1. …you love having hundreds of pages of reading to do each week, most of which you will probably never do and will certainly never understand.

The Directed Studies curriculum is designed to give you a basic overview of the humanities: everything from Plato and Aristotle to T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” As tempting as all that knowledge may seem, what they don’t tell you is that a good quarter of it is made up of information that you probably care nothing about. (Case in point. If this article appeals to you, sign up for DS right now.)

Besides, let’s be honest: almost no one does all the reading. (That “almost” was added after I read Maggie’s article. Maggie, I have ridiculous amounts of respect for you and your insanity now.) Ancient Greek authors don’t try to be interesting, and unless you have superhuman powers of concentration and willpower, you’re more likely than not to simply fall asleep at your desk.

Don’t get me wrong: there are at least a few books that you can’t help but love if you have even a passing affection for the humanities. But then there’s everything Aristotle wrote. The people who spend hours reading his work understand about as much of it as the people who don’t.

So really, what’s the point?

2. …you’ve always wanted to be part of a cult.

DS really is more than just a set of classes. If you’re a true DSer and someone brings up Plato, your face will light up and you’ll immediately plunge into a passionate discussion of your interpretation of the ascension of beauty. This is great and all, except for one minor detail: no one else cares. Seriously.

The same abstract philosophy terms that sounded so good in section fall flat in the real world. No one wants to listen about your discourse on the flaws in Homer. That is, no one but the other DS students. This unfortunate fact leads to an equally unfortunate phenomenon: put two DSers in a room with a group of other people, and they will almost immediately find each other and eagerly begin to rehash every detail of their last lecture as the rest of the room looks on with a mixture of bewilderment and pity.

Maggie already pointed out the plus side of this; having a discussion in a section where everyone cares about the same obscure philosophy topic is fascinating. As long as you truly care about the material, you’ll love the atmosphere and will fervently deny that it’s at all cultish to everyone else.

…but we all know the truth.

3. …you love stressing out over nothing.

It’s Wednesday afternoon, and you’ve just picked a topic for your essay. What have you been doing with your life? Why are you such a slacker? How are you ever going to manage to finish on time?

Oh wait, did I mention that it’s due Friday?

DS just sets you up to freak out. Having an essay hanging over your head the entire week isn’t the best way to enjoy your life, and if you’re prone to panic, you may well be a nervous wreck before the end of the first semester.

Of course, all this stress means that the best weeks of your year will be the ones when you don’t have an essay due. The best weeks…of your year. Wow. Do you really want to do that to yourself?

Advice to the determined DSer: Chill. A good six page essay doesn’t really take more than 6 to 8 hours to write. This means that you can start at 2 AM Friday morning and still finish on time. (With the extra hour spent checking despondent facebook statuses to see who else is awake. It’s a very bonding experience.) I don’t recommend starting that late, necessarily, but keep in mind that starting on Thursday afternoon (heaven forbid!) is not at all a big deal.

4. …you don’t want to open your blue book.

To be honest, this was at least partially my reasoning for taking DS: I had no idea what else to take, and the sheer number of classes available terrified me. A blend of humanities seemed like a nice, safe, enjoyable option.

Now, though, I’m totally jealous of the people I know who loved their classes freshman year, who picked a course on a whim and ended up finding a new passion. All I learned was that yeah, I like reading. Just not particularly about history or politics or philosophy. I would say that I genuinely loved two of my six sections; the rest were mediocre or flat out boring.

If you were counting on taking DS and haven’t looked at the other options available yet, please do. If you see some classes that you want to try, shop them! That’s what shopping period is all about, and you have a full week and a half to change your mind.
And for heaven’s sake, there’s a freshman seminar about food. If you can pick Hegel over food, then yes, you are a born DSer.

5. …you want this man as your professor.

I believe this speaks for itself. (Warning: strong language.)

All this said, if you’ve read Maggie’s article and think that this is what you want to do, go for it! Most people who last through both semesters (all 18 papers and every Thursday night full of panic and trepidation) love it and wouldn’t have changed a single thing about their freshman year for the world.

However, if you’re having second thoughts, keep your options open. Remember, nothing’s set in stone until shopping period is over. Pull out your blue book and flip through it, see if there’s anything else that appeals to you.

And most of all, whatever you do, enjoy your freshman year.

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To start from the beginning of the series, go here. Sadly, once on campus, I can’t promise song and dance at every opportunity, but I can promise that some of your interactions will be this awkward. Sweet.

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N.B. In order to avoid redundancy, I’m going to assume that if you’re reading this blog entry, you have some idea of what Directed Studies is: a by-application-only freshman program in the humanities that involves reading selections from the Western canon and writing one six-page paper nearly every week. If you are still unclear, look in the Blue Book or at www.yale.edu/directedstudies, but that’s the general idea.

Given the title of this entry, it may not come as a surprise to you that, this time last year, I was feverishly working my way through the last few books of the Iliad, wondering if I would ever be able to keep all of the characters straight. For that reason and others (what if I couldn’t do all the reading or I was the stupidest person at Yale or I couldn’t write a proper college paper or the boy who sat next to me in section thought I smelled bad?), I was anxious about starting Directed Studies, but when I sat down in my first section, I knew that my decision hadn’t been all bad.

That first DS section was philosophy with Professor Willis, who wore fashionable hats, loved turtles, and would start section with seemingly unrelated examples featuring classmates (let’s say Nora is hiding under the table…) that would always tie back into the reading by the time that they had run their course. The section was all the best of DS: thought-provoking reading material, a close-knit group of students ready to discuss it, and an intelligent, realistic, and sometime outrageous professor who genuinely cared about every one of his students. When Professor Willis gave the lecture on Augustine to the whole DS group, we donned turtle hats purchased off the Internet and sat in the first row to show our class solidarity; second semester, after our section ended, we would have class reunions over dinner and compare stories of our latest adventures.

Sure, not every section is so perfect. Some discussions were less-than-inspiring, some professors more prone to depart on seemingly unrelated tangents that may impart a few fun facts but never return to the point at hand. Despite these digressions, my DS experience on the whole made up for these low points. Four out of six of my sections were phenomenal — all in their own ways — and the remaining two were certainly not uneducational. DS is an opportunity to interact with faculty members on an up-close-and-personal basis, participate in seminar-style discussions, go over papers during office hours, and get to know professors—one of whom will most likely become your sophomore adviser.

Beyond class itself, DS is a valuable community. I came from a small high school and was intimidated by the prospect of being in a class of more than one thousand, so DS offered me a smaller venue in which I could know everyone, at least by sight.  Some of those Thursday night paper-writing sessions may induce bonding through trauma, but there is no denying that a majority of DSers leave freshman year with friendships that will outlast even the seemingly unending Don Quixote. Yale is full of interesting and interested students, but many of the people I’m most glad to have met last year, I met through DS: in lecture, at lunch, reading the same book in the library.

It’s not all turtle hats and post-paper glow, of course. There were Tuesday nights when I walked in endless circles around Old Campus trying to nail down a thesis in my head and Sunday afternoons when I would grow increasingly frustrated each time I nodded off over Hobbes. And yet, at every step along the way, it was worth it to me for the probing questions offered up in section and the baby steps through one opus after another.

There are always worries associated with DS: “Will I still be able to participate in extracurricular activities? Will I miss tons of good parties if I can’t go out on Thursday nights? What’s the big deal with the Western canon anyway? Will I become a super-nerd if I read Kant’s Critique?” To address the first of these concerns, let me reassure you that, though it is possible to do DS and nothing but DS for your entire freshman year, the majority of students do not do so. DSers produce, act in, and stage manage shows, write for the paper, sing a capella, hold office in political parties of all stripes, join fraternities and sororities, play sports, and take part in the myriad of other activities constantly taking place at Yale. I purposely kept my schedule light last year after the hustle and bustle of doing everything possible at my high school, but still ended up taking swing dancing lessons, writing an article for the YDN magazine, and holding a board position in Crotonia, a writers’ group on campus.

Speaking of writing, you ask, what about papers? “There are so many, and even if they aren’t excessively long, I don’t want to stay up all night every Thursday night typing away in the library!” Well, my friend, you don’t have to. Although there are many DSers who choose to take the Thursday night/Friday morning paper writing route, I wrote my papers on Tuesday nights so I could visit the (wonderful!) Directed Studies writing tutor every Wednesday afternoon. In addition to helping me smooth out the difficulties I had come across in my paper, the meetings with the tutor were on my own deadline so that I didn’t have to stress the entire week—something with which most DSers deal but would have totally incapacitated me. I don’t necessarily advocate that you take exactly the same approach, if you do choose to take DS, but I do offer myself as an example that there are many ways of writing one’s paper. Everyone finds his or her own way to make it work. Plus, the little-recognized joy of DS is that, unless you are crazy enough to take another writing class in addition to the program, you will never have more than one paper due in a single week!

“Don’t you feel bad, just learning about dead white men?” my friends would sometimes ask me.  As a matter of fact, I did feel bad. I like women and people from places other than Europe and even people who are alive! However, just as that’s the pain of DS, it’s also the beauty. After one year of learning a whole heck of a lot about a lot of important dead white men (and approximately two women), you can take the next three years to learn a whole lot more about people of all different races, nationalities, and genders.

Finally, to answer your last question about the super-nerd, well…yes. You will become a super-nerd. But isn’t that why you came to Yale?

You may hear that an unprecedented number of last year’s DSers dropped after one semester. That’s true, and those that I talked to were happy with the decision to do so; however, don’t let that put you off. For every DSer that dropped, eight or nine or maybe even ten (you see why I’m in the humanities…) remained to read Democracy in America and War and Peace and hear Harold Bloom’s (largely unintelligible, to my ears) lecture on Shakespeare.

As Leah’s forthcoming blog entry will surely demonstrate, DS isn’t for everyone. Even those of us who enjoyed it will acknowledge that it can make the wrong person pretty unhappy. Over on the Timothy Dwight blog, Caroline identifies some reasons to take DS and some reasons one might avoid it that are worth checking out (http://timothydwight.blogspot.com/2009/08/directed-studies-caroline-elenowitz.html). But Caroline also says that DS isn’t a big deal, and though she might be right in terms of workload (the famous Wikipedia article of several years ago and the Fiske College Guide’s reference to Directed Suicide make it seem impossible) in other areas, I must beg to differ. DS is a big deal because it’s amazing to sit in a classroom with sixteen students who genuinely care about Descartes’ cogito ergo sum argument. DS is a big deal because it’s fantastic to watch the pile of unread books on your desk slowly shrink until you’ve read your body weight in the Western canon. DS is a big deal because it’s electrifying to think that by next May you could have written more than one hundred pages of essays for professors whom you haven’t even met yet.

There’s no doubt that you will get a fantastic education at Yale no matter which classes you take this semester. But if you think the idea of reading Madame Bovary in two nights or pouring over Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War sounds a tiny bit exhilarating, you’re a DSer in the making.

SAY WHAT?

-Maggie

P.S. Caroline also says in her blog entry that doing all the reading for DS is a mark of insanity and wouldn’t allow you to do anything else with your life. Now, I’m not saying that I comprehended every single thing I read last year (or that I’m not insane), but I did do every single page of reading and am extremely proud of it. Seriously though, this is another personal choice thing: she’s right insofar as most people skip here and there and some people skip almost everywhere.

P.P.S. If you’re sold on DS, e-mail me (maggie.cooper@yale.edu) and we can have a meeting with Saybrook DSers past for Saybrook DSers present about which sections to try and switch into—most are fine, but sometimes an escape can prove desirable. This would take place after you get your schedules of course, but some time before class starts.

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In an attempt to alleviate those occasional night terrors, I’ve  compiled a brief guide detailing how exactly you might want to go about fulfilling these requirements. Drawing upon my extensive anthropological background, I will of course break everything down into gross generalizations that I hope will both entertain and inform.

But first, the requirements. The basic rule is that by the end of your freshman year, you need to have completed one credit in each of the skills-based distributions: that is Quantitative Reasoning (QR), Writing (WR) or a Language. However, since by the end of your sophomore year you also need to have finished at least one credit in each disciplinary area (Science, Social Science, Humanities) and at least one credit in all three of your skills (QR, WR, Language), you should probably plan ahead a bit.

The advice to complete the first year’s requirements, grouped to target specific groups of the Yale population, starts after the jump.

The Mathematical Masochist (or the Scientific Suffering-Seeker, not to be confused with the Scientific Suffrage-Seeker)

Academic Interests: Math, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Medical School

If you love problem sets, impossibly steep curves and laboratory classes that eat up entire afternoons, you probably fall into this category. While pursuing your double-major in Biology and Economics and Mathematics (yes, there are three words in that second major), you will probably finish up your QR and Sc credits in the first semester. But how in the world will you possibly complete a WR class?

If you’re looking to fulfill the WR Requirement (but science is more your thing), consider:

• E&EB 240a, Animal Behavior: I don’t know much about this class, but I do know that the evaluations mention spider sex and the class is in one of the Biology departments. That’s always a plus if you prefer writing a research proposal to composing an essay about Keats and Pope.
• EVST 215a, Scientific and Environmental Writing: The title seems pretty self-explanatory although the class looks like a bit more work. Hey, when you’re making money and own all of us humanities majors, at least you’ll be able to tell us what you’re researching “with grace, clarity and accuracy”?
• E&EB 122b, Principles of Evolution, Ecology & Behavior: If you wait until second semester you can always take the basic class for the major for a writing credit. If you’re planning on going to med school, you probably already took MCDB 120 first semester anyways.
• ENGL 114-120, Writing Seminars: A lot of work but they’re classes that look good on your transcript and might help you out when you ultimately decide to drop premed in favor of something a bit more reasonable.

If you’re absolutely insane, Directed Studies completes all your Hu, WR and So credits in one short year. You would work hard, but then you would be pretty much done with your distributional requirements. There are some kids who manage to take a math or science class along with DS, but I would not recommend it for the faint of heart. That said, if you’re even entertaining the idea (after all, you DID get into Yale and you therefore MUST be pretty diligent), your cardiovascular system probably isn’t on the verge of collapse yet anyways.

The Ditzy Intellectual (a.k.a. the Humanities Major)

Academic Interests: English, Philosophy, American Studies, Directed Studies, Theater Studies (pretty much every department that ends in Studies)

We quiver in the face of simple arithmetic. We quake before trigonometry and calculus. We quail at the mere prospect of anything quantitative. But can we compose consonant sentences tricolon crescens while employing one of the most rarely used sounds in the English language? Oh, no question.

If you’d rather write a paper than complete a problem set, then you probably fall into this category. How could you possibly fulfill the QR requirement without doing too much (or even any) math?

• PHIL 115a , First-Order Logic: Don’t want to do math? Would you rather learn the language of logic and do great on your LSAT? Then this class if for you! Plus, I hear the professor is fantastic (and it’s a class in the philosophy department!).
• LING 263a, Introduction to Semantics: Along the same lines as first-order logic, you will have problem sets that have more to do with the implications of sentences than partial derivatives.
• STAT 101-106a, Introduction to Statistics: There are five different sections, each of which focuses on a particular field of study. This diversity also means that the course can count for the E&EB, MCDB, EP&E, Statistics and Political Science majors. Apparently, it’s a course in Minitab as well as statistics, so it’ll be good to have access to a Windows computer if you take the course.
• ECON 110a or 115, Introductory Microeconomics: In either a lecture or seminar format, you could maybe learn something that actually applies to the real world. Although I guess if you’re brilliant enough, someone will handle your finances. The seminar requires a bit more math, but may be more engaging.

The A-muhr-ican

Academic Interests: Anything but classes that require me to make funny noises with professors I cannot understand

You got your roommate assignment in the mail and eagerly Facebook stalked until you found him/her. After checking him/her out to make sure he/she was not a total crazy, you exchanged phone numbers and agreed on a time to coordinate furniture shopping. Unfortunately, in your excitement you made a fatal error.

“Hey. Ale-jah-andro/a?”

Oops.

If you find Spanish stale, French flat and Latin lackluster, here are some options to finish off that language requirement.

• HNDI 110a & 120b, Elementary Hindi I & II: Supposedly a reasonable language with a reasonable workload. And since Hindi is one of those all or nothing languages, you can expect that nobody else in the class will know what’s going on either.
• EGYP 110a & 120b, Introduction to Classical Hieroglyphic Egyptian I & II: It only meets twice a week, as compared to other L1 classes that meet 5 times a week. Don’t expect this to be a walk in the park though. It’s a lot of memorization, and both the professors and the other students take it very seriously.
• SPAN 150a or 151b, Advanced Conversational Spanish: If you tested into L5, but aren’t in love with Spanish, give this class a try. I know that it says “Advanced,” but the class is very reasonable and incredibly engaging. All the professors are excellent. I took it with Profesora Carballal (who I highly recommend).
• If you do not like foreign langues and want to survive, do not take Arabic or Chinese. Most of you will probably ignore this warning because you plan to work for the CIA or something. After all, not all spies can get by with a pierc(e)ing stare, martinis and a British accent. You may regret this decision if you’re not a language whiz.

The Young and the Restless

Academic Interests: Soap operas and looking glam

So you have no idea what you want to study. That’s cool, too. Here are some tips on getting started on those requirements while staying broad enough to avoid pigeonholing:

• Go for classes that satisfy prerequisites for multiple departments but also fulfill your distributions. Microeconomics is a great place to look for a QR if you might be interested in the social sciences (it counts in the Economics, EP&E, International Studies and (sometimes) Political Science Departments). If you don’t love writing  but might want to pursue any major in the social sciences consider the writing intensive section of PLSC 114, Introduction to Political Philosophy (Steven Smith is a genius).
• If you’re interested in science and need to look for a WR, Hu or So credit, look around in the Environmental Studies and E&EB departments. The distributions are ripe for the picking in those departments because they tend to be a little more accessible and less hard science.
• If you’re considering Psychology, you have tons of options that are broad enough to be useful in other departments. PSYC 120, Introduction to the Human Brain, is cross-listed with the Cognitive Science department and fulfills your Sc requirement. PSYC 129, Statistics as a Way of Knowing, is cross-listed with Statistics and, if you ask the DUS, could apply to multiple departments while fulfilling your QR. PSYC 137, Language and Mind, fulfills the preqrequisite for the Linguistics department and is a So. PSYC 127 & 140, Early Childhood Methods & Developmental Psychology, are both WR credits and the former counts for Teacher Prep.
• If you need a Sc credit and know you’re not looking for science, look for the nonmajor classes in many of the departments. Some of them are freshman seminars, and some of them are decent. Check out the evaluations. Other options are ANTH 116, Introduction to Biological Anthropology (I might be taking that) or an Astronomy course.

If you have questions, corrections or additional advice, please comment!

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