It is hard to believe that three years ago this time, I was just starting my Yale experience as a freshman. Now, my little sister is starting school - at Carleton - and I'm getting ready to finish. That's a scary thought indeed. Before we cross that frightful threshold out of the ivory tower come May, however, I have a few more credits and quite a lot more courses that I will take along the way. Let's explore!
I've been catalog-browsing and will begin going to courses proper tomorrow. Shopping period at Yale is a magical, mystical thing. I have been writing about it
on and
off since
before I set foot on campus. When I first got here, I was bursting with
excitement about the many classes to choose from, and it's still a delight to me, for all the stresses that it might produce.
I traded my four-day weekends of freshman fall for 5-days-a-week Chinese sophomore fall, but that hasn't stopped me from a huge amount of intellectual adventuring. While I've taken some lumps and developed some degree of cynicism since, I still very much love Yale and love being here.
Classes are a big part of that, especially once I figured out that you didn't have to take lectures as a Political Science major unless you really wanted to. (I don't, so I don't).
This post is meant principally to talk about the classes that I'm looking at this semester - though, apologies, I can't help it if I start to wax nostalgic and teary-eyed looking back on three years of the collegiate experience.
Onwards! These pictures should convey a sense of what my shopping looks like. I have a large roster of classes that I would like, but can only reasonably take about five of them. This fact, and my past abuses / excesses, mean that I am theoretically only 5 credits (or one semester) away from graduating. But, because I have a lot of classes not
strictly speaking in my major, graduating a semester early would be a terrible strain.
Plus, I like Yale so much that it's worth stomaching thousands and thousands (...and thousands) of dollars to be there another semester. I hope.
The smaller photo gives a sense of the layout of my week; that shows the 18 classes that are "most likely" to be shopped, adjusted for schedule conflicts. If seminars let out early, there are other classes that I would like to attend to investigate for future study, or curiosity, or whatever. A separate page has a lot of classes that I might like to stop in sometime to hear -- a particularly good lecture can be fun to listen to, even if I wouldn't want to be stuck in the class for 13 weeks.
I pre-registered for State-Building, with Keith Darden, and Language & Ethnic Conflict in the Balkans with Robert Greenberg. This is because I know from first hand experience that both are awesome professors, and both courses deal with fascinating subjects, from different angles. More on these later. I am shopping approximately 15 other Political Science / International Studies / Ethics, Politics, Economics style courses as well; all tend to be similarly interesting to me.
I have to be careful to try not to take too many in Political Philosophy since I need to diversify my classes, as it were, for my major. This is a kind of confusing process because the course divisions for PLSC are only listed on certain
secret websites. You can guess by course numbers, but not always. This is because there are more total courses taught over the record keeping period than there are course numbers. This means there are numerous repeats in the class range from 100 to 499... lot of Poli Sci courses indeed!
What will I shop, if not seriously try to get into? Some samples:
PLSC or its Social Scientific cousins:
- Democracy & Constitutionalism
- U.S. Party Formation
- Public Opinion in China
- Means and Ends in Politics
- American Founding Debates
- Moral Capital and International Politics
- Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves
Outside PLSC:
- Direction of Time (Exploration into the nature of time, some philosophy of physics here)
- Language and Computation
All in all, it should be a fun week. As a senior, my schedule is not due until 5 pm the 15th. That means I have 2 full weeks of classes to shop, though in most cases, I would never take a class unless I went to a meeting of it, which means going to the first class for seminars. This limits total shoppability, but extensive syllabus stalking and preparatory work ensures that the best decisions are made. The best laid plans still go awry, as has happened to me in past semesters.
I think that things will go well, and will report to you, my dutiful Internet Public, the results of shopping period...
Any questions always welcome, happy to help enlighten those poor unlucky souls who are still long-time readers or found their way here by search engine.
