<p>I have been preadmitted into Directed Studies, and I have a few questions. How many other courses are you allowed to take? For example, could I take a math or science and Spanish along with DS? (I wouldn't take a hard science/math, since I am an English major.)
Also, just in general, how many courses per semester are freshmen allowed to and/or recommended to take?</p>
<p>Hi Scholar,</p>
<p>I’m a freshman at Yale currently enrolled in Directed Studies (referred to around Yale simply as “DS”), so hopefully I’ll be able to provide some answers to your questions.</p>
<p>So, Yale doesn’t technically place a limit on how many courses you can take outside of the 3 courses (literature, philosophy, and historical & political thought) that comprise the DS curriculum, although if you take more than five credits total, especially in the first semester of your freshman year, you might be putting yourself in a place where your faculty advisor or freshman counselor may not agree to sign off on your schedule. Yale requires that you have at least 36 credits by the time you graduate, which comes to an average of 9 per year. It’s pretty typical for people to be taking 4, 4.5, or 5 credits at any given semester, although people have been known to do more. You are required to have at least 8 credits by the end of your freshman year, so you really ought to do at least 4 every semester, which shouldn’t be a problem.</p>
<p>As for your question about whether you could do DS + math/science + Spanish, that would depend on a couple of things. I guess the technical answer is this: yes, you could hypothetically do it. Depending on the level of Spanish that you would place into, that would be either a 5-credit or a 5.5-credit schedule (Levels 1-4 of languages are worth 1.5 credits each because they meet every day, and Level 5 classes are worth only 1 due to reduced class time). I would suggest that for your first semester of freshman year, you stick to 4 or 4.5 credits so that you can get a feel for life as a college student, have more time to discover what extracurriculars you want to get involved with, etc. I have done 4.5 credits (DS + French) for both semesters so far and it’s worked out really well. </p>
<p>Also, just a side note, but DS is a lot of work. If you’re really passionate about the material though, and willing to do a lot of reading and writing, then I cannot recommend it enough. The classes are small, the books we read are fantastic, the professors are brilliant, and it’s a really well-structured program. I urge you to consider it seriously.</p>
<p>Hope that helps, and congratulations on being admitted to Yale! It’s a wonderful place!</p>
<p>@aksoccerboy: Thank you so much! That really helps a lot.</p>
<p>+1 to aksoccerboy answer. 5.5 credits as a first semester freshman would likely be a mistake frowned upon by advisers who would need to sign your schedule. DS lectures and sections are plentiful and it may be a challenge to schedule two additional classes around them.</p>
<p>This thread and the (accurate, I believe) answers posted point up a real problem with Directed Studies. The question “Can I have a core curriculum that includes math and foreign language?” has a right and a wrong answer, from a moral/educational standpoint, and that version of the right answer cannot be “No.” That the practical answer at Yale today is “No” has to trouble people who care about DS.</p>
<p>I faced a version of this problem 40 years ago. I was in DS; I really wanted to take a French course to keep up my French, and I had to take some sort of math or science course for distributional reasons. If I hadn’t satisfied the math requirement with the AP test, that fifth course would have had to be math. Instead of taking an advanced French language course with daily drilling, I took a fabulous literature class (in French), and for my science class I took a famous, and famously entertaining, gut. I would have been better educated in the long run, however, if I had taken more math and at least one rigorous language course.</p>
<p>I loved DS. (My wife was in it too, and she also loved it.) In retrospect, however, it was not as great an idea as it seemed at the time. If I had known in September of my freshman year what I knew by December of the following year, I would have known that I could do better with an a la carte approach. </p>