Hello, Saybrugians!

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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