Determining my schedule was a struggle this semester. I wanted to continue pushing myself academically, so I took on CS32, Brown's "Introduction to Software Engineering." This class is often regarded as the most time consuming of the introductory CS courses. I knew that CS32 alone would dominate my schedule, so I was hoping to find some lighter classes to balance it out.
Well, that was the plan anyway. During shopping, none of the humanities class I looked into appealed to me. I found myself questioning whether I would actually be able to sit down and do those 100 pages of reading when I have a "CS day" looming ahead of me. On top of that, none of them seemed particularly light in terms of coursework, and combining that with CS32 seemed like a bad idea.
Thus 2 weeks into classes, I suddenly dropped one of them and randomly decided to shop HIST1150: "Modern Japan" instead. During the "first" class (I was of course 2 weeks behind), I found out that the class was also quite heavy on reading, and it even boasted quizzes and a written test midterm/final.
So the problems I described above were not solved. Why then did I suddenly decide to take history above the other humanities courses I was shopping? To be honest, at the time there was no explicit reason. I simply recalled that during my first semester, I took history and it felt rewarding, so why not just do it again? Now here we are, 4 weeks and 3 books later, and I am convinced that history is among the most rewarding and sophisticated fields within the humanities. This exposition has taken longer than I expected, so I'll give the details of why this is in another post. See you then!
