Content Warning: Suicide, Depression

Reading Time: 16 Minutes

I am very angry.

This is not the type of post I want to write. I want to write fun anime/movie/game reviews with gifs, memes, and legitimate analysis of what makes art beautiful with a side of sad introspection.

This will not be the norm for my blog.

But I’ve been sitting on this for a long time, I could probably say I’ve been dealing with this for my entire life. I don’t intend to give you my whole life story or give you a thorough breakdown of everything wrong with STEM education. But after 5 suicides at my (former) university since the start of this school year (nearly one per month), I think I have to fucking say something. These are just my thoughts and experiences.

Take it or leave it. 

Being Trained

While this post is mostly engaging with American STEM education, this can apply to other education systems as an idea but the issue we are dealing with is inherently very American or at the very least from Capitalism™. Let’s go back, way back. To like the 1950s. The reason why I’m stating that the importance of STEM in America started as a capitalistic idea and the reason why modern STEM is so hyper-accelerated and competitive is because of the Space Race. It’s intertangled with the ideas of the red scare, nationalist pride, and competition coming before all else. I’m not saying that STEM education wasn’t fucked before this or that going as far back as WWII or the industrial revolution isn’t important, but the Space Race is the defining moment that set the tone for what modern STEM should be.

The Space Race quite literally set the aspirations for an entire generation of American youth to the stars. Sputnik 1 was the most aggressive non-confrontational offense on the United States that the Soviet Union could do. It demanded a large culture change. I’m not here to link specific articles or journals to you about how Sputnik and the Space Race changed American education but I can assure you, you can find them. I don’t want this to be super research focused, I’m just here to point a finger at this moment and move on. 

The STEM movement caused by the Space Race was then used as a form of propaganda employed by parents, teachers, and other adults onto children that they can do incredible things such as going to the moon. This is why you hear so many kids in movies, shows, and even real life say “I want to be an astronaut!” This was what parents wanted to hear. While this may be their legitimate dream because of the environment they are in, this was pushed on them by people who wanted them to achieve something great and be seen as reputable members of society that would exceed the average citizen in other countries (aka the Soviet Union). The United States needed to produce scientists who would be able to achieve their goal of going to the moon, that was the culture shift caused by The Space Race/Sputnik. Education was no longer about what children wanted to do with their life or making children as well-rounded as possible (if it ever was) and American education became a church of STEM. Children were praised more than ever when they achieved something in math or science, it became a news story in some cases, and accelerated math/science programs became more and more widespread over the years. 

There is a reason you don’t see this for history, language arts, or social sciences. They weren’t what America needed to compete in the global market. 

This then leads to me talking about my experiences as a “gifted” kid. Especially as a minority in a basically pure white school system growing up, being “gifted” was important for justifying my existence in the academic world. I don’t want to delve fully into the weeds about everything that being “gifted” means because that is far too long for this but I mainly want to talk about the education programs related to it.

It was around 3rd grade when I was moved into accelerated math and science and I was even offered to skip a grade. My parents didn’t want this since I have a brother a year older than me and that would have caused a whole lot of ego issues. I would do A TON of standardized testing and whatnot as an accelerated student and one thing that I noticed was that nobody cared about my reading and writing scores.

There was no accelerated history, language arts, or social sciences. Despite my stellar writing scores and being told by graders that my creativity and content writing was “incredibly unique” that never mattered. It never came up in conversations in school and it never affected my class placements. In fact, my parents told me that the one class I was allowed to do poorly in (get a B) was English/Language Arts because it was unimportant. My reading and writing skills eventually started to deteriorate since they were never valued and in fact, were actively ignored as a danger that would lead me down the wrong path of not being a STEM student (aka what I am now, a failing writer).

I was constantly told that I was a STEM student and was praised for being so good at math and science. Every time I transferred schools they had no issue putting me in accelerated math and science classes but they always ignored anything related to reading/writing. The workload of STEM classes eventually became so strenuous in order to keep up while maintaining other aspects of my life (sports, friendships, hobbies like gaming) that I eventually just streamlined myself as a STEM student who happened to be good at other subjects too because that was what colleges wanted to see. 

I had a perfect resume, could write a great personal essay, and was near the top of my class. How did I feel about myself as a nearly-graduated high school student?

Like absolute fucking shit.

Competition

By high school, everyone who has played the game of STEM education properly ends up in the same place. People who were formerly accelerated only end up in the slightly ahead sections while people like me ended up taking Calculus 1 and 2 my junior year and Calculus 3 my senior year.

My high school Calc class was an absolute fucking nightmare. A culture that has told all of these kids that they are special for one reason or another doing math that most adults try to actively forget. There were the students who could keep up and those who couldn’t. Seeing people who were genuinely quite smart being left behind because of STEM’s tendency to keep moving forward no matter what made me feel awful. With how difficult Calc 1 and 2 were it was hard to spare the time to help other people keep up and in fact, you were almost encouraged by the system to not help others. The more people slowing down class meant the more time you were spending not learning new material which meant YOU were getting put behind. If just keeping up in the race was hard why would you go backwards and try to help someone get back up.

This was how competition manifested in the Calc classroom. It wasn’t as brutal as a dog eat dog world but it was as simple as there were those who could and those who couldn’t. And among the hyper-accelerated students, there was a group of elite students who would basically be ahead of the rest of the class. I was in that group, not necessarily by choice. My brother basically forced me to attend the sessions because my parents wanted me to (oh yes me and my older brother were in the same calc class that is a whole issue I won’t get into here) and this was where students tried to out do each other. Being given extra difficult problems and whoever could finish them fastest would be praised and could (wo)mansplain that to the rest of the class.

I soon learned that it was more of a hassle to try and stand out in these groups as everyone there was so competitive that if you out did them they would never leave you alone. The group had its own drama and everything but by the time I got to deal with all of that stuff at the end of the school day I realized something.

I was tired.

Exhaustion

This is something I really hate to admit, but I was really tired by the time I was a junior in high school. I was tired of everything. Life, school, sports, hobbies, everything. I was a lifeless husk of a person who had too many responsibilities. While I could still achieve the goals required of me to still keep that “gifted” title and make it into college, I made far more mistakes than usual. And as opposed to anyone asking me what’s wrong, I was condemned for making mistakes in the first place.

I had teachers pull me aside and ridicule me for being lazy, my parents were relentless and brutal with my punishments, and even my brother would tell me how much of a failure I was becoming.

Mind you, I still had a 4.6 GPA, was on the cross-country team, and did plenty of other after-school activities while basically being a chaffuer/babysitter for the cross-country underclassmen. Just a couple of falters in my last 2 years of high school and people started to tell me I wasn’t going to graduate/make it into college anymore.

This is the pressure that STEM education put on me and many others. I started trying to think of ways out of it. I would escape into my hobbies of gaming, I started to write standup comedy to vent, and I would stay up all night making sure I didn’t forget anything.

By the end of high school, I was getting around 0-2 hours of sleep a night. I lost around 30 pounds. And I was depressed out of my fucking mind.

But it was all fine since I somehow graduated and made it into college! Right?

Breaking Point

I had already had a suicide attempt by the time I graduated high school but it was a forbidden topic. No one in my family was allowed to talk about it and it was to never be mentioned again. Don’t bring it up ever, it will only make you look bad. It must have just been from one really bad day.

Getting into college was supposed to solve everything. I signed up to be a first-year engineering major because that was really all that was left for me at this point. I needed to do something worthy of what my education has pushed me to do. Didn’t matter if it was what I wanted to do or not, I did it because I had to. This what what I was set up to do.

First-year engineering is like a weird fever dream. At the start of the year they do several orientation kinda things for the first-year engineering students. I still very vividly remember going with one of my friends to one of the orientations and its like, an entire entertainment hall is filled with promising first-year engineering students being preached to. It was like those weird big pharmaceutical conferences where they hype the whole company up. They have several speakers, some from the university and other outside speakers from big companies. They talk about how promising the students from the university are when they enter the workforce, the incredible things alumni have achieved, and how much money we were gonna make it. Money was fetishized in STEM. It was almost encouraged to mock other majors about how much more money we were gonna make than them.

Engineering students were supposed to feel superior because they even had their own whole separate campus that was newer and nicer. The college was touted as an engineering school despite having other very robust programs (like agriculture, design, and film) because that was what companies/sponsors wanted to hear.

Then there was FEDD, Freshman Engineering Design Day. FEDD was the first big red flag for me. There was a required engineering class all first-year engineering students had to take. It was another propaganda-like class that told us we were gonna change the world and make tons of money. The big project at the end of the semester though was this design idea. You basically chose a type of project and were randomly assigned to work with other students. It was a group of 3-5. I had a group of 3. One person stopped showing up. I’m sure you can see where this is going.

The premise of this project was that we needed to be able to make something out of nothing to prove our ingenuity needed in engineering. All groups had a $40 budget and had to keep receipts. But, anything you had “lying around” you could use without accounting it into the budget. Now, this already encourages students to lie with how bullshit artificial the rules are but don’t worry, it will get worse later. My partner in this project was a lifesaver, he and I bonded over how much we had to work on this. We basically worked every other day for a couple hours the last month of the semester for this 1-hour class. We did woodwork, painting, and coding all for this cute little homemade pinball machine. Now, the night before the project the arduino’s/code weren’t working so we improvised it and I made the poster for our project the morning of, but it all turned out really well.

Here are some pics of this project which got 2nd place out of the first block of arcade machines.

A reminder, all-nighters and not taking care of yourself/overworking was encouraged and basically expected for this project. This is also just a trend in STEM in general.

We had to present this project at basically a BIG conference center. This center was the same one used for job festival stuff which I will get to later. The sad thing is that the person who stopped showing up to our project ended up showing up to present with us as well. We didn’t scold them because we were just too tired but that is the only person for a group project ever that I intentionally gave a bad self-review grade on to the professor. 

Everyone was so incredibly impressed with our work. I made it all meaningful by making our design a tribute to Satoru Iwata and did all the public speaking and presenting for the work that made us seem cool. Our professor knew that our groupmate had stopped showing up and to her credit was very nice to use despite being part of a broken system.

Oh yeah, I mentioned I was in 2nd place right? The winner was a 5-person team whose parents were physics researchers who helped them and who had access to laser cutters and plexiglass that didn’t need to be accounted for in the budget. So shockingly, their project looked more professional than the one made by 2 first-year students holding onto dear life. But, we still got a shirt that, I kid you not, said “WINNER” on it.

Proving that yes, we are better than our peers. If the narrative of competition wasn’t clear by now, it’s about to become fucking crystal. 

Another thing you are told very early on in first-year engineering is how many people you see around you that “aren’t going to make it” as in they drop out or change majors. It was supposed to instill fear into us in order for us to work harder. Making it into your department from first-year engineering was supposed to be seen as a huge achievement and everyone else who didn’t make it was a quitter or a failure.

For some reason, people think that is the only outcome in these situations.

In my first semester of college, a first-year engineering student jumped from several stories of a building to their death.

In broad daylight.

A passerby attempted to resuscitate them but to no avail. It was declared a suicide. The university was STUNNED by this. Mental health days were not the norm in 2015, but many professors said it was okay to take the day off.

Broken Promises

What STEM people do not fundamentally understand about their programs is that while people can make excuses about it being an anomaly, we should have seen the signs, or nothing could have been done. This is exactly what the programs are designed to do, suicide just happens to be an extreme outlier.

These programs pit students against each other trying to see who breaks first. They firmly believe that pressure only makes diamonds and doesn’t break bones. Students were encouraged to go to job fairs for extra credit and try to get as many job offers as possible. Students were encouraged to try and pitch a startup and make connections with companies as soon as possible. Everyone was expected to be more brilliant than everyone else around them and those who couldn’t keep up were faulty products.

The only difference between the students that quit such as myself and the numerous engineering students who killed themselves over the years is something very simple.

Luck.

There are people who are more predisposed to depression than not. Some people have more support network resources. Other people have access to meet their mental health needs. And others are just lucky. The STEM education system does not care about these things. You either meet the criteria to succeed or you don’t. Whatever happens to you afterwards doesn’t matter, they wipe their hands clean of it.

After being told for years that these students were special, standing above their peers from elementary, to middle, to high school, they are told at the college level that they are not enough. It’s hard to say it’s anything but a broken promise. Because nobody wants to help them.

You either keep up or give up.

I remember my advisor for freshman engineering was a horrifying woman. Nearly every single time I was required to meet with her she would either be screaming at the person before me or a student would walk out of her office crying. I remember she called me on MY PERSONAL PHONE one day to yell at me for missing an appointment. Nobody in the department actually wants to help you if you are struggling. I’m not saying this to trample over the work that some actual good people have done because there are some people. But, the cultural norm is that it is weak to ask for help and that people shouldn’t help you. You can never feel anyone helping you.

If you are so “gifted” you will figure it out yourself.

You Are The Product

It wasn’t until my second year that I was pushed to my limits. It’s not that it wasn’t possible for me to succeed in school. I could have found a way. But the overwhelming feeling was that I wasn’t going to be able to or even if I did, it wasn’t worth it. I was one day away from committing suicide. I might have actually done it if I didn’t remember the horror of what happened in my freshman year. But, my therapist forced me into a mental hospital before I could do anything. This was in fact a legal action where the police cuffed me up and brought me in.

If being an engineering student taught me one thing, it was that I was made to be replaceable. Despite being considered a genius for so long, at some point if I didn’t keep producing results, I would be tossed aside.

And as a reminder, with the number of students that actually do end up dying from suicide, there hundreds even thousands of others who have thought about it, have been stopped, or are going to try again. I am living proof of that.

I genuinely believe that I could have kept going in STEM in terms of raw academic skills and what was expected of me. But the culture of STEM breaks down your soul. It makes you question who you are and what exactly you are worth down to simple numbers.

How many job offers did you get? How many tries did it take to get into your department? How highly ranked is your Co-Op? 

The fact that everything about the worth of your existence should be able to be written down on a piece of paper feels so cruel. But, as the STEM machine churns, it needs to be able to assess everyone as fairly as possible, so everyone is treated cruelly. 

I didn’t even want to be a STEM student, as clear as that is now. I wanted to be a writer and study film and make art and blah blah blah.

That doesn’t matter.

I was good at STEM.

So into the machine I went.

And I was lucky enough to be spat back out in one piece.

America doesn’t care what you want to do with your life. It’s what you SHOULD do with your life that matters. I had the talent to succeed as a person in STEM if I really wanted to. I know that for an absolute fact no matter what others may say of me. But I never wanted to do that. I was tricked into it by everyone who praised me and pretended like being good at STEM made be better than other people.

It doesn’t, it just makes me a more appealing product.

While STEM education started as a Space Race initiative, it soon transformed into being the backbone of American capitalism. The big tech companies in America are all powered by STEM and make the mostest of moneys. While there are those who are lucky enough to be able to make their way through it unharmed, many new graduates get churned out of the work force after being overworked and used for their passion and drive in order to make some bigwigs a quick buck.

The machine never stops running.

I got lucky to jump out of it before I invested my whole career and life into it. And I’m not saying there aren’t people who legitimately enjoy STEM and are ethical about it. I’m just saying holistically, there are fundamental problems with it.

Those 5 suicides at my university are proof of that.

They are not incalculable anomalies, they are a pattern of behavior caused by something much bigger than any one person or university. And no matter how heartbroken the people in charge are when they see this stuff happen.

They wouldn’t change it for the world.

If that meant that their university even has a chance of producing less students to go to co-ops or to graduate into a job then they wouldn’t take it. These universities have deals with companies and they are expected to meet their quota. They obviously don’t want students to kill themselves but if that is what it takes for them to meet their quota they will just say that they could have never foreseen these events.

There is nothing more important that meeting the bottom line.

STEM education is predicated on people dropping out and suffering from it. It wants to push students to their absolute limits hoping to make gems out of them. They will absolutely break some eggs in order to make an omelet. Greatness needs to be about overcoming what breaks other people.

It’s gross. I absolutely fucking hate it. I was apart of it. And it’s the truth.

We are telling people they are worthless if they can’t reach the stars. That’s what the system is designed to do

Just because you made it out fine or it isn’t as bad as where you are is irrelevant. The fact that it could ever get this bad is absolutely fucking unacceptable.

How, HOW CAN YOU LET THIS PATTERN GO ON FOR SEVERAL YEARS? WHY DOES A KID HAVE TO DIE EVERY YEAR NEARLY EVERY MONTHAND THEN WE MAKE SOME STUPID STATEMENT AND MAYBE HAVE A MENTAL HEALTH DAY. WHY DO WE TREAT PEOPLE LIKE FAULTY PRODUCTS?

I’m really tired of it. I try to step away from this part of my past sometimes because it’s ugly and not pleasant to talk about, but it made me who I am today. 

STEM education is inherently broken and no one wants to fix it because helping people means hurting companies.

I just get so crushed every single time I see someone who was in the same position as me but just wasn’t as lucky.

I wanted to change things so bad that I even was an education major for a bit because I wanted to save the students who would end up like me or worse.

But, I learned I’m not that strong.

The best thing I can do is hopefully one day, write something that tells this story in a worthwhile way so that maybe enough eyes are opened and then someone stronger can make that change.

I am very weak. The STEM education has made that very clear to me.

But I’m not weak enough to keep letting this happen without having something to say. I will never forget what STEM did to me and countless others.

And the sad thing is, I will have constant reminders like this to keep me going.

I am very angry.

I hope you are too.

– Jared/Zeph