STEM or liberal arts—man, I’m sitting here in my Ann Arbor apartment with November rain tapping the window like it’s trying to code in Morse, and this debate hits different post-2025. Like, I’m literally wearing a hoodie that says “Poets Against Algorithms” while my second monitor runs a machine learning model that’s… honestly probably writing better haikus than me right now. The future of education post-2025 feels less like a choice and more like surviving a blender that someone threw both calculus textbooks and oil paints into.
Why My STEM or Liberal Arts Crisis Started with a $7 Taco
Okay, real talk—last month I spent seven bucks on a taco that had “locally sourced AI-generated salsa” which is peak post-2025 education nonsense. The truck guy was a philosophy major who taught himself neural networks to optimize spice ratios. That’s the hybrid future nobody prepared us for in 2015. My own journey? Dropped out of Michigan State’s engineering program because I couldn’t stop writing angsty poetry in the margins of my circuit diagrams. Professor caught me annotating Kirchhoff’s laws with metaphors about unrequited love—got a C- and a weirdly supportive email about “interdisciplinary potential.”
The Post-2025 Education Mess I’m Actually Living
Here’s where STEM or liberal arts gets stupid—my current gig pays me to write code that analyzes medieval manuscripts. Yeah. The same hands that once failed thermodynamics now train models to detect emotion in 14th-century marginalia. The future of education post-2025 isn’t choosing sides; it’s this weird Frankenstein mashup where:
- My liberal arts degree (finally finished online during lockdown #3) taught me how to ask “but why does this algorithm dream of electric sheep?”
- My self-taught Python skills pay rent
- But seriously, nobody warned me I’d need therapy-level emotional intelligence to debug sentiment analysis on love letters from 1348
The contradiction kills me—I’m making bank teaching machines to understand human feeling while I still can’t explain my own emotions to my mom.
That Time Liberal Arts Saved My STEM Ass
Picture this: 2 AM, production down, my gradient descent stuck in local minima hell. Instead of more math, I applied dramatic irony from my Shakespeare class—treated the loss function like a tragic hero with fatal flaws. Worked. The model converged. My boss thought I was a genius; I was just drunk on iambic pentameter and Red Bull. This is post-2025 education reality—your English prof’s close reading skills debug better than Stack Overflow sometimes.
What the Experts Get Wrong About STEM or Liberal Arts Post-2025
These think pieces keep saying we need “T-shaped professionals” but I’m more like a drunk ampersand (&) wobbling between disciplines. The future of education post-2025 isn’t STEM or liberal arts; it’s:
- Knowing when to use calculus
- Knowing when to use empathy
- Knowing both fail spectacularly at 3 AM when your cat deletes your database
My Most Embarrassing Post-2025 Education Failure
True story: Applied for a “Digital Humanities” fellowship with a portfolio that accidentally included my teenage fanfiction.net archives. Got accepted. The committee loved my “authentic voice in computational narrative.” I cried in a Starbucks bathroom while my acceptance email loaded. STEM or liberal arts? Try “accidental performance art meets data science.”
Building Your Own Weird Post-2025 Education Path
Look, I’m not your guidance counselor (thank God), but here’s what actually worked in my chaotic journey:
- Steal from both worlds: Use liberal arts close reading on error logs—like really interrogate why your code is “sad”
- Make stuff that scares you: I built an AI that writes breakup texts in the style of Jane Austen. Got 10k downloads. Still haven’t told my ex.
- Find your freaks: My Discord server of poet-coders meets Thursdays to critique each other’s regex like it’s workshopping sonnets
The Future of Education Post-2025 (According to This Hot Mess)
STEM or liberal arts isn’t the question anymore—it’s “how much of yourself are you willing to let these systems eat?” I’m keeping the parts that write terrible love poems at 3 AM. The algorithms can have my productivity metrics.
Anyway, rain stopped. My model’s done training and—holy shit—it just generated a sonnet about gradient descent that made me tear up. Post-2025 education wins again.
Your turn: What’s the weirdest skill mashup that’s saved your ass lately? Drop it in the comments—bonus points if it involves both calculus and crying. And if you’re building something that shouldn’t exist, DM me on X—I collect beautiful disasters.
[1] MIT Technology Review – The Rise of Hybrid Degrees [2] Chronicle of Higher Education – When English Majors Code [3] My actual failed thermodynamics notebook on GitHub
