Week 1 Post

            Victoria Vesna’s article titled, Toward a Third Culture: Being In Between, discusses Charles Percy Snow’s (CP Snow) main ideas and arguments regarding the gaps and bridges of cultures. Vesna also incorporates a few other prominent writers whose studies also involve similar beliefs to CP Snow’s. These authors all circumvent the idea that the structure of universities and other academic establishments are creating a gap between artists and scientists. Vesna says that because of this structure, it is impossible for artists to make a living outside of academia and industry.

            In the second article, The Two Cultures and Scientific Revolution, CP Snow speaks about his time at Cambridge and how it helped shaped his experience and perspective on artists versus scientists. He describes these two groups as literary intellectuals and scientists. He likes to place the two groups at opposite poles of the world to express the significance in their differences.

            I started my four-year student-athlete experience at UCLA as an undeclared Men’s Water Polo Player. I quickly discovered I wanted to become a geography major, which immediately placed me in North Campus. Looking at my college career now that I am a fourth year expecting to graduate Spring 2017, I never was able to “Bridge the Gap” until winter quarter 2017. This was when I decided to fulfill my math requirement, and go against John Brockman’s assertion that the two cultures stay separate. This decision to take a Statistics 10 ultimately placed me in the math and science building in south campus for 10 weeks.

            Throughout my four years at UCLA as a student-athlete, I have spent the majority of my time at Spieker Aquatics Center for water polo and North and South Campus for my academics. I believe my overall experience at UCLA could be used as an example in a following lecture of “The Two Cultures: and a Second Look.”

After learning about week 1’s Two Cultures, I like to think that the pool, located on the "Hill," can be seen as the third culture or environment, which combines the two cultures of humanities and science. This is true because there are many north campus students such as myself on the water polo team, but there are also many student-athletes who aspire to be doctors, and so these teammates of mine spend their time away from the pool on south campus of UCLA. Therefore, this seems like a clear example of a location on a well-known academic school such as, UCLA, where the gap has been minimized and humanities and science can be one.

Bibliogrpahy

Brockman, John. The Third Culture. 1995. Print.

Snow, C. P. “Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” Reading. 1959. New York: Cambridge Up,

1961. Print.

Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures: And a Second Look. 1963. Print.

Vesna, Victoria. “Toward a Third Culture: Being in Between.” Leonardo, vol. 34, no. 2, 2001 pp.121–

125., www.jstor.org/stable/1577014.