With registration going on these few weeks, the seniors are beginning to get a bit jealous. As we cry in our beds with our wine bottles and rejected resumes, all of you underclassmen are frolicking around the newly green campus, pondering Quest for Justice? Survey of Art I? The possibilities of youth are endless! Yes, overdramatic, but still, the seniors here at HCK thought we’d fill you youngsters in on our experiences with Kenyon classes and what we’d do if we could do it all over again.
Abby Roberts
Major: English, emphasis in Creative Writing
Favorite Kenyon course: Gender Benders with Pashmina Murthy. This was my first English class at Kenyon, and the course list has really shaped what I like and who I am as a reader, and, as trite as it maybe sounds, it helped me understand feminism in a different way. Pashmina is the greatest professor–caring, critical, and stupidly intelligent.
Kenyon course regret: I wish I had taken some more sociology classes, actually. I loved all my classes within my major, and I’m glad we had to fulfill all the general requirements in order to make us branch out into other topics, but I wish I hadn’t waited to take them so late in the game. Maybe if I started freshman year I would have had more time to take classes outside the major. Also art classes. So cool, so hard. I wish I had more time to spend on them.
Rachel Larson
Major: Psychology
Favorite Kenyon course: There are way too many to choose from, but maybe Abnormal Psych. Everything we talked about was interesting and very real, and Professor Lopez teaches with such enthusiasm. I’m not interested in going into clinical psychology, but I still absolutely loved this class.
Kenyon course regret: I always meant to take a biology class. I was really big into bio and anatomy/physiology classes in high school but was too intimidated to take any in college as a non-major. Also, I should have taken a women’s and gender studies class. I feel like that’s just a must at Kenyon.
Sarah Bence
Major: English, emphasis in Creative Writing
Favorite Kenyon course: Everyone should take Directed Teaching from Prof Julie Brodie in the dance department. Basically you get to play pretend with kids all day.
Kenyon course regret: I feel like if I’d taken Women’s and Gender Studies earlier, I would have concentrated, so if I could go back and do it again I’d enroll in that.
Rekha Mohan
Major: English and Film double major, emphasis in Creative Writing
Favorite Kenyon course: Intro to Fiction Writing, with P.F. Kluge. When your writing is good, Kluge will tell you, and when it’s bad, Kluge will tell you. This class will kick your ass, and I don’t think I’ll ever know a more acute stress than working right up until seminar and then having to wait for fifteen copies of a thirty-page story to print, but it’s so worth it.
Kenyon course regret: I wish I’d gotten to take another class in the anthropology department, because then I could have minored. Sadly, by the time I realized this, all the seminars were full.
Annie Sheslow
Major: English
Favorite Kenyon course: The English class Theory of Comedy gave me the tools to write basically all my future papers on humor. The class could be a little cringe-worthy in terms of awkward laughs, but I think that was all part of the experience.
Kenyon course regret: Practically, I wish I had kept up with my Spanish, because it is such a marketable skill, but emotionally I think I would have really enjoyed taking more film classes. I also feel like I should have taken an art history class because I fear that one day I will be schmoozing at a fancy cocktail party, and it will become painfully obvious that I don’t know anything about art, and I will feel uncultured and make a beeline for drinks and cheese cubes.
Image: flickr.com