and will pursue until I fall out of love with it. And if/when that happens, it's just one more thing I will have tried with my best effort, and I'll move on with yet another story to tell.