Half of all Yale students are regular café hoppers or Feb Club all-stars. They spend their weekends pursuing photography or planning trips to NYC. The other half socializes during peer tutor office hours and spends Friday nights studying. Clearly, there is a lifestyle divide in our community.
The cliché response to this is the STEM vs. anything-else dichotomy. Many think paper-based courses are subjective. It’s commonplace to argue that social science and humanities students get by with decent seminar skills and a manageable workload.
But enrolled in Directed Studies, Yale’s infamously intense first-year humanities program, I saw that STEM is not the only field that demands rigor. We discussed historical thought as thoroughly as a STEM student would do their problem sets. I was busier studying humanities than any of my friends were in studying STEM. For the first time in my life, reading was a rigorous endeavor.
Six credits of Directed Studies fulfill the distributional requirements for humanities and social sciences and the skills requirement for writing. However, the program requires a weekly five-page paper assignment and 400-500 pages of difficult reading. DS courses don’t double-count toward any of my major requirements. From an outside perspective, it seems like an unrewarded undertaking.
To be honest, I’ve never been a decisive or practical person. I was an Ethics, Politics and Economics major my first semester. Then came a short-lived architecture phase. I made the unspeakable mistake of taking multivariable calculus. In the meantime, I discovered that there’s a life outside the classroom, something I’ve realized only after graduating from high school.
In studying what interests me and challenging myself, I gave up the option to have a much easier college journey. I want to go to law school in my thirties. I doubt the admissions staff will ever tell the difference between rigorous courses and a fancy-sounding easy seminar. In the end, an A will be an A, and a B a B. “So what’s the point of taking the hard academic route?”, one may ask.
I’m not one to obsessively prioritize my GPA. I’d rather struggle in a difficult course than to have a 4.0 without ever developing. Professors who care to criticize my essays are more genuine than those who hand out easy As and get better ratings. But when everyone wants to cut corners and get the most resume lines with the least work, we lose faith in genuine learning. Innovative and creative thinkers are forced into numerical systems. Choosing to genuinely challenge yourself becomes the irrational option. And everyone has to somewhat adapt to the system.
During winter break, I was really frustrated with myself while reflecting on my DS experience. In high school, I went to a strict boarding school that scheduled nearly every hour of my day. I thought I had earned newfound freedom in college. But while my peers had been frat-hopping every Friday, I had been in my room, silently reading. I had not connected with most of my first-semester texts. Stoic physics seemed plainly outdated, for one. Anselm’s ontological argument about God felt like a traffic jam of words. I had been planning to major in EP&E, and its prerequisites could be satisfied by DS. I asked my then-DUS whether I could transfer the credits of one semester of DS. She said my three courses would only count as one major credit.
Now I’ve arrived at the finishing line, and I’ve chosen to stick with the ambitions of my high-school-senior self. My first year of adulthood has been swarmed with the opaque sentences of DS texts. My bedtime reads are canonical Western works embroidered with puzzling complications. I started using the words “ontology,” “theodicy,” and “teleology” for the first time in my life. And I usually see myself as quite a non-pretentious person.
Around a month ago, I was reading Tocqueville in the Silliman Good Life Center. I constantly ruminate over tiny details, so speed reading has always been difficult for me. I wanted a break, so I picked up a psychology book from the bookshelf. My eyes sprinted through the first page at record speed. I quickly absorbed language I’d have once slugged over. DS had forced me to read efficiently. Even more so than my entire junior year speed-running the SAT reading section.
As a soon-to-be DS alum, I can now confidently call out people who claim to know much about Plato or Kant. My first-semester self was struggling to keep up with the readings. Now, I’m taking five credits with busy extracurriculars—and some form of a social life. I still struggle sometimes, but at least with a deepened understanding of the Western canon.
Jokes aside, I think that “aha” moments like this require genuine frustration. I don’t think there’s any Pomodoro session or mnemonic that can replace the gut feeling of learning. Realizing that something that’d once puzzled me had become intuitive… I’ll think about the unfairness of grade inflation once I’m actually applying to law school. For now, I choose the gut feeling over the gut, and I recommend you do, too.
