Getting Schooled on Classes

There further you get into your graduate education the less time you will find yourself in class. However, if you are just starting out there's a good chance you're in a few. Most grad classes are really focused on your area of study, but if you're adding some weird, out-there concentration (like I am) you might find yourself in a classes that you don't necessarily think would be placed in the same schedule. For example, as a Women's and Gender Studies student, one would expect to find things like Feminist Thought and Domestic Violence & Sexual Assault on my class schedule, but pairing those with Theatre for the Young...?

This leads me to my main "topic" this time: Types of classes.

I think this information can be useful to anyone in grad school, but particularly those that have some seemingly randomly placed classes in there.

First, you will undoubtedly have the class that will might you wonder if you are in fact above a third grade reading level. For me, this class is Feminist Thought. I can't tell you how many times I've had to google words just to get a partial understanding of one sentence in a forty page long article. (One would think that theorists should be forced to choose between incomprehensible to people with less than a Ph.D, or long enough to be my Master's thesis, but that's a topic for another day!) This class will be the one you find yourself nearly in tears over several times throughout the semester (actual tears may too come). It is the most challenging class you have come across in your entire academic history and because of it you will question whether the admissions committee decided to torture you for a good laugh at your misery.

Next, you might find yourself in a class that you thought was going to expand your knowledge on a subject you were already quite familiar with (this would be my Domestic Violence & Sexual Assault class). I have a decent background in trainings and education in domestic violence and sexual assault, so upon seeing this class listed for the semester, I jumped on it. I was told that it was taught by a board member of the local women's domestic violence shelter and that he had been teaching the class for many years. This was definitely the class I thought I would rock. Well as it turns out, I know everything this professor is going to say before he says it. Everything. The readings are simple and about things I already know and class discussions do nothing be reiterate the readings. There's really no point to this class whatsoever and every week I'm left wondering why I'm there and how the rest of the class has managed to survive to this point in their life. Baffling.

Finally, the is the fun class (Theatre for the Young), the class you thought was going to save your sanity for the first semester at least. Wrong. It might be fun at first, you might think "Well, at least it's a break, right?" but then as the semester progresses you realize that you're losing more of your sanity with each class you attend (and being the good student you are, you'll attend them all...most of the time). If you are put in the position that I was, you'll be in a mixed class. By this I mean that this class is open to undergrads too. BE WARNED of this class! It is EVIL and you will want to rip your eyeballs out because of the level of stupidity. You will be taught as if you are an undergrad, because that's what the majority of the class is. In fact there is only one other grad student in the class with you...and she might stop showing up after a while. The "grad component" of the class only means doubling the paper length and a surprise project. My prof left it up to me what I was going to do for this surprise project and thinking about applying to Ph. D programs in the future, I chose teaching. This seemed like a great idea. Then I was given no feedback and all of the sudden surprise, you're teaching next Monday, get me a detailed lesson plan by Tuesday at the latest (of course its Monday afternoon when you get this e-mail and well, duh, you have a paper due Tuesday for DV&SA). So you throw something together for a lesson plan and all is good. Once again, no feedback. Joy.


The real pleasure in all of these classes is realizing that you're encountering all three types at the same time. This will throw you into a semi permanent state of confusion. You may have ups and downs to the point that you think you're developing a mental disorder. Don't even get me started on the will power it takes to go from Theatre for the Young into Feminist Thought on the same day. If only you could see the sideways head turn and the sarcastic "really?" expression on my face.

The real insanity of it all is that when you're find yourself reading for one of your no-brainer classes you will be thinking about the challenging class and wanting to read for that instead. Why? Who knows, maybe you're just a masochist...I mean you'd have to be to subject yourself to grad school in the first place, right?