By Sam Barrett
For English majors, a Socratic seminar is not an unusual sight. However, for anyone majoring in a STEM field they may be nothing more than a distant memory from high school English classes. The Maryland Science Café is hoping to change that.
The Maryland Science Café is a book club that is geared entirely toward University of Maryland STEM majors. The club’s main goal is to expose STEM majors to reading fiction, an aspect of college that can be missing from their curriculum aside from general education requirements. They have read a variety of books, from “Where the Crawdads Sing,” by Delia Owens to “Dune,” by Frank Herbert.
“It’s important for STEM students to explore their other hobbies outside of classes,” says Megan Brown, a junior atmospheric and oceanic sciences major who joined the club last year. “I think it’s really awesome if there’s an outlet for people to share their love of reading.”
Erfan Jabari, a fifth-year senior majoring in bioengineering, started this club in the fall of 2019 with his friend Harris Malik, a spring 2022 graduate who majored in biological sciences. Jabari said he and Malik have been friends since high school and took AP English Language together.
“We really saw the value in being able to connect through people by just discussing ideas and literature,” Jabari said. “So we wanted to sort of recreate that atmosphere in a way that was very accessible.”
All meetings follow the same style. For the first half hour, everyone plays ice-breaker games so they can get to know each other. For the last half hour, they discuss the week’s chapters, and senior mechanical engineering major Lucas Peters said discussions can get heated
“For STEM majors, there’s huge value,” Jabari said. “Because I know a lot of people go into STEM thinking ‘I don’t need to read or write.’ But I think it’s important for people to spend more time thinking about how to communicate really complex ideas.”
The club also serves fresh coffee at every meeting, and members are encouraged to bring their own mug. This is an aspect that club president Madeline Lessard, a junior astronomy and physics double major, said was lacking during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Like many clubs, Maryland Science Café meetings were held on Zoom during the 2020-2021 academic year. They moved back in person last year, but this is the first semester they have been able to serve coffee again.
“It’s nice to make a space for that,” Lessard said. “It’s nice to be able to have a place to discuss books and things with people because, you can do that on your own, but it’s nice to hear other opinions.”
The club is currently reading Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” a dystopian science fiction book that takes place several hundred years in the future. The group’s discussion ranged from the merits of the dystopian genre to how the book relates to our cultural norms. Later the discussion turned to the possibility of some of the book’s more scientific themes.
“A lot of these ideas are super abstract, super difficult to describe. And that’s kind of the case in science, too, things are difficult to describe. Ideas are very difficult to get across,” says Jabari.
Featured Image: Students at the Maryland Science Café sitting in a circle to discuss “Brave New World,” by Aldous Huxley in Room 3207 of the Art and Sociology Building at University of Maryland on Thursday, Sept. 29, 2022. Photo by Sam Barrett.