The science of why I’m not drawn to science

Hi everyone,

My name is Kateryna Okhrimchuk, but most people just call me Cathy! I was born in Lviv, Ukraine but have been living in New York City for almost 15 years now. I’m a freshman here at Penn State and I did summer session so I’m extremely happy to be somewhat ahead. I’ve been playing lacrosse for most of my life (and hopefully will join the club team), love to work out, and love R&B and rap. I’m currently in the Division of Undergraduate Studies but hope to switch to Smeal as a Finance Major with a minor in either Econ or Political Science.

To be completely honest, the reason why I’m taking this course is because I needed to fulfill a general education science credit. Classes like biology, chemistry, and physics scare me, so I was looking for a class that wasn’t too difficult and didn’t require me to memorize formulas or do scary science math. When I was reading the description of SC200 on LionPath, I was extremely interested in the fact that it was more about getting you to think than to figure out how to find the velocity of a moving car. One of my friends also took the class last year, and just like me, he hates science. He told me that he really enjoyed it and that Andrew’s accent was really cool, so I thought “why not?”. I also really appreciated the fact that the class started at 1:35 PM, giving me plenty of time to sleep in and look like this:

                                                     :SLEEPING BEAUTY AKA ME

The reason why I’m not planning on being a science major is because I’ve felt really excluded my entire life from the “smart science kids”. I’ve noticed that teachers always favored the students that did well in their classes, which was never me in anything having to do with cells, molecules, and chemicals by the way, so I’ve never really had the chance to love it. When we were looking through microscopes for bio labs in the 7th grade, I was always the kid in the back that let the other guy do it, and when we were doing chemistry labs sophomore year of high school the teacher assigned me to write down the results because I just wasn’t as good or as fast at completing the task as the other people in my group. I definitely don’t hate science, I just feel like I’ve never been welcomed or given a chance at learning it well. On the flip side, though, I’ve always excelled in subjects like Math, Economics, History, and English, so when teacher’s in those classes liked me and gave me chances to do the subjects and voice what I thought, it made me love the class even more, so I tried hard and succeeded in those subjects, while I’m sure other people felt left out. It’s unfair, but it happens.

I’m not going to let my past bad experiences stop me from enjoying this class, though. While I was going through the syllabus and the things that we were going to talk about, I found so many interesting topics that really made you think about the world and how things around us work. One that was especially interesting to me was the question of Where does evil come from? When I tried to Google it, only the biblical answers like this one came up, but is there an actual scientific answer?

One thought on “The science of why I’m not drawn to science

  1. Dana Corinne Pirrotta

    Hey Cathy! I was drawn to your post because of its funny title. I am also a freshman, and chose SC 200 because I can relate to your apprehension towards “scary science math”. I know exactly what you mean when you wrote about being excluded from the science kids that seemed to have everything figured out. I love English and history as well, but hopefully we can both develop more confidence and appreciation for science! Reading articles like this always make me feel better for not being so great at science.

    -Dana

Leave a Reply