One can easily notice the judgmental and accusatorial comments about the various career and academic branches chosen by students all along their scholastic years. Be it parents, professors, or high school faculties, certain fields of studies are being idolatrized at the expense of other fields to the point where it has become a habit to openly joke about one’s vocation without a second thought. In the general public’s mindset, it is believed that Upper “intelligent” students opt for scientific fields/majors, “average” students go for the business/economic field of study, and the “Lower” students go for humanities fields.
The choice of an academic field has become the first criterion to label someone’s intellectual capacities, future employment opportunities, or even personality and social status. AUIers, like every other Moroccan student, have bathed in this doctrine throughout their whole pre-university life. Due to these stereotypes, students began to experience an important amount of disorientation and lack of self-confidence when it comes to flipping majors or choosing a certain minor.
Just like the four Hogwarts houses competing over the house cup or the different houses of Game of Thrones fighting over the Iron throne, students of the three separate schools of Al Akhawayn University are corrivals. This rivalry starts manifesting after putting their very first step into the university. Whether it be comments and different labels about the individual labs in where students study, to their everyday habits, clothing styles, type assignments, and courseloads. Any occasion can be opportune to publicly criticize another School.
Apart from the different jokes and memes made on Facebook groups, are those clichés really accurate and is there any semblance of truth behind it?
School of Business Administration (SBA): The Snoby, reckless, lazy students.
As a matter of fact, Al Akhawayn University inaugurated in 1995 with only the School of Business Administration. While expanding through the years, other schools and fields started to be incorporated within the university. For that reason, the percentage of students enrolled in the Business School was always preponderant compared to other schools.
Stereotype 1: Business administration is for people who don’t know what else to study
This stereotype finds its roots in one of the most inexplicable switches of study fields in Morocco, the famous “Scientique f Bac, Eco mora Bac“. Business majors are popular among university students in the kingdom. The majority of them assume that it will provide them with high salaries and plenty of job positions as well as a wide range of study abroad opportunities. Furthermore, the field of business is very much flexible that it offers plenty of options since the fundamentals of business can be applied to nearly any industry or career.
Stereotype 2: As a business administration student, you don’t need any skills – you just memorize everything.
Finance and Logistics majors would disagree. In fact, these fields require a lot of mathematical analysis. Furthermore, just as in any other field staying at the surface level requires no skills. However, deep analysis and full comprehension of a subject require effort and balance between a large set of skills, including quantitative and qualitative ones.
School of Science and Engineering (SSE): the unapologetic nerds
Integrated the SSE? Congratulations! Everyone will see you as a straight-up nerd. You either wear glasses or speak really fast when talking about abstract algebra. It is widely assumed that engineering and science folks are always cooped up in Lab 7 studying or writing tons of lines of code that look like Egyptian hieroglyphs to most people– they usually don’t get enough sleep or sunlight resulting in a very zombie” ish”, pasty look.
It is clearly noticeable that the University has made tangible efforts to highlight and push future students to consider SSE as one of their first choices by creating an important number of new majors during Fall 2020 and introducing fully-funded scholarships such as “Al-Ghurair”.
Stereotype 1: They have no social life / skills.
Understandable! They spend all their time either studying for exams or perfecting their knowledge about the different coding languages. Jokes aside, their social involvement on campus is constantly criticized. However, many are omitting the fact that a large portion of active students on campus are also SSE students (club board members, sports teams players, campus event organizers)
Stereotype 2: They like to think of themselves as ” the smartest “.
“We study the most”, “We have the heaviest course load”, ” People that can’t keep up with engineering often switch to other majors, never the other way around”. It is worldwide believed that STEM fields require more quantitative skills and therefore they hold more job opportunities. These beliefs actually shed the light upon a more critical and ongoing subject: The constant war between STEM and Humanities fields.
School of Humanities and Social Sciences (SHSS): the UN/Political Ambassadors Wannabees.
Although the School of Humanities and Social Sciences is the most active in terms of conferences and research publications, it counts the least number of students at Al Akhawayn University. The cause? The crisis and lack of profile diversity in our initial education system because it fails to comply with the neoliberal global model as well as the demands of the job market. From this perspective, the social sciences (sociology, psychology, anthropology, etc.) and the humanities (literature, history, philosophy, and International studies) are often considered to be of no use as they are not immediately used to create profit. Even more, in Morocco, the distribution of the general baccalaureate into “Scientifique”, “Literature” and “économie” series does not very much help since the “Scientifique” series is considered to be the key to opening all the doors of a decent higher education.
Stereotype 1: Students studying a degree in SHSS have it easy and don’t learn anything.
This stereotype has actually no base whatsoever. SHSS students are known to drown in ink and papers. Their assignments are based on reviewing and reading tons and tons of articles and academic papers. Besides developing their patience and ability to write as fast as a “dactilo“, SHSS students are actually gaining general and practical knowledge in social sciences.
Stereotype 2: SHSS majors can’t find jobs after graduation
“Good luck finding a job!” This is the stereotype that is perhaps the most frustrating to SHSS students. It is deeply embedded within the Moroccan culture that jobs related to politics and media are the most unreachable for the common people and that it’s only reserved for a certain “elite” of the country.
Putting rivalry aside
During the lockdown, between June and July 2020, a Facebook group was created under the name “Clash of Schools” with a simple concept, “Joking” and criticizing other Moroccan schools and universities in order to assert the supremacy of one specific school. AUIers quickly became members, and put their rivalry aside in order to best defend not only their respective schools and majors but most importantly defend Al Akhawayn as a whole. This feeling of belonging is what makes the bond between AUIers even more special, giving sense and meaning to the famous “Once an AUIer, Always an AUIer”.
There’s no need for majors to be competitive. The way our society has prioritized some majors over others must change. Every major is important in its own way. It can lead people to a job they truly feel passionate about. Instead of making majors hierarchical, we should recognize the importance of all of them.
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