<p>Feel free to update with your 2010-2011 classes.</p>
<p>Seeing this thread reminds me – I’ll be TFing SCRB 180 again in the fall, and I’d love to see some of you there!</p>
<p>I really recommend Game Theory (Ec 1051). It was a really interesting class, and one of the few classes in microeconomics that I’ve managed to find at Harvard.
Econometrics, on the other hand, was incredibly boring. Lecture attendance is around 30%, but at least it’s pretty easy. I took 1123, and apparently 1126 is slightly better but so ridiculously difficult that it’s not worth taking over 1123
I’m an econ concentrator- these were two very different courses I took this semester</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I’ll pass. Two of the classes I took last semester were too horrible to be described.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Ha, all the more reason to describe them.</p>
<p>Love this thread just for the honesty. What, some of the TFs at Harvard suck? What, some of the classes are boring? No way! This is Harvard where everything academic is better than everywhere else on the planet! Only people with 10 AP classes, near perfect SATs and 4.0s need apply, right? My kid is going to go there and it’s really the whole scene that makes it great, isn’t it? I’m sure the academics are wonderful on average, but it’s the people and the atmosphere that make it the special place that it is, no? At least I hope that’s the case for my kid’s sake. Keep up the posts guys, and please, Calico, tell us about your horrible classes. I think I may have learned more from my horrible classes than I did from my merely good ones.</p>
<p>Yes, Calico, please share so that we can avoid them!</p>
<p>I loved five of my classes this year. Four were last semester: my freshman seminar and a language class, which I shan’t too much since they were so small. One of the larger two was Puett’s ER-18: Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Philosophy (or something). He would occasionally randomly diss all of Western culture and philosophy, which was annoying, but if you could get over that, the class was great. (It was not a generally polemical class, despite his clearly polemical personal views.) Like, there are all these Chinese philosophers who thought really interesting things that nobody knows about, and I always want to reference them now. Most philosophy doesn’t tackle political organization (at least until quite recent modern philosophy). The Chinese thinkers DID spend a lot of time thinking about the best way to order society and the state, and it’s great. I could summarize more about my favorite philosophers, but I think that would get tedious. Basically, when I emerge from a class excited to share insights from it (and in possession of favorite philosophers), it was a very good class to have taken.
The other was McCormick’s SW41, a survey of Medieval European history. I had spent all high taking history courses that began with “…the Middle Ages were boring, so we’re going to start with the super interesting Renaissance!” It was great to finally have that itch scratched. Professor McCormick is a charming person and a charming lecturer. That said, the class is HARD. Do not be fooled by its gen ed status.
This semester, I loved HAA 11: Landmarks of World Architecture. I was not originally optimistic about its chances of adding up to more than a series of lectures on interesting buildings, but it did. I don’t have a grounding in one field of architectural history, or the field as a whole, but I can see a little of what architectural historians see in buildings. I thought the exams and the last essay were positively fun. I’d never done slide comparisons before, and found that I actually quite enjoyed them, making the tests fun. The essay was rather unusual for a Harvard paper. We had to find and physically go to a building in the Harvard area, and then write a research paper using 5-10 sources, but primarily based on our own observations of it. I was originally dreading the paper, but taking a field trip over to an interesting building at MIT and hanging out one nice spring day, taking pictures and thinking about architecture, was one of the most painless kinds of research I’ve done. Recommended!</p>
<p>As for the classes that I did not love, I don’t have that much to say about them. They were just solidly mediocre, rather than legendarily bad. My Expos was fine. I think it was about as good as Expos can be, but that meant it plateaued at “slightly annoying but mostly unobjectionable.” I took an American history class that taught me less about its period of specialty than my (absolutely fantastic) APUSH teacher did. That professor is leaving after this year, though. And I took a Great Books Gen Ed with James Simpson that I was originally really excited about, but just didn’t quite cohere as a course. It may get better in future years.</p>
<p>Although I’ll leave Calico to describe them, I’m guessing that she’s talking about Physical Sciences 1 and Life Sciences 1b. I cried tears of blood for those courses - I’m fairly certain that you’d be hard pressed to find worse classes at Harvard. My courses this semester made me hate school.</p>
<p>Thanks for your inputs everyone. 
This thread was a great idea Dwight!</p>
<p>OT: Wow, I’d assumed calico was a guy!!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The worst part was Dan Hartl’s jokes.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>LOL. Although PS1 was difficult, I can say that it was well taught and once I rewatched lectures that I slept in (which was everything after the second test) I did way better than expected and was able to recover from my horrible grade on third test. Also they were pretty nice to us with the easy final.</p>
<p>Life Sci 1b really is too horrible for words. Both professors are horrible at teaching (and I may be the only one but I thought Hartl was slightly better than Ruvolo) and the head preceptors are extremely *****y. Even my TF hated the class and said she felt sorry for us. The problem set questions were very vague and the textbook didn’t help much since it was horribly written (I would never forget that stupid paragraph about the freaking kitchen blender). The GDP project took up so many hours and was so useless. Because they were mad at us for the facebook group issue, they made the final impossible. They put material on the final that they have never taught us and was never mentioned at all. This is the worst class I have ever had which is saying something since I came from a ghetto inner-city high school.</p>
<p>Off-topic, but @ksarmand I just realized who you are. Now I can say I know one person from CC.</p>
<p>^You just perfectly summarized the majority of what I got out of life sci. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Wish I have that kind of skill :p! Yep, one of them was LS1b, and the other was English 159.</p>
<p>I’ll add to the LS1b discussion… oh my god, that class was AWFUL. To future students: do not take if you are not ABSOLUTELY SURE that you don’t have to.
I took:
Psych 14 (cognitive neuroscience): this class had high cue scores, but it had new professors this year (Schachter and Alvarez); they were clearly lazy. The entirety of our grade was tests (two midterms for 30% each and the final for 40%), and although their lectures were alright, our sole TF implied multiple times that the tests were largely taken from a bank of questions, and that it was largely his job to write them, ie that the professors were simply uninvolved in the writing of the tests. (On a related note: this seems to be a very Harvard phenomenon. LS1B also had the preceptors, NOT the professors, write exams; both of my parents are professors at another top 25 college, and they write all their own exams. What is going on??) </p>
<p>LS1b: again, a disaster. Disorganized, unreasonable; the staff were patronizing and largely incompetent; labs were usually useless. </p>
<p>religion 56 (existentialism and religion): a moral and ethical reasoning gen ed that, as a probable philosophy concentrator, I’m not really sure why I took. It was interesting, and I imagine I’d have been much better if it’d had been ~40 people like it was last year instead of ~400. My TF was a really nice but flaky guy who clearly had a lot of other stuff going on and had been roped into this at the last minute when they needed more staff. Probably one of the better moral/ethical reasoning gen eds; largely painless, and interesting; I took it as an easy second philosophy-ish course, and it was fun, although the size was often kind of annoying. The professor knows her stuff and was a good lecturer.</p>
<p>Phil 129 (kant’s critique of pure reason): this was my first upper-level phil class, and the phil head tutor later said to a group of potential concentrators that “we shouldn’t take something like Kant for our first non-intro class”… oops. Anyway, it was REALLY GREAT, even though it was difficult (came out okay in the end, though). Good and dedicated TF; good, very very knowledgeable instructor; chill, open classroom atmosphere. I love the phil department, and this was no exception, even though the instructor wasn’t a faculty professor.</p>
<p>A freshman seminar about string theory, extra dimensions, etc: this was with Lisa Randall, an extremely prominent theoretical physicist. Awesome experience; she was totally brilliant, and although I wasn’t well-versed enough in physics to get as much out of it as I could have, it was a seriously great class. </p>
<p>In short: avoid huge classes if possible, though some of them are okay; be prepared for sucky TFs and lazy teachers; and AVOID LS1B ;_;</p>
<p>Mollieb - that course looks really interesting… I hadn’t considered any SCRB courses before! Do you know if the MCB80 requirement can be filled concurrently? I’ll be taking that in the fall as well.
(Such high cue scores!)</p>
<p>“Perhaps the community college instructors will refrain from interjecting such pensive arboricultural mythos into their math lectures.”</p>
<p>Mifune, I must myself advance the following interjections: that I take great pleasure in the syntactical rhythms of your exposition, and moreover that your lexicon inspires in me a soaring feeling akin to one experienced in a bird’s initial flight. </p>
<p>On a more serious note, what class year are you in?</p>
<p>Elanorci – I think that should be fine, but I’ll double-check with The Boss today.</p>
<p>We mainly ask for the MCB80 prereq for two reasons. The major one is that we start off assuming everybody knows what a neuron is, what an action potential is, etc. The minor one is that we require the same textbook, and we don’t want anybody to have to buy it only for this class, because we don’t use it that much. But it’s more a class that asks you to bring your ability to think and reason rather than to bring specific factual knowledge, so I think taking MCB80 concurrently would be perfectly fine.</p>
<p>Do any of you take classes at MIT? How smooth is the registration process, do the different term schedules clash, and of course what classes did you take and how were they?</p>
<p>@Elanorci-- omg, Lisa Randall has a freshman seminar? Can you take it even if the last time you took physics was in freshman year of high school and you remember nothing? </p>
<p>“Psych 14 (cognitive neuroscience): this class had high cue scores, but it had new professors this year (Schachter and Alvarez); they were clearly lazy.” NOOOOOOOOO, this was one of the classes I was looking forward to most! Are Schachter and Alvarez staying for next year?</p>
<p>impromptublue - I only have one friend who’s taken a class at MIT so you should wait for other responses, but she seemed very stressed not only by the course but by the various clashes of the scheduling. I don’t think the actual registration process was a problem, but, for instance, there often seemed to be big projects (she took an architecture class) due on the day of big midterms in important, large at Harvard that most non-sadistic professors at Harvard would have known about and maybe avoided. The term breaks also don’t match up; she had to stay on campus and take classes over spring break. Overall, though, I think she enjoyed it; just a couple things to keep in mind. </p>
<p>The Randall seminar is open to anyone; the textbook is her book Warped Passages, which is written for the general public and is very comprehensible with little to no physics background. A word of caution, though: most people in my class were serious physics concentrators (although there were two or three other almost clueless people like me), and they got a hell of a lot more out of the course than I did. It really, really helps to know some physics; consider taking 15a before enrolling in this seminar, not because it’s a prerequisite per se but because if you’re interested in this class you’ll probably be interested in 15a as well, and you’ll get a lot out of both of them that way.
It is, however, a freshman seminar; if you don’t know how the application process for those work, you write a couple short essays for one to many seminars, apply, and you get accepted to some and rejected from others. It seems to be a mostly random process, but you may or may not get it. The Randall seminar was offered second semester this year, which made it a little less competitive, but i know some people who didn’t get it. (You can always email the professor after the official seminar assignments; I think she let a couple extra people in.) </p>
<p>And about psych 14: the new course catalog (released today) shows that the old professor is back to teaching it. So hooray for you! No worries.</p>
<p>by schacter, do you guys mean THE stanley schacter from the schacter-singer theory?</p>