Author Mays Imad, who is a neuroscientist, writes that throughout her teaching career she has watched talented, creative, high-potential students walk away from the sciences because they feel that the STEM curriculum lacks ethical, political, and creative significance. One of her students wrote to her, "Life is hard and the world feels drab and dull without passion. I wish my teacher knew just how badly some people struggle with the weight of the work and the world as you try to wriggle your way through the tight and unrelenting cookie-cutter format of the educational system." In the wake of this student feedback, Imad argues here that for her it has become increasingly critical to tune in to her students and rethink her approach to science education. The stakes are high for both STEM students and society as a whole: any educational philosophy that does not actively integrate, affirm, and promote creativity and freedom threatens to model and reinforce conformity, fragmentation, and overspecialization. Imad considers the possible effects of professional overspecialization on the world of higher education.? By narrowing our curricular pathways, science education risks failing today's students not only by limiting their potential career paths but also by essentializing science, minimizing or ignoring its broader connections to other disciplines. A narrowed scientific curriculum also results in a lack of appreciation for the essential humanity of science--the beauty it both illuminates and inherently possesses. As today's workforce expects, and even demands, highly specialized skills from its employees, educators must guard against the downsides of extreme specialization, including a reduction in the number of scientists capable of critiquing work outside their small and contracting fields of expertise. The future depends upon scientists who represent greater diversity, which brings multiple world views, values, perspectives, cognitive styles, and experiences into the problem-solving processes to engender more robust solutions. Imad posits that a holistic approach to science education necessitates that educators cultivate healthy and meaningful relationships between the learner and knowledge, self, peers, professors, community, and the world outside the classroom.