Like many people, this election instilled the fear of God in me. What has this country come to? How can this man be the leader of the free world? What even are politics anymore? Were just a few of the questions that have been running through my head since Nov. 8. I figured that the only way to understand the system is to essentially be the system, so I signed up for a political science class for the spring semester. As an English and journalism major, I knew I wouldn’t have the chance to take one again and wanted to understand exactly how our political system worked.
I went through the catalog of available classes for weeks prior to my registration date. This is a good problem to have, but there were just so many fun-sounding, interesting political science classes available to all majors. Did I want to learn about the civil rights movement or national security? Environmental politics or politics in Asia? The options were quite literally endless.
I wanted to make this class count, so I ended up signing up for a class called “Political Opinion in the Media,” which I thought would a) tie in nicely with my degree in journalism and b) help me understand the degree to which the media affected the 2016 election. I figured it would be the most useful and interesting (in a way that pertained to me) of all the many available options. I went into class on my first day excited and ready to explore one of the thousands of different subject areas available to me.
This class, so far, has been…interesting. I’ve learned that poli-sci is not a class (or a department) to mess with. I’m not going to lie; this class has been the struggle for a majority of this semester. I managed to sign up for an incredibly reading-heavy, writing-heavy course which, coupled with my intense reading and writing heavy English and journalism classes, usually takes the backseat in terms of priorities (shameful, I know). I find myself wishing I had signed up for one of the classes that was just a GPA boost and was easier—it certainly would have saved me a lot of headaches and stressful nights.
That’s not to say this class hasn’t been useful, informative or interesting—it has been all three and more. I’ve learned exactly what I came for and then some—my professor has really pushed me to different levels of thinking and researching that I didn’t think I was capable of. It broke me out of my shell, one that made me focus on only my two areas of study. I took a lot of AP classes in high school, so I was able to skip many of my gen eds my freshman year and go straight to my major classes. This class put me back into the mode of wanting to learn a little about different subjects, as opposed to learning a lot about one or two subjects. Luckily, political science is something that I was already vaguely interested in, so this class just made me more interested as opposed to less (as is the case with a lot of gen eds).
I would advise anyone who is even remotely interested in politics to take a class in it—it might not be the most fun, but it will make you more knowledgeable about something that is always at the forefront of the media. If you even think you could enjoy a poli sci class, take it. You never know how much you could enjoy it.