<p>hey all</p>
<p>What are your experiences with skipping intro courses and diving straight into the "non-intros"?</p>
<p>i.e. I'm skipping intro to anthro & going straight into anth 2280 medical anthropology</p>
<p>If it’s not a prereq it usually doesn’t matter. A great example is the psych department – they have intro 101 psych, which is very broad. They they have 200 level classes which are intro but more specialized, such as child psych. I didn’t need intro psych for child psych and I liked that the 200 level was more specialized. So that is totally fine if the antro dept works like that. I’ve never taken an anthro class so I don’t know the policy but it might be the same, that 200 level is just a more specialized intro class… You can always email the prof and ask for his recommendation?</p>
<p>In most humanities and social sciences departments, the important difference in difficulty is between the 1000/2000 level courses, which are designed for nonmajors or underclassmen, and the 3000/4000 level, which are designed for majors or more advanced students. As Hazelorb says, the 2000 series courses are simply more specialized. So you shouldn’t hesitate to take a 2000 level anthro, sociology, psych, or lit course right off the bat if you’re interested in the topic.</p>
<p>Maybe this is a tidbit off topic, but when I went to Days on the Lawn and talked to one of the current students about the different levels of classes, she mentioned that it’s probably best for most (but certainly not all) students to not take a class that is more than two levels above their current year. For example, as a 1st-year, she suggested not taking classes above the 3000 level, and so forth. How true/good is this advice? While I’m kind of following this advice, I am signed up for two 3000 level classes in my first semester. So is that potentially a bad idea, or doable? (Granted, one of them is a language in which I have a lot of experience.)</p>
<p>I took two 300 level math classes my first semester and it went fine. Because I love math. Haha. I balanced it out with 2 dinky 1 credit seminars, a 101 language, and another class I could afford to do poorly in / skip / not care about (which I did all of those things). So it is up to you.</p>