<p>Hey guys,</p>
<p>Could a current Yalie tell me about DS? I know what it is and what it covers, but is it amazing? Is it a ton of work or not life-changingly time-consuming?</p>
<p>Any details would be appreciated!</p>
<p>Thanks!!!</p>
<p>I’m curious about this too. I’ve heard some stories/rumors, but nothing concrete…</p>
<p>Just FYI, current DS’ers are in the throws of finals, so you might want to pose this question again in a few days.</p>
<p>ah ok that would make sense
thanks :)</p>
<p>Coming from a procrastinator (exams this week!) who knows many DS people and was accepted to the program, but did not end up taking it… DS is very time intensive and it may limit your other choices for classes… at most you would only take one other class per semester and it would probably be smart not to take a horribly difficult class. My reasons for not taking DS lied in its limiting of my schedule and my ability to explore other interests. At the same time, it would certainly be worthwhile. An introduction to (most of) the western canon is a solid foundation from which to build on no matter what area of study you eventually pursue. If certain features of DS are appealing, there are usually classes that you can take that cover similar material, although the overall DS program covers more because of the full year courses. In addition, DS will shape and improve your writing ability and hone your critical thinking skills.</p>
<p>DSer here. Descartesz is right that we’re in the midst of finals, but this seems like an opportune way to procrastinate. </p>
<p>Info You May Know Already
Most basically, Directed Studies is a broad survey of the Humanities in Western Civilization that some Yalies take during their freshman year. You have three DS courses your first year: Literature, History & Politics, and Philosophy. First semester starts with the Homer, Herodotus, and Plato and ends with Dante and Aquinas. Second semester picks up with Cervantes, Machiavelli, and Descartes (not the CC user) and ends with Eliot, Arendt, and Nietzsche. All texts are English or English translations.</p>
<p>About 120 frosh participate each year. Most apply via an application that you’ll see posted sometime in May/June, a couple dozen are offered pre-admission by the Directed Studies faculty (no one is quite sure how pre-admission works, but it must be based off your Yale application).</p>
<p>Most students take one other course with DS, but some take two. Nobody takes DS without choosing at least one other course.</p>
<p>Things That Aren’t As Well Known [ul]
[li] The program was started a little over 40 years ago, when Yale realized that many of its students were no longer prep school grads and thus hadn’t read all of the Western Canon by freshman year. It quickly became a fixture at Yale College and arguably what’s seen as its premier program. Now even prep schools spend very little time on Western classics, so the programs is viewed as even more essential.</p>[/li]
<p>[li] Because DS is so central to the Yale curriculum, the teaching faculty are top-notch. Each course has one lecture and two sections per week. The sections are led by Yale professors, not TAs, and many of the professors are renowned for their teaching abilities (see footnote below, marked by *). These professors generally rotate out after a semester and return to their normal courses, but many view teaching in DS as a coveted position. </p>[/li]
<p>[li] Because of these two previous points, Directed Studies is often considered the top Great Books program in the country. This isn’t to deny that some other schools have great classics programs, but the combination of tradition and stellar program really make DS hard to beat.</p>[/li]
<p>[li] While I agree with Mythbuster that DS is a big commitment, I don’t think it’s as constraining as he believes. Every course in DS counts toward a distributional credit, and by the time your done you have your Humanties, Social Science, and Writing requirements completed (6 o distributional credits out of 12 total). The only major that it fairly incompatible with DS is Engineering; even premed students can often find a way to fit DS in. In many cases, is even possible to double major after DS if you have a good idea of what you want to do at the beginning of sophomore year. [/ul]</p>[/li]
<p>Workload
DS gives you a considerable amount of reading. We devour most texts in a week, but occasionally spend two weeks on large works like the Iliad or the Republic. You also write three essays every four weeks, which are always due on Fridays and are always 4-6 pages. </p>
<p>That said, I think other Yalies have a misconception that DS is much more work than all other courses. I rarely notice myself working more intensely than those taking Freshman Orgo or other rigorous courses. Yes, sometimes the reading takes a while and sometimes it’s a mad scramble to finish your essay on Thursday night, but what most non-DSers overlook is how well-structured the workload is. Because the three courses are centrally organized, you’ll never find, for example, that you’re stuck writing 3 essays in one weekend. The workload is always manageable, and if you’re efficient with your reading (admittedly, I am not always so), you would never find yourself pulling an all-nighter.</p>
<p>** Why Do DS **
Of course, there are the fairly standard answers like “it’s a strong foundation for college” or “there’s not another time when you’ll be able to read all those books.” But apart from these, I think there are two other good reasons for doing it.</p>
<p>First, DS at its best is a new approach to thinking. Having so many perspectives and ideas thrown at you requires you to filter and criticize quickly. The essays are focused and most teachers demand pretty rigorous thinking in them; my writing skills have gotten a lot less shabby as a result. And you get to talk about heavy-hitting topics every day – most of the time you’re dealing with the whole forest, not just the trees. </p>
<p>Secondly, this is about as good as Yale gets. It’s the best of the English and Humanties departments, which are generally considered to be tops in their fields. It draws some of the best law professors from a not-too-shabby law school. You get students who care and who generally take the course not out of a sense of obligation but simply out of interest. Yale, and really the whole Western university system, was built around this kind of program, so it seems good to pay homage to that a bit.</p>
<p>I guess I should also say that I didn’t plan on doing DS. I was intrigued but, like Mythbuster, thought it would be too academically limiting, and, in addition, that it was too narrow an approach to the Humanities. This second objection is one I still hold and still wrestle with. I cannot pretend to not be perpetuating a system of education that inevitably marginalizes many voices and points of view. But (I hope) DS does not pretend to be a survey of all great works. The task is to study the West’s influence upon itself. As long as I don’t begin thinking that these are the “only” or “best” works worth studying, I end up feeling pretty good about DS at the end of the day. </p>
<p>For more information, check out [Directed</a> Studies at Yale University](<a href=“http://www.yale.edu/directedstudies]Directed”>Welcome | Directed Studies)</p>
<p>*There are always several especially notable faculty who lead sections; this semester Profs. Charles Hill (Yale’s diplomat-in-residence) and Anthony Kronman (Former Dean of the Law School) both led sections. Lecturers this year include Kronman and Hill, Donald Kagan, Harold Bloom, and Shelly Kagen, all professors whose other lectures are packed every semester. Every semester includes a couple colloquium on more general topics, and often non-Yale professors are flown in to give these talks.</p>
<p>This is coming from a non-DSer. I hope I can give you an outsiders perspective because at times, it can be interesting.</p>
<p>I have a close friend who is in DS and I agree that DS, while time consuming, is not all-consuming. During the week, he seems to always be reading and in fact, there is a small group of Calhoun DSers who seem to be in the Calhoun library A LOT reading. (Or, especially on Thursday nights, working on their papers.) However, DSers do have social lives, contrary to what many people believe. My friend partys hard on weekends (as do some other DSers). Of course, this is depending on the character of each person in DS.</p>
<p>Which brings me to another point. The diversity of the people that take DS has astounded me. I met this kid during CC (Cultural Connections, a pre-orientation program) who seemed like a total party animal, ladies man, typical jock. Lo and behold, he likes to contemplate Plato and Socrates in his free time. He’s in DS. To me, the fact that in a small sample of 120 kids you get the party animals, the “nerds,” the philosophers, the random normal kid, and many others, is surprising.</p>
<p>Would I do DS? No, I would not. It does limit your class choices (READ: not a waste of time, just limiting) and being pre-med, it would not really suit my needs.</p>
<p>Thanks, everyone!
As I’m hoping for EPE, I guess DS would be a good foundation, since I won’t be taking science or math (well, maybe stats).</p>
<p>If your second (or third, or whatever) choice in colleges was a place like Columbia or Chicago, then you ought to be interested in DS, since it is essentially a chance to take the Columbia core with about 10% of your Yale class.</p>
<p>My wife and I were both in DS in the Pleistocene Era. I think we would both agree that it was interesting and valuable, but not essential. Almost everyone in it liked it, and almost everyone not in it was perfectly happy with whatever else they were doing. It was not completely incompatible with being a pre-med, but it got in the way of things that lots of pre-meds wanted to do, especially if they wanted to be science majors, so there were very few pre-meds in it (and even fewer non-pre-med math/science/engineering types).</p>
<p>If you are not already a fluid writer, you have to want to improve in a boot-camp kind of manner to choose DS. My wife actually did this – she came from a high school where she never wrote anything longer than five pages (handwritten), and not that much very often. DS helped teach her how to churn out the papers fast. It wasn’t easy, but it worked. If you don’t take DS, you will get something of the same thing in freshman English, but you won’t get 3x freshman English, which DS essentially is.</p>
<p>It’s important to realize that you will be placed into DS classes without regard for the other class you are interested in taking, so you should have several alternatives in mind. (You can try to swap sections once classes start.) The biggest problem comes if you are trying to take a singleton language course that meets every day. You can’t be both places at once, but you can’t miss your DS class while you’re trying to swap.</p>
<p>@drbigboyjoe:
I would agree that DS doesn’t seem to attract an especially like-minded group of students, and that it’s always surprising to find out what people are into outside of DS. However, having sat in a lot of DS lectures, it’s definitely no random sampling of freshmen. There are more white people, fewer pre-med/science majors, fewer athletes, and there’s an even more liberal temperment than the rest of campus. </p>
<p>@bluescreen:
It’s my understanding that many EPE’ers have a DS background, and DS is generally looked upon favorably by the EPE department during the EPE selection process (not to say it’s a shoo-in, but DS can definitely open other academic doors). </p>
<p>@ Yalemom2:
DS can be a problem if you’re interested in a unique language course your freshman year, like Czech or Indonesian. However, most popular languages offer sections at many different times, so it’s typically workable.</p>
<p>True, nickknack. My son was shut out of Latin (both beginning and Intensive) because of DS his first semester which really upset him. I think it wouldn’t have been such a blow had he realized how they did the scheduling. I just wanted to give others the heads up.</p>
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<p>My DS Philosophy and Classics sections included one of the future founders of the Federalist Society (and general libertarian-activist lawyer) and a future senior official in the Bush II administration. Also Lawrence Summers’ first wife. It did not have a more liberal temperament than the rest of the campus. </p>
<p>(Of course, this was a while ago. But I had to laugh at that characterization. Also, a kid I know who’s there now, and did DS, arrived a more-or-less standard upper-class liberal, and somehow converted into a fire-breathing right-wing blogger by the end of her freshman year.)</p>