Academic Rigour

I am all for learning all aspects of one's future profession or subject for interest. However, a line is crossed when people are forced to learn things that are useless and/or disgusting in the name of academic rigour.

Take me. I am in Human-Computer Interaction. Great major, huge potential for making the world a better place by making it easier for people to use computers.

Now, since HCI people work with user interfaces, they are not required to know all the advanced maths that other computer people need, so the curriculum designers took it off of the list of required subjects. Great, thank you. Except they had to replace it with something equally hard, or others would say HCI is just a way for people to avoid the hard maths. They replaced it with psychology of various sorts.

A surface knowledge of psychology is a must in HCI. Blue is the hardest colour to read, green is the most calming, people suck at paying attention, this sort of thing. However, the psych courses at U of T are also academically rigorous. They go into details. Dull, disgusting details. Psych majors need to know these details. I do not. In no possible universe, shall I ever be able to use them. Heck. I do not want to know. I am being forced to cram something gross and useless.

They should make up a psych course just for HCI people. Something along the lines of “HCI; The Human Side”. Stick in the psych, and, for good measure, the few bits of sociology that we need. Leave out the experiments. Please.