Coming into college, I was aimless; I didn’t know what I wanted to study or what I wanted to do with my life. On a whim, I signed up for a sociology 101 class my first semester. I learned the reasoning behind so many social phenomena like racial and gender discrimination and why wealth inequality is so prevalent. I had finally found a subject matter that interested me and helped me understand and process the world around me. I’ve had so many amazing opportunities that I would’ve never thought were possible.
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I get to sit in on court cases and experience what I want to do in real time.
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One of my professors is a judge in Miami-Dade county who occasionally lets her students come to her courtroom and view proceedings. I’ve also had another professor who is a judge in a different circuit. Both of them are employed by the university to teach courses to the sociology department. Viewing proceedings and listening to arraignments can sound boring, but when I’m in the courtroom, I really come alive. It’s like I’m seeing my future 10 years in advance when I watch the lawyers badger back and forth. For privacy reasons, trials are closed to the public if the judge so chooses. I got to witness a case that should have been a slam-dunk death penalty case be plead down to 20 years. Without my major, I would have never had the opportunity to witness such a mind-blowing decision. I get to wake up every day and work hard toward my future, hopefully working in the courthouse that fueled my desire to become a lawyer. These are just some of the perks of being a sociology major – we witness history being made and we get to help influence policy through our education.
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I love my major and everything about it… except the reading.
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I do upwards of 175 pages of reading per week between my four sociology classes. As much as I love learning about crime’s effects on public policy and how we select the most qualified police officers, the amount of required reading is so much that I struggle to get it all done. Much of what I read are scholarly journal articles – sometimes I even read up on court cases and Supreme Court decisions. Each piece of reading I do gives me more insight into the endless wealth of knowledge shared by scientists.
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Speaking of scientists, yes I am a scientist.
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Many people don’t think sociology is a real science; it’s described dismissively as “just a social science.” Let me be clear – sociologists and criminologists are just as much entitled to the label scientists as physicists and chemists are. We practically and systematically study the structure of the world. We may not study cells or chemicals, but we study human beings and their interactions. If you’ve ever read a journal article published by a sociologist, you’ll notice that we utilize a methods section to describe how we quantitatively collected our data, just as other scientists do. Sociology and criminology are not soft sciences by any means; they have produced some of the hardest and most intelligent people I know.
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If you want to “broaden your horizons,” take a sociology class!
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Prospective med school students who are taking the MCAT have started taking sociology classes because that is now part of what is offered on the test. You can pick any aspect of society and there will be a class that tells you about its social processes. I’ve taken classes titled “Violence in America,” “Crime and Public Policy” and “Crime and Punishment.” We allow you to study what matters to you – you can go a whole four years avoiding things that don’t interest you and delving into things that do. I focused my undergrad career on criminology, which is the study of crime, criminals and public policy, and how to enact change.
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Confession time – this is one of the most useful majors outside of academia.
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The topics that sociologists study are things that affect real people in the real world, outside of our bubble of academia. Wealth inequality, race relations, and crime hot spots are all examples of real-time things that sociology majors use outside of the classroom. Sociologists can do almost any job, especially one in public policy, considering you know demographics and crime correlations.
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It means more to me than I can ever put into words to have had the opportunity to study sociology and criminology. I have encountered the most caring and knowledgeable staff, which makes me feel like I am invincible and give me hope for a new day. Even though we learn about a lot of depressing topics, just by knowing about them I am one step closer to changing the world.
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