The Nerd...A Hidden Stereotype

void main()

{

cout<<”Hello everyone”;

}

Wait! Wait!!! Do not run away after seeing the first few lines 😊 That’s just a C++ program that says Hello!

I am Siddhanta Panda. I am a freshman studying Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and am from New Delhi, India. I love commanding computers all around me to do fancy things and am simply in love with aircrafts. I enjoy flying them on the Flight Simulator and have been doing this ever since I was a child.

I love Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics as well. I feel they are my foundations. Without them there would have been nothing around us. Math is used in Physics, and Chem stems out of Physics!!!

I know what might be coming to most of your minds after reading all of this.

What a nerdy guy he is!!!

That is true! The words “Nerd”, “Geek”, and “Dork” have been an inseparable part of my life.

In my school, I would always get excited when I saw my teacher do something really fantastic on the black board. Sometimes, she would define something, sometimes she would illustrate how that problem could be used in real life to address some issue. In one of these classes, I most distinctly remember sitting in the front seat while my favourite math teacher was showing us what tan(90^o) meant using right triangles. I remember feeling a sudden sense of excitement and yelling fantastic and bouncing up and down on my seat and was extremely happy!! Obviously the whole class laughed like anything and I heard some of my classmates say, “What a geek! He should get a life” and  “The Nerd guy strikes again!!!”

A typical Nerd Picture

I felt a little bad about it then probably because of the way it was said and probably because I was having the time of my life in class!

A couple of days later during my Chemistry class, I remember studying “Thermodynamics ,” and at that time one of my classmates raised a question on the Maxwell Boltzmann Distribution of Molecular Speeds… and I found that he was mocked as well. People called him a “Dork” just because he happened to clear his doubts. I could not understand what was wrong in asking why the distribution of molecular speeds shows a “Bell Curve.” The answer to this question is actually fascinating and can be obtained from tossing a coin!!! But people still mocked him and I could not comprehend why people were behaving that way!

I also remember another instance when I was in my math class and everyone was struggling with a problem on 3-D Geometry as it was very difficult to visualise. I remember telling myself that 3D is a mere third variable being added and so I visualised the problem like a 2 D problem and solved it easily and efficiently.

I am the Nerd!:-)

I remember my friends saying, “What a nerdy solution!!! Good Job Nerd!” I felt very happy and actually took it as a compliment. I came to feel that perspective does have to play some role here…

I researched this on the internet and found that this stereotype frames anyone who shows socially atypical behaviour in academics and does not do what others mostly do, that is sit and blankly stare at the board.

I found these articles illustrating the typical “nerd” qualities, and every single one of them showed someone who was different in one way or the other!
I cite one such article that talks about how a nerd is generally viewed by people...

“Nerds were also perceived as being very focused on academic endeavors, physically weak, uninteresting, unnecessary to society, and ultimately undesirable. Generally speaking, all these things might be categorized under the heading of feeling abhorrent, which was the way most of these students described their experience of being gifted” 

from the article

Nerds and Geeks by Tracy.L.Cross

But, that struck me as utterly conflicting!!!!

I learned in Biology in grade 10 that every single person has a specific genetic sequence. This genetic sequence is unique in ever sense. It is 90% similar, but it’s that mere 10% that makes us have different skin colour, fingerprints etc.

We all are unique and special in our own ways. Why then say someone is different from others and call them names!

I feel that it’s the way you perceive the world that makes you determine how you think and how you act.

I might have one perspective about the world: as one populated by unique evolving fragments. Someone might view the world as clusters of objects acting specifically.

A stereotype such as a “Nerd” or “Geek” is nothing but an outcome of something our brain does rather all the time… Classifying objects into groups based on how they act and based on patterns that are observed and taken for granted.

I feel stereotypes arise from our nature to classify objects around us. If we come to think about it, we have indeed engaged in a lot of classifications in science as well…biology for instance…but they are “non social objects, they don’t mind”…That’s how we think… If we implement the same on humans … we call it stereotype, we feel bad… That is exactly how I view this culture of stereotyping and prejudice that is so much prevalent all around us…

void main()

{

cout<<”Good Bye and Have a Great Day!!!”;

}

A hillarious video portraying the Stereotype