“This class is useless.”  “I seriously don’t care about this class – I’m never going to have to use it!”How often do you hear something along those lines while you sit in your general education, humanity or social science class?It’s a common sentiment – why should an engineering major, for example, have to sit through hours of humanities and social sciences, when none of the material in that field is immediately relevant to their chosen vocation?Why should they have to take such a “useless” class?To some college students who have chosen to study a “practical” field — computer science, engineering, biology, etc. — the humanities are just that — useless classes.  Political science is just an annoyance to dispose of, mandated by the administration and taught by old, useless academics in tweed coats. And of course anyone who decides to actually choose such a major is simply not smart enough for a “real major.”As a mass communication major with multiple friends from more “practical disciplines,” it’s a sentiment I hear a lot – and I’m tired of it.First of all, most critics of such majors claim, for example, a political science major is “easy.” Their evidence is usually an easy A in whatever general education-level class they are forced to take to graduate. As a former political science major, I agree that POLI 1000 is easy. But then again, so is MATH 1000 – so easy you can pass out of it with even a mediocre math score on the ACT. The entry-level humanities are designed to be easy, because they give basic, general information to students who aren’t going on to specialize in that information.Try an advanced course – I guarantee it will be more difficult.The second myth about humanities majors is answers are easily faked. As opposed to math or engineering classes, where the right answer is static (usually a number), humanities majors often cannot answer a question with a single statistic or figure – sometimes, a “right answer” doesn’t necessarily exist at all.Just because there’s no one answer absolutely doesn’t mean coming up with an acceptable response is easy.In fact, were I arrogant enough to attempt to argue that, say, a mass communication major such as myself were somehow superior to, say, a biology major, I could easily say merely memorizing answers is far easier than coming up with a logical response based on a wealth of information.But I’m not that arrogant.The simple truth is a math or engineering major uses an entirely different set of skills, processes and techniques than a sociology or history major. Different majors operate on a different, but important, planes. We need political communication majors to keep our government running smoothly and political scientists to analyze what goes wrong when it doesn’t. We need history majors to help us learn from the past so we don’t keep making the same stupid mistakes. We need foreign language majors because, well, we need to talk to people who speak other languages. And we need all these things just as much as we need engineers, doctors, and architects.So, to all you smug future engineers, architects and doctors, who refer to your disciplines as “real majors,” I think I speak for my fellow mass communication, political science, history, and all the other poor undervalued humanities majors on this campus when I say we’re tired of it. Who knows? Maybe we’ll have a revolution or something. Just don’t expect us to have very well-designed weapons.Matthew Albright is a 20-year-old mass communication junior from Baton Rouge.  Follow him on Twitter @TDR_malbright.–Contact Matthew Albright at [email protected]