Hello all, I’m a prospective student at Emory and I’m really interested in the voluntary core. Honestly, if I wanted to, I could skip it out on a lot of these classes with AP credit; however I also really want to come to Emory and take advantage of its awesome lib arts department.
To be honest, I’ve never been a huge fan of literature and reading Jane Austen in class sucked, but I also want to challenge myself.
I plan on being a Philosophy major with maybe a BBA double major.
I heard these classes were really tough and really challenge your writing skills, and that kind of scares me. While I don’t want to be a GPA snob, I do want to start my college experience well. I’m afraid my writing abilities are subpar compared to the average Emory student and I’ll end up getting laughed at by one of the professors…
Has anyone taken classes here or know anyone who has? How was the experience? Was it worth it?
Uhmmm, they typically help you with that sort of stuff, so that if you do what you are supposed to, you do well. Also, please instead of thinking of your GPA as: “Starting off the college experience well”, also consider your intellectual experience. If you do the work at a decent level for most humanities and social sciences, you should receive an A-/A and perhaps a B+ for not good work (so you will probably do really well even if one class doesn’t go as well as hoped). It’s a matter of keeping up with the readings and not procrastinating on the writing assignments so that you can seek assistance and polish it before it is due. And there is one freshman who used to post here who is doing quite well in the program even they say it is quite a bit of work. Also, Emory students are no exception. There is great variability in talent in writing and other disciplines. That particular program is meant to make you strong at it, because those who designed know that other portions of the curriculum are lacking in any sort of specific aims. They don’t expect students who are perfect writers at the get go. They just want those who are willing to do the work to get better as opposed to those who will whine once they are told “Your writing is not at the A level yet”, given that most are being used to being told such a thing in high school and with soft instructors who care less about student learning, will likely be told it again, such that the student never becomes particularly great at writing. If most Emory students were epic writers already, even for a selective school, they wouldn’t see the need for the program. Perhaps the person I refer to will come and comment on this to give you more details.
But in general, keep this in mind: Sometimes education is not about your self-esteem. Perhaps being “laughed at” can do you some good and motivate you to improve. I am currently in thermodynamics for my masters program and signed up for the tutorial session, the first of which did not go well (I was slipping all over the place when asked to do a simple problem involving partial derivatives and the TA asked at one point: “do you know how to take a derivative?!”) Needless to say, I made sure to get my act together, reviewed, and scored a high A on the 1st exam and may very well do so on my upcoming exam this week. Hardly no freshman class will come down to one big assignment where you get no feedback before handing it in, so you should be fine as you’ll have plenty of time to develop during the semester in the case you find yourself in a class with reasonably high expectations.
If you feel like you have the skills already, take the course. Also, if you have enough time, take it. They make you go to mandatory talks (which doesn’t sound like a lot now, but trust me, when you start getting involved in things, it’s literally the biggest time drain). The courses are really challenging. Overall, I think there’s better courses at Emory and more time for you to expand on liberal arts. I would wait to take it second semester once you feel out how you adjusted to college
Of course there are better courses (I honestly imagine them to be in the religion or social sciences depts such as history and polisci), but I don’t know if they are that easily accessible to freshmen. Also, the voluntary core is supposed to mimic the cores that some selective schools have, but add an intellectual community component which is why they have the talks. If one is not willing to actually go to the talks, then you should not join. In the mean time, there are freshmen seminars like ORDER. And to be blunt, this person is pre-business. I doubt that this person may have much oppurtunities to take any liberal intensive courses that are actually serious unless they carefully select philosophy courses in the future (as apparently the intros are among the duller ones). But regardless, I think it is supposed to be hard, like the HUME sequence at Princeton for example, so I don’t know, I’m not surprised. Another option would be to play with the 385 and 285 courses of certain departments as they have interesting topics and no pre-reqs and are not necessarily intensive though I say you should at least find one course that is intensive so that you are challenged (maybe take a class with Dr. Payne or Dr. Lancaster).