Frosh Humanities

<p>Look little prefroshies... You're going to get railroaded into taking 2 hums that you probably don't like without your choice being involved in any way. They only offer enough hums to allow everyone to take 2, so if you can't get in to a particular set by the first 2 terms, you might be screwed. While they claim this offers you one-on-one interactions with your profs, this does not help you. It's an arbitrary limit that does more harm than good.</p>

<p>I don't care what people try to tell you about having the freedom to pick two of the three (history, philosophy, and English) and the freedom to effectively blackball another.</p>

<p>I'm not taking a hum next term. I'm taking CS 21 instead. And neither is my roommate.
I guess I'll take my second frosh hum sophomore year or something. It shouldn't be so bad because most of the people who'll be taking them will be on pass-fail => general standards will be lower => I won't have to work as hard to get a decent grade in the class.</p>

<p>(At least this means we don't have to suffer through papers. Like the one that's due at 2:30 today that I've written about a quarter of.)</p>

<p>See, we do get freedom! Well, kinda.
Actually, not really. ::cry::</p>

<p>can you take music or languages for humanities though?</p>

<p>2 of your 12 hum/SS classes have to follow the restrictions of the OP. It's really not that bad. Yes, not every class at Tech is going to be spectacular and exactly what you want, but you do what you need to do to graduate. Of the 12 hum/SS classes, the breakdown is:</p>

<p>2 frosh hums in 2 different subjects out of English, History, Philosophy
2 advanced hums
2 introductory SS
2 advanced SS
4 hum/SS of your choosing</p>

<p>So, languages and music (history) classes can count towards the 4 hum/SS of your choosing. Languages after the 4th term in the sequence count towards advanced hums, regardless of whether you've actually taken the first 4 classes in the sequence. Hope that clears things up.</p>

<p>The humanities requirements, and the effectiveness of the frosh hums in particular, leave plenty to be desired.</p>

<p>I would like to see some of the SFC suggestions that have been recurring with clear emphasis for the past several SFC (student-faculty conferences) actually being implemented; e.g, linguistics classes. Not for me personally, but a lot of people want these classes; why haven't they been offered yet?</p>

<p>I feel like the apparently noble vision of the humanities requirements is being carried out very poorly by the frosh hums, but maybe it's just my specific experience (each class is different). In the grand scheme of your education here, it's not really the most important issue, though.</p>

<p>Work is being done to see a linguistics class implemented. One of the issues is finding someone to teach it. It's not that simple to just hire new faculty. They're currently working to try to determine exactly what kind of linguistics students are interested in, as the field is fairly broad.</p>