Liberal Arts Winter Term Classes
Grace talks about her very liberal arts winter schedule
Grace talks about her very liberal arts winter schedule
Fun fact about me: up until a week before choosing to go to Carleton, I thought I would go to the flagship school in my state. I was planning on taking only STEM classes (maybe 1 or two English classes during all four years,) so there was a major shift in mindset that had to take place when picking out my classes here.
Carleton has tons of liberal arts requirements that students must take to graduate. When I first saw this, I was excited and also disappointed. Excited because at heart, I’m a liberal arts girl. I love looking at things through many angles and perspectives and I love to learn about the world around me in different ways. On the other hand…less science? Humanities class *gasp* instead of science?

However, over the first term, I learned to embrace the liberal arts mindset and appreciate how learning different ways of thinking and approaching problems can help no matter what subject I’m looking at. Anybody can learn any content online, but learning new ways to think is what college is all about.
And now with that long-winded introduction out of the way, let me present: my super liberal arts schedule.
Greek 101

I won’t lie to you, Greek is all Greek to me. It’s been two weeks and already I’m having a time. Because language classes meet every day, we have had a lot of time to cover a lot of material. In two weeks, we have already learned the whole alphabet, two different verb conjugations, a type of declension (which is like conjugation but for verbs), around 40 vocabulary words, and a ton of rules about where the accents go.
Languages in high school were always my most difficult subject. I’m a STEM person, I like my logic and my rules, and I’m very sorry, but most languages don’t have many. (Or they do, but they have so many exceptions that the rule doesn’t seem to apply to just about anyone.) However, at Carleton, you get very immersed in the languages (I literally cannot nap anymore without dreaming about Greek accents) which makes them very intense. It’s even more important to use your resources (the prof, your classmates, the TA) who want to help you get to the level you want to be at, as long as you reach out to them.
Physics 144
My first college physics class! This is the intro physics class for people who already have taken up to at least Calculus 2 and have studied some physics in high school. So far, this course has been a review because the first 5 weeks mirror the units of AP Physics in high school. However, that has not necessarily been bad because it allows us to do physics and learn the expectations of a Carleton physics class in a relaxed setting where we already know most of the material.

However, as a potential physics major, I’m very excited about week 6 because that’s when we transition from regular gravity to relativity (the thing that Einstein discovered.) Most physics intro courses don’t spend any more than a couple of days on relativity, if at all so the fact that Carleton has it in its intro course is something I was excited about.
Religion 110

This class has been interesting in terms of learning how I think. I took a philosophy class last term and assumed all social studies classes were structured similarly. They are not. Each humanities class pushes you in new ways, and Religion is no different. While I was naturally attached to philosophy because the questions asked in that class were pretty vague, and I could attach them each to my personal experiences, religion is difficult because the questions are so specific. The answers cannot come naturally to me because they don’t have anything to do with my experience. I cannot answer why a specific person now believes in a spirit because they felt a presence. After all, I’m not that person. Learning to think around this to understand religion has been a very interesting process, and I’m very excited to continue this course to see in what ways I can think about Religion by the end of the term!
As you can see, my classes vary widely in material and ways of thinking. For physics, I have to think very logically and methodically, for Greek, I have to have everything memorized and sticking in my brain so that I can eventually get an intuition on how it works, and for religion, I have to work on my skill of thinking around the issues that studying religion presents. It’s only still very close to the start of the term, but I have already learned so much from all of my classes and I’m very excited to see what is yet to come!
Grace (she/her) is always up for a good adventure and is right at home trying new things. At Carleton, that’s everything from exploring new sections of the Arb to joining sports like rugby to meeting new people every day! She loves learning about the “whys” behind the world and hopes to be a physics major. You can find trying all the new clubs and opportunities she can at Carleton and hanging out with her friends.