Most memorable/enriching: group dynamics seminar with Kenwyn Smith. It was an extraordinary class taught by an extraordinary man.
Most useful for work: probability and statistics.
Least useful: I had hoped I’d learn something valuable in the introduction to psych and abnormal psych classes. I took them seriously, put the work in, and they were still a complete and utter disappointment.
Biggest surprises: I really enjoyed the contract law (Richard Shell), criminology and the (significantly harder than expected) oceanography classes I took.
i took financial literacy and sociology online in high school. they were great. financial literacy was especially useful, i wish i could retake it again as an online course or something. martial arts was also great, it’s helped me so much in ways i didn’t even think about when i took the class. ive been able to pick up sports and join boot camps or pilates or yoga or other fitness activities with a physical literacy. instructors at said activities have said i train like i’ve already been training at that sport/activity lol. it’s just great to be able to jump into something and have the knowledge and muscle memory to understand how your body moves and works. biology in high school was also pretty enriching. i was a bit depressed sometimes but learning that your body does these amazing things and how it almost seems like a miracle to live and just how complicated your body is and how it works to keep you alive, well that idea made me pretty happy.
in college:
mythology was really enriching. it was so eye opening learning about how so much of our culture is passed down… how the patterns in some stories appear in other lands as migration occurs. it also helped me understand a few references in stories and made me look closer at such things as well.
microeconomics was also really practical and enriching. you get a basic understanding of how businesses and money flow work. i don’t need to take a business class for my major, but taking economics has made me interested in getting some more education in that business/economics sector in order to understand our world.
i also took macroeconomics but to be honest i didn’t get as much away from it as i did from micro.
Applied Calculus at a community college in California. This was the class where I overcame my math block, and was the first class I ever had that demonstrated you could actually use math for something practical. Without that class, I'd be selling shoes instead of getting degrees in CS and IE.
While it wasn't a for-credit class, years ago I bought a series of (48?) VHS lectures entitled "Great Ideas from Philosophy" from a company called "The Teaching Company." Opened up a whole, new world.
I’m an English professor. 30 years. Most useful? A weeklong geology field work class. I thought I knew how to write. My professor taught me things about being straightforward that I’ve never forgotten.
Most inspirational? Same class. Without knowledge of geology, rocks and dirt look pretty boring. Then one day you put your hand into a gap in the side of a cliff that represents 500 million years of missing time, and I was changed. My understanding of time, life, the universe, all that, changed.
I still explain it badly. Sediments were deposited. We know they were a billion years old. And then a big empty happened. Maybe the terrain was above sea level and some of it got eroded.
The difference was clear. Below, there was one flat layer after another. Then there was a layer that was flat on the bottom and sloped on the top. The way you’d expect a surface of earth to be, in your back yard, or maybe a desert in Utah. Just old and worn down by occasional rain.
Maybe it was simple erosian. Maybe a mountain built up and was eroded. No way of knowing. Then newer sediments were deposited. We know they are half a billion years younger than the underlying layers. What happened in between is a 500 million year mystery.
And I put my hand there. In the gap.
I learned about time in a way that reading Beowulf sort of prepares you for, but not really.
Some people by have religion. I have rocks. Rocks give me awe.
Classes that changed my life? There’s two: An 10-student elective literature course at Carnegie-Mellon (one of the two courses i didn’t crash and burn in that year…) on race, and a 100±student anthropology gen-ed course at Maryland—they taught me more about the need to question my assumptions about what I’d always thought were simply givens about the world than anything I’d ever faced before.
Most useful for my career? Again, two: An undergrad audiology/speech pathology gen-ed course at Maryland, and a graduate course in phonetics at Penn. I took both of them purely because I had to in order to fulfill requirements, but in both cases I discovered, years later, that I’d completely without realizing it been using stuff from both of them every day in my career as a sociolinguist.
Most inspirational? To prove I’m a true word nerd, it was the introductory linguistics class I took at Maryland that got me hooked on the field that would eventually become my career. It wasn’t so much that it was about linguistics, it’s that I learned that there really were people who thought about language the same way I did, that it’s silly to talk about “good” or “bad” grammar, but rather that everybody has grammar and everybody’s grammar is different and that’s beautiful—and those of us who feel that way may not get a lot of traction now, but time is on our side and we will change. the. world!
Most enriching: Several art history classes that left me one class shy of a minor. The cultural widening and critical thinking/writing these courses provided me were part of a quintessential liberal arts experience, and have served me well to this day. Plus, I can now walk into museums all over the world and have a clue about something.
Most memorable: A 7-student drama seminar called Theatrical Farce, where we read a satirical play each week and analyzed it in class. Taught by a 20-something professor who would go on to become a well-known playwright.
Most useful: I would have to say a Negotiation class I took while getting my MBA.
Easy. Organic chemistry: useful because it showed me how to construct practically any molecular entity (well, within reason) using basic carbon/oxygen/nitrogen building blocks; enriching because it taught me how to work hard, study well, and think critically; and practical, because I’ve been using organic chemistry almost every day for the last 30 years.
I also think that organic chemistry helped me be a better cook (I’m looking at you, Alton Brown).
I also had a life-changing Romantic Poets class that was very enriching.
Speaking Voice Development (I was a Theater major), for a few reasons:
The breathing exercises we used where the ones I used both times I was in labor - no Lamaze for me, just deep, focused breathing, the whole time.
I have noticed that female colleagues with higher pitched voices are often talked-over and ignored; this helped me developed my vocal resonance (I already had a deep voice for a woman), and when I speak in a meeting, attention is paid
I have picked up side-work doing the occasional voice over, mostly for educational materials.
I wish I had taken key boarding or typing instead of Bio 2 AP. It would have been helpful to have a speech or public speaking class. If they had had power point/presentation type classes back in the dark ages (late 80’s) that would have been helpful too.
Useful - Calculus. So much of what I have learned later relied on the tools necessary to describe things in space and time.
Practical - Circuits 1. If you wire a house or design digital chips, it all goes back to a the ability to understand the circuit in small bits.
Interesting - Psychohistory. It introduced us to the work of Lloyd DeMause and showed that things are rarely as they are perceived. I find that I am a much more insightful person because of this.
Most enriching: figure drawing. Most practical: Shakespeare, which gave me an entirely expanded vocabulary to describe all the nude people I was drawing.
Biological anthropology 101 - how our genes really do affect our daily lives, our choices, and how we developed those genes - what benefits and drawbacks they have on us.
Also, a class team-taught by the geology and atmospheric science departments, called “Natural Disasters.” It covered everything common natural disaster you can think of; floods, wildfires, droughts, earthquakes, tornadoes, volcanoes, hurricanes, major storms, blizzards, and climate change. It included the mechanisms, causes, ways to mitigate damage, preparation, The class ultimately informed my decision on where to live to minimize my chances of being in a disaster, or at least informing me where to live according to which disasters I was more willing to accept risk.
Enriching-Sociology & Psychology. I’m currently taking both, I love them! I’m really interested in social sciences, my goal is to become a social worker.
@LadyArwyn I took a Natural Disasters class, too! I loved it. I do live in a place where we get the occasional hurricane, which is the most deadly kind of natural disaster, but at least we have time to prepare for hurricanes, unlike tornados, which still scare me.
Useful: Seminar on Exploratory Data Analysis (Tukey, pretty sure this was late undergrad but could have been grad school), Game Theory/Linear Programming (taught by John Nash’s advisor), Real Analysis (don’t remember who taught it).
Enriching: The Symphony (Levy); Social Psychology (John Darley/Joel Cooper).
Grad:
Useful and Enriching: Bayesian Inference (Don Rubin); Competitive Decision-Making (Raiffa).
All but the Symphony course were practical and useful. I was privileged to have some of these instructors.