<p>I am currently a student in Directed Studies and here is what I wrote to a friend about it.</p>
<p>What can I say about Directed Studies than
if the idea of spending most of your time freshman year getting
engrossed in the Western canon, devoting almost all your time to dead
white men, and writing a paper almost every week sounds appealing to
you, then there is nothing better. I personally love Directed Studies.
It is essentially a Great Books program consisting of courses in
Literature, Philosophy and Historial/Political Thought (although second
semester it is almost entirely political thought). Each class has one
lecture a week than in theory all 150 DS students attend (usually the
numbers are more like 100-120) and two discussion sections with real
professors that have 15-20 students each. In your discussion sections,
you get to work with some of the best professors at Yale like Charles
Hill, who is Yale's Diplomat in Residence and Carlos Eire, who wrote the
National Book Award winning memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana (If you
haven't read that book, get it now. It is the fascinating story of
Carlos Eire's life in Cuba during Castro's overthrow and his struggles
to get to America). Almost all of the professors, famous or not, are
really good and they do a wonderful job of keeping discussions
interesting and teaching you the material. The great thing about DS
professors is that they are all readily available to help you with your
papers and other questions whenever you need it. They also do a really
good job at keeping the interdisciplinary nature of the program alive by
drawing comparisions in one subject to texts we have read in another. Finally another good thing about DS is that it provides you with an instant community of 125 people bonded through the "pain" and pleasures of Directed Studies.</p>
<p>This is not to say that DS is without its problems. One big problem is
the speed with which you fly through the material (for example, we have
only two weeks to read and discuss Don Quixote which if you don't know
is about 1000 pages long) and the constant pressure of writing papers
just about every week. You also have to write a 4-6 page paper due on
Friday almost every week, which isn't too bad, but if you have 3 or more
in a row it can get very draining. Another is the scheduling. When you
come to the DS orientation they just assign you in sections which may or
may not conflict with other classes you want to take and they only way
to switch is to try use the elaborate trading market that appears in
every DSers e-mail. Sometimes you will get lucky and find someone
willing to switch and other times you will have to take another class.
Finally, the last problem is that there are always one or two professors
that are not quite as good as the other ones in each subject and it can
be sort of a disappointment to be assigned to their section (they are
still good professors, after all they are at Yale, they just aren't as
good as the other ones). </p>
<p>If I haven't scared you away with my description of the program, there
are two ways to get into it. The first, and easiest, way is they will
simply send you a letter in mid-April telling you that you have been
pre-accepted into Directed Studies based on certain strengths or
elements in your Yale application (I wrote on mine that DS was one of
the reasons I liked Yale so much, so that might have helped me). The
other way is to apply in June with the application on-line. If you apply
and are not accepted, they will waitlist you and if you still want to do
the program don't worry, if you put enough effort into making Jane Levin
(the director of DS) know that you really want to do DS they will keep
you in mind, and at the beginning of the semester when a lot of people
drop DS after they realize what it really is, there will most likely be
a spot for you in the program. If you want to see the application, see
the reading list, get an idea of the pace at which the program moves, or
see any more info go to <a href="http://www.yale.edu/directedstudies%5B/url%5D">www.yale.edu/directedstudies</a> which will be able
to answer a lot of questions you might have.</p>
<p>To the above poster who didn't apply to Columbia because of the core program, you will probably not like Directed Studies because it is essentially an expanded version of the Lit/Hum class in that (except that it is 3 courses only your freshman year). I personally though would think hard about Directed Studies because I have enjoyed it.</p>