Mayank Bhatter, Communications and McCormick sophomore, is not an ordinary Northwestern student. He’s part engineer, part actor, part frat brother. He spends hours in the library, rehearses in the shower and attends parties at night. It’s almost as if he’s got three different identities, but somehow, he manages to pull it all together.
Bhatter is a double major in theater and engineering. “It’s kind of like one for me, one for my parents,” he says.
Though theater and engineering do not have many similarities, Bhatter has found some areas where the two majors balance one another. “Engineering is all mental and brain power while theater tests me more physically,” he says. It helps that his theater class is practicing focus, which Bhatter uses to help him with the large workload from engineering.
But they certainly are two different worlds, he says. “Theater people can create a scene or a character like that (he snaps). Engineers, on the other hand, are very ‘yeah! Pi-squared!'”
They also differentiate in terms of what you are preparing for. Engineering, Bhatter says, prepares you for a profession, while theater prepares you for life. “I think theater will help me because engineers learn the math and how to program stuff that no one really understands but they’re not great at articulating it,” he says.
And just what will happen when it becomes time to get into the profession? Bhatter says most of the engineers know how to solve a problem but are not as social, especially compared to theater majors. “In the end, it’s all about networking and social skills and how you deal with people, and I think theater will put me above other engineers socially,” he says. “Maybe you just need to make your boss laugh – and I can do that,” he says.
Bhatter once spoke with Lynn Kelso, an advisor and lecturer of theater in the Communications School, who said that in her entire career here, she’s never seen anyone do this double major, he says.
Other faculty members, such as Kyla Brundage, an academic counselor in the Communications school who used to work in McCormick, have warned Bhatter that he is certainly in for a bumpy ride. “Theater requires a lot of time, labs, run crews and intense class time,” Bhatter says, “engineering is a lot of outside-of-class work, like homework and group projects.”
Both theater and engineering are degree programs, which means Bhatter has to somehow manage to overlap 45 requirements each. Though he says he has been told it is most likely impossible to do it in three years (Bhatter became a double-major his sophomore year), he plans on trying to take summer school and five classes for a couple of quarters. Already, though, he has encountered a number of scheduling problems with his ambitions.
“(Brundage) warned me, ‘if you do these programs you will not have a life.’ And it’s so true,” he says with a laugh. “I lost my life! Where did it go?”
But whether he’s running lines in the shower of the frat house or building shelves for his room (“see! That’s engineering!”) Bhatter has done something that many NU students will never do – gotten a taste practically everything NU has to offer.
“I’m three-fold,” he says. “I have access to the frat life, the theater-artsy life and the engineers. It’s a lot of work, but at the same time I would’ve never been exposed to all these groups.”
– Emily Glazer
