Around this time of year, I’m usually scouring websites, finding summer programs to apply to and looking for the best subject to spend my summer learning everything about. I found myself going through this process while applying to college as well, and I noticed that in programs and in college, we often focus all our attention on one subject. Although we often concentrate on one subject, I believe that we should also have an understanding of many different subjects.

The Monta Vista Robotics Club is made up of three engineering (STEM) divisions and three operations (humanities) divisions. During first semester, we hold multiple meetings a week to expose lowerclassmen to each division so they can ultimately decide which one they want to join by the start of the second semester. We would not announce which division would be teaching in each meeting beforehand in order to encourage people to come to all of them.

As the director of the software division last year, I would stop by meetings from other divisions to give a helping hand and to see how other departments were doing. On one Friday, I decided to hop onto the Zoom Meeting. After we announced that one of the operations (non-STEM) divisions was doing a lesson today. Suddenly, the sound of someone leaving the Zoom meeting began to repeat. I saw the number of participants decrease faster and faster. Not even a minute later, the number of people in the meeting went from 40 to 20. I didn’t know what to say. My meetings had a constant number of people.

From personal experiences like this one, I have noticed a general tendency for people to only participate in activities that are related to their intended major or the field they plan to pursue. However, I believe that having a general knowledge in activities other than your intended field of study is essential for anyone, regardless of your interests.

In addition to having a general knowledge about a variety of things, I believe it is valuable to work with people with different specializations. When I joined Lumiere Shorts, a streaming service I helped create, I mainly focused on coding and the technological aspects of the startup. However, for the first time, I got to work with a team of people with backgrounds such as business, film and marketing. I found that it was very useful to get feedback and learn from people with a different background. For example, learning how the business plan worked helped me when I was implementing the payment system for the website. Conversely, I was able to give my opinion and feedback on marketing plans and business ideas.

Working with people with a diverse set of skills helped us solve problems together. One issue that we faced was improving the search engine optimization of the website, as we wanted to be the first result when someone searched for the name of the company. There were several products that shared the same name as our company, so we were normally on the third or fourth page of the Google search. After doing some research online, I found that we needed to include important keywords on our home page, reduce the size of images and improve the speed of the website. In addition, I worked with the marketing and business teams on adding “trendy” words on the home page and images.

I believe that these fields do not have to be academic as well, like exploring different hobbies and interests. For example, I found that reading articles about stocks helped me understand the lingo on the radio and learning Spanish vocabulary helped me understand the name of nearby cities, like Palo Alto meaning tall stick/tree.

After seeing firsthand the benefits of working with people who specialize in different domains and learning about things outside of my intended field of study, I believe that I have shifted my mindset. Instead of only focusing my attention on one specific field of study and ignoring all other subjects, I now understand that having a breadth of experiences is beneficial to solving problems in any subject. With the summer approaching, I encourage all of us to explore topics we haven’t concentrated on before.