Do professors know your name?
Always. Classes are usually small, and professors make an effort. I also tend to be pretty vocal in class, which probably helps.
Tell us about your favorite class. Least favorite?
I took a seminar on Nabokov that I adored. The professor was a total Nabokov-o-phile – each class he would bring in some piece of pertinent memorabilia from his collection [Nabokov’s letters, eg]; he had published extensively on Nabokov, etc. He really illuminated the material with this stuff and with supplementary readings from all over the place – from Ovid to Dostoevsky to Poe. He also gave really fun assignments – eg, the option to “mimic” Nabokov in a fictional story instead of writing an analytical paper – but the way they were structured ensured that we still learned from them; they weren’t just throwaways.
Least favorite: some of the classes I took to fill requirements. Like “Chaos, Complexity and Self-Organization,” supposedly a physics class for “non-science” students. We read “pop science” books which could have been cool except the professor focused the class on memorizing esoteric and useless details about the people in the books, like where Edward Lorenz went to college. We were later tested on this stuff. But I mean, the subject matter – chaos theory – is interesting…
• How many hours per day do you spend working on assignments/studying?
Totally depends. I’m also the kind of kid who pulls consecutive all-nighters instead of working per-day throughout the semester.
Is class participation common?
Yes, definitely. And required for good grades, I think.
What’s in your schoolbag right now?
Uh…my iPod, a book, keys, my wallet, a duck finger puppet.
Do [College] students have intellectual conversations outside of class?
Definitely, though they’re frequently stoned while doing so.
Are students competitive?
I didn’t experience any competition among the people I hung out with.
What’s the weirdest thing you’ve learned, or weirdest class you’ve taken?
I took “basic energy balancing” to fulfill my gym requirement. We cleansed our auras. Freshman year I took a class called “The Creative Process.” Our teacher was a performance artist who regularly regaled us with stories of his past performances – such as dancing naked in a plexiglass box with a bunch of bees. On one memorable day we were put into pairs, blindfolded, given pencil and paper, and instructed to draw portraits of our partners by feeling their faces. It was a great class.
Tell us about your major/ department.
The English major is pretty conservative – ie, emphasis on Shakespeare and Milton. But many of the professors are really cool, and there are some more contemporary offerings. It’s pretty easy to get very good grades if you’re a good writer – I felt like I got away with a lot. Like, A’s on multiple papers about Paradise Lost, which I still haven’t read.
Do you hang out with professors outside of class?
Sometimes. Middlebury doesn’t seem to provide much of a community for young professors…as a result, many of these have (a) hung out with students, and (b) moved on quickly.
Does [College] have a core curriculum? How do you feel about it?
Too many requirements. I can’t think of a single class I was forced to take outside of my major that I benefited from. I wish I had been free to choose more, and that many of the art classes in particular hadn’t had so many pre-requisites – the only way I could have had time to take them would have been if I was a major, really.
Is the education at [College] geared toward getting a job, or learning for its own sake?
Learning for its own sake.
Do students talk about how much they’ll earn one day?
My friends didn’t.