How to Creatively Fulfill Your Liberal Arts Requirements

Next week is a very exciting week at Carleton. It’s Advising Days!!! Your academic advisor at Carleton is the person who guides you through your academic journey. Advisors meet with their advisees during Week 7 to figure out their plans for the next term (for more on the trimester system, check out my post here). Being this close to this term’s Advising Week also means that the course catalogue has been released! On campus, this is a time where it is necessary to reflect on classes you’ve taken and what still needs to be done before graduation.

Since Carleton is a liberal arts college, we don’t have a set of core classes. Instead, we have a list of Liberal Arts Requirements that all students are required to meet. The requirements are designed so that students can explore a sizable number of departments at Carleton. It forces students to step outside of their comfort zones and explore the breadth of classes that Carleton’s award-winning professors offer!

I’ve really enjoyed my experience with fulfilling the requirements, and the process has really pushed me out of my comfort zone. It’s led to a boatload of curricular exploration. Here are some of my favorite classes that I’ve taken, what requirement they fulfilled, and why I ended up loving them.

RUSS 100- From Underground Man to Invisible Man

This course fulfilled the first requirement that all Carls must take: the Argument & Inquiry Seminar (A&I). The A&I does a bunch of things for students, including introducing them to the flow of a college-level class, teaching students the polite way to interact with professors, and how to actively engage in a classroom environment. One of the things that my A&I certainly taught me how to do is how to write at a college level. As much as I loved my big public high school, it didn’t really teach me how to respond to complex prompts in complex ways. My professor and first year advisor, the always lovely Laura Goering from the Russian Department, met me where I was stuck at and helped me advance my writing to where it is today.

The registration process for A&I classes is weird. Students rank their top options and then are placed, rather than directly registering as we do for other courses. While I was excited about taking a literature course, Russian 100 wasn’t a class that I’d ever dreamed of taking. However, despite my initial hesitations, I loved this class. The reading list was interesting, it was thoughtfully constructed and taught, and it introduced me to some students that are still my best friends even now. The students in my A&I really bonded and even gathered outside of class to talk about the work or whatever else was blowing us away during our freshman fall. Taking this A&I became one of the most impactful parts of my freshman year!

DANC 279- Tap Dance, Intermediate/Advanced

One of Carleton’s most unique requirements is the PE Requirement. That’s right, your gym class days don’t end in high school! Carleton students are required to take 4 terms of PE classes during their time at Carleton, with the idea being that physical and mental fitness go hand in hand. By getting your heart rate up, students become more productive and well-balanced, which exemplifies the importance of fitness for the rest of your life. The classes generally meet once a week and are taken in addition to the normal course load, but usually students really enjoy their PE classes!

As a generally adversely competitive individual, I have chosen to complete my PE requirement through the Dance Department! I do have some dance experience, but it’s absolutely ancient. It’s been a joy to get back into dance, and to get to know the department as a whole. My tap class was a really wonderful introduction to some really sweet people, and it even landed me a job! I now work for my professor at her dance studio downtown. It’s also uncovered a love for dance that’s been hiding since I quit tap back in middle school. This term, I’m in the department’s intro to modern dance and part of Synchrony, an extracurricular dance group.

GEOL 110- Introduction to Geology & Lab

This class, which I’m enrolled in right now, is going to fulfill my Science with Lab Requirement. As a humanities major, I felt really hesitant about this requirement. I hadn’t taken a lab science since my junior year of high school and I was worried that taking a harder lab, like Chemistry or Biology, might have actually killed me. Carleton is really well-known for its Geology program, and I have many Geo major friends who encouraged me to give it a try. And so, I ended up in yet another class that I never would have taken on my own: Intro to Geology.

Even though I wasn’t expecting to, I’ve enjoyed my time in this class. It’s a perfect class to take in the spring because almost all of the labs are outside! It’s a cool way to break out of the normal class routine and spend some time in the fresh air. For non-car owning individuals such as myself, it’s also a great way to get out of Northfield. I would have never been to many of the small towns we’ve visited without this class. While it’s definitely pretty far outside of my comfort zone, this class has been an unexpectedly delightful surprise!

CLAS 214- Gender and Sexuality in Classical Antiquity

This class fulfilled one of the most elusive requirements for myself and my fellow humanities majors: the Quantitative Reasoning Encounter. Students are required to take three courses that meet this requirement. QRE just means that the course includes at least an assignment that requires students to engage with numerical evidence of some kind. Typical classes that count towards this requirement include bio labs, econ classes, and other math-adjacent topics.

As a humanities person to my core, I was thrilled to see this course on the list of QRE offerings my freshman spring. The quantitative element of the course was a paper that evaluated the persuasiveness of an article that attempted to explain an entire genre of curse tablets. We had to think about the author’s use of not just numbers, but terms like “usually” or “mostly.” The assignment was a challenge because it forced me to engage with the scholarship in a way that was really unusual for me, but I also thought that it opened my eyes to a new way to make an argument: quantitatively. Besides this assignment, the class was truly fascinating. We looked at really strange sources from across different times and space in an effort to understand the truly bizarre world of sexuality in the classical world. I loved the course, and the professor even ended up writing me a letter of recommendation. It’s proof that taking even the most expected class can change your life!

Emma (she/her/hers) is a sophomore Art History major/European Studies minor from Attleboro, Massachusetts. When she’s not in class, you can probably find Emma engrossed in a terribly long conversation in Burton Dining Hall, knitting at a Bald Spot picnic table, or perusing the museum studies stacks on third libe. Beyond blogging, she works for the Registrar’s Office, teaches adult tap dance classes downtown, and loves submitting to student publications like babyteeth and No Fidelity. She loves Carleton for the number of opportunities it offers and the close connections she’s formed with professors, not to mention proximity to coffee from Goodbye Blue Monday and early morning walks through the neighborhoods.