More than a number
As I was quickly reminded as I showed a prospective students around Grounds last weekend, the idea of the “typical college experience” is a prominent fantasy in the minds of high school students. As we walked the Lawn amongst sunning students, it struck me that this was probably her exact idea of what the academic experience at college was like: sunbathing with Shakespeare, sipping lattes in Alderman Café while discussing the finer points of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, and whispering sweet Italian nothings into your lover’s ear while stargazing late at night. For many of us, however, these notions are crushed when we begin our time here and realize that the homework (strangely absent from our fantasies) is real and that the closest you will ever get to your biology teacher is through clicker questions. By the time we’ve finished our pre-med or Commerce School prerequisites, all of our dreams have been squeezed out of us and replaced with the grade distribution in our statistics class. Ah, the life of the mind.
But these stereotypical academic experiences are not entirely the product of an ENWR fiction paper. They just require that the student seek them out. One place they can be found is in the cold, early days of January. The scene is bleak: little stirs on the Grounds of the University, the Lawn is barren, and the elliptical machines at the AFC sit silently. Although to the casual observer the University might appear to be asleep, in reality it is alive with the academic banter that we all dreamed about. Welcome to January Term.
Every winter, for the last ten days of break, some of the University’s top professors offer courses in almost twenty disciplines, ranging from anthropology to mathematics. Unlike the courses taught during the fall, spring, and summer semesters, however, these are non-traditional courses. This January, for example, will feature Prozac Culture, Virginia Government and Politics, and Euclidean and Noneuclidean Geometry, just to sample a few. This small self-selecting pool of students spends ten intensive days studying one topic in depth. Most courses carry about three or four credits just like any other course. This begs the question, how much can you really get out of ten days? And why would I want to pay to spend my whole day in a classroom?
For starters, all January Term classes are small, making it easier to establish a relationship with the professor. For first-year students navigating through large introductory-level lectures, these courses are a breath of fresh air. For students who felt that they couldn’t ever hear themselves think over the roar of Chem 402 in the fall, taking a January Term class will help them remember what their voices sound like. Here, it is imperative to come to class prepared. If not, you’re in for a long six hours. You won’t admit it to yourself, but you like being forced to share your opinion; you feel like a necessary part of your class, and not just a number. Extracurricular-wise, the small class size also enables you to form a group of friends with whom to socialize during those ten long and weary days. With most of the University’s facilities, including the dining halls, closed for this period, you and your fellow comrades must band together to ensure survival.
Second, these classes bring those long-dormant fantasies about college to life. Students often leave Perpetrators of Genocide, the American Health Care System, and Nation-Building in Iraq with more practical knowledge than they left their theory-driven fall semester classes. These issues cover current affairs that merit just as much attention from our future leaders as Intro to International Relations. Better yet, it is a chance to indulge your intellectual interests with a group of people who are as interested as you are, as evidenced by their decision to spend the last ten days of Winter Break studying, too.
And while the general lack of life might be daunting to some, especially in the grey light of winter, January Term isn’t really about having a raging time. It’s about have the intellectual experience that so many of us search for throughout our time here. It’s about becoming a mini-scholar on something that you’ve never really studied formally before. It’s about turning peers into colleagues and professors into mentors.
Emily Kuhbach’s column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at e.kuhbach@cavalierdaily.com.
