Last year, I didn’t think much about classes that were outside of my requirements. I was only trying to take classes for my major and for my theme. However, second semester I decided to take a sociology class called Rich and Poor in the US because it worked with my theme. I knew nothing about sociology before that but I thought hey why not? This random decision ended up being one of my best ones.

The lecture taught me about the class system and the different experiences that people in different classes than me have gone through. This class honestly brightened my intellectual horizon better than any class ever had. After that, I realized that I wanted to minor in the subject.

This year, I’m taking intro to sociology and at first I wasn’t sure how to feel about the professor or the lessons but after a few weeks I started to really get into them. For example, the past week one of the things we talked about was the issue of #BlackLivesMatter vs #AllLivesMatter. I guess I hadn’t known the extent of this issue before reading an article about it. I know people were trying to act like #BlackLivesMatter shouldn’t be a real issue but I didn’t know that something that said #BlueLivesMatter was also trending, which is very racist.

I also just wrote a paper for the class on microaggressions. My seminar last year had several discussions about them but I honestly thought the idea of them was too exaggerated. For some reason, my mind was changed because I’m learning that it’s not so much that microaggressions shouldn’t be that big of a deal, it’s that good people with good intentions can sometime carry them out. This doesn’t mean they aren’t hurtful; it just means that they don’t know they’re being offensive.

We also had a zap panel come in and talk to us from the LGBT community on campus. They taught us that the gender binary is in all reality, non-existent. Girls and guys can dress however they want and it doesn’t have to mean anything regarding their gender or their sexuality. Gender and sexuality are also spectrums. They aren’t just one thing or the other, which is a concept called dualistic thinking. A lot of older generations were raised on this way of thinking which says there can’t be any in between, either you believe something or you don’t. The millennial generation is starting to welcome much more open ways of thinking.

If you’ve never taken a sociology class, it’s something that I highly suggest. You’ll much more about groups of people and issues that you really know nothing about.