Common Time: What classroom experience changed your life?
22 October 2025
Photos and text by Zach Spindler-Krage
Among small liberal arts colleges, Carleton consistently earns top rankings for the quality of its teaching. But what does that look like in the classroom? During Common Time on the last week of spring term, we headed out to find out how our faculty made a difference for students.
“I took two classes back to back—Relativity and Atomic Nuclear Physics, both taught by Barry Costanzi. He was talking about these mind-boggling things, like, light doesn’t have mass. No photon has mass. But as soon as you have two, the system collectively has mass. Which doesn’t make any sense, but he had this amazing way of explaining these concepts, and by the end, it made perfect sense. It was so cool, and I left those classes thinking, ‘Yeah, physics is crazy.’”
—Thomas Lund ’27
“Let’s Talk About Race with Professor Anita Chikkatur changed the way I think about history. We learned about a lot of Native American history, and took a field trip to a sacred burial site. I’m from Minnesota, but I don’t really hear about Native American history, so just learning about the history that I didn’t learn when I was in high school was so interesting.”
— Michelle Musa ’27
“I think the best part of being here—I’m a studio art major—is getting to do the hands-on part of the studio classes. You’re building things, creating stuff with your hands instead of just sitting in a classroom. I like all the people in Boliou. I like how excited Stephen Mohring gets, and David Lefkowitz ’85 is a really kind person. They’re strange, and they really like what they do. I appreciate the enthusiasm and verve of my classmates and professors.”
—Zoe Pinto ’27
“Going to my first prefect session for my Data Structures class in Computer Science was the most impactful thing I’ve experienced at Carleton. Being able to talk to the prefect allowed me to be more comfortable talking to people in general here at Carleton, and also reaching out for help on classroom-based stuff. I feel like because I went to the prefect session, I also felt more comfortable going to professors’ office hours, and it’s helped both my social life and my academic life.”
—Bradley Hunde ’28
“My Organic Chemistry 2 class was super difficult, but Professor Kaz Skubi ’11 is great at lectures and really pushed us. All the questions on his tests were incredibly difficult, and for the most part the class averages were pretty low. But it was a wake-up call and pushed me to level myself up to make sure I succeeded. I learned how to study more effectively, and it’s changed the way I do independent study for other classes.”
—Ryan Son ’26
“In my Latino identity class, we had a participation rubric each week where we wrote down what went well and what goals we had for ourselves, and there was also a place to shout out somebody in the class. I got a lot of shout outs, and at the end of the term, the professor sent me a Google Doc that had all of the reasons for the shout outs. That has had a really big impact on me. It felt really nice knowing that my classmates were secretly appreciating the things that I was saying. I think that’s something that if I had not realized that earlier, I’d probably just be the quiet girl in the room who probably has some brilliant ideas but keeps to herself.”
