There’s a great divide that has been polarising LACAS students since 1987. It’s been the start of various heated common room discussions while munching on overpriced chips and has been the end of friendships.

I mean you probably know what I’m talking about because you read the title and it’s not the atrocious green turf. It’s the humanities kids versus the STEM (science and maths) kids.

The science kids lament the fact that they have all of Saturday on.

Listen. I feel you but this is what happens when you make bad decisions and took the obviously wrong combination of subjects. Who needs to know about electron orbitals in the real world anyways? A shoutout is also deserved to those who decided to keep sciences and further maths, we really pity you, we truly do (we’re not sure if you exist, but we’re sorry nonetheless). We’re all stuck between looking at the science students as harmless little nerds or people who will potentially blow up the A Level campus (imagine shifting campuses again.)

They’re also some of the most hardworking and smart people I know (I’m not legally allowed to trash talk them too much.) You’ll find them sitting in the common room in a circle desperately trying to memorise formulas for that horrific physics test in the next period. Or talking about their plans to hopefully be out of school in the next ten years because medicine, y’know. They know what they want to do and work towards it, and for that I respect them (just a tiny bit though.)

The humanities kids think that because they can quote all of Shakespeare’s sonnets they’re better than the STEM kids. It’s not my fault all they do is memorise some dead, slightly pretentious poet’s writing. Also what’s up with the bad anarcho-Marxist memes? Guys, trying to start another communist revolution is not studying for your sociology test. And for the science students wondering – yes! the humanities students are jealous of your lab coats and don’t let anyone tell you anything otherwise.

I do have to give them a lot of credit for being really creative. Whether that mean figuring out your teacher’s views on a particular piece of work so you can tailor your last minute assignment for the highest possible grade. Or even about how they incorporate the most out there things like an entire critique of Elizabethan society into anything. Be nice to them, they’re trying to change the world.

At the end of the day, we all work ourselves to the bone (because it’s A Level, kids.) Whether that be writing about how the French revolution was really an analogy for a class struggle or titrating strange coloured liquids — it’s for that sweet, sweet A.

But I mean the real enemy of the day, the one we need to unite against…

It’s the business kids.

Mino Qureshi
Class of 2020