At a research university filled with about 30,000 undergraduate students and over 225 programs to major in, making one’s schedule of classes can be difficult. Actually, it can be very overwhelming and really stressful.
There are requirements that each student must fulfill in order to graduate, and these depend on what college they are in within the university. As a student in the College of LSA, the liberal arts school at the University of Michigan, there are a variety of requirements I must take.
To name a few, there are natural science credits, humanities credits, and social science credits.
When I first learned about these requirements, I was a little intimidated. I have never loved science, and honestly, I thought I was done with them in high school.
So, the idea of needing seven more credits in the natural sciences stressed me out.
I think that in my mind, I thought college would be about taking whatever classes I wanted. But the reality of what courses I would be taking for the next four years quickly hit me as I was making my schedule at orientation this summer.
For my first semester of college, one of the classes I decided to take was an introductory anthropology course. I honestly did not know a lot about anthropology, but it fulfilled my “Race and Ethnicity” credit and it also fit into my schedule, which is no easy task to make happen.
Although I had never taken a class on this topic before, I decided to give it a try. This is something that I have come to love about getting a liberal arts education.
I am actually “forced” to try courses that are outside of my comfort zone.
I would never have taken anthropology last semester or a biology class focusing on neurological diseases this semester if I did not have these requirements. But, the only way you learn if you like something is by trying it. I’m not sure I would’ve done that voluntarily.
I know that sometimes a liberal arts education can be frowned upon by society. Some people come to college knowing exactly what they want to do, and society seems to expect that in a way from college students. I even felt that during my senior year of high school when people asked what I planned to major in.
It sometimes feels like students at U of M majoring in fields like business and engineering are often viewed in a better light than liberal arts students. Or maybe that’s just my perception.
While the business school and engineering school are both great options, they are not for me. And that’s OK. It’s more than OK. In LSA, I am taking some really interesting classes and learning about a variety of fields that I had never even heard of before coming here. And, one of them is bound to become my major.
For now, I’m in the “exploring” stage. It seems like one of the last times in my life I’ll have the opportunity to “decide what I want to do when I grow up,” and I think I’ll just enjoy that for the next year or so.
