A few days ago, I signed up for classes on SCORE for the very last time. It was incredibly strange to realize that these are the last classes I will ever take at Princeton. As I look back on three and a half years of classes at this fine institution, I want to take this last chance to give juniors, sophomores and freshmen some advice on classes.
What are the best classes at Princeton? Most students wondering this will ask their older friends or advisers for a comprehensive list of good classes or professors. I think classes actually divide into two distinct categories: classes on topics you already know you are passionate about and classes that you're not particularly excited to take.
The first type of class is always good. Even taught by an incredibly dull professor, if the topic is one you are already passionate about, you will love the class. An international relations buff will love almost any class on international relations, and if you have always been interested in psychology, Psychology 101 will be enjoyable regardless of who is teaching the class that semester.
In some sense, this type of class is not the reason you are at Princeton. Any university could give the international relations buff a chance to learn more about international relations. You probably got admitted to Princeton because you naturally love to pursue things you are interested in. Even if a professor just sat silently in lecture and gave you books on a topic you love, you would probably read those books enthusiastically and get a lot out of the "class." In this type of class, the professor is doing half the job just by providing you with a good reading list.
The real reason we are at Princeton is to take the second type of class. These are the classes we dread taking, since we do not expect to be particularly passionate about the topic. We take these classes to fulfill distribution requirements or requirements for our major, or even just to try something new. The classes I will remember most from Princeton are the classes that I did not expect to be passionate about before a great professor's lectures grabbed me by the hand and showed me an exciting new world I never knew existed.
I dreaded fulfilling my LA requirements, and was terrified by literature classes. When I was finally forced to either take an LA or stay in school indefinitely, I reluctantly signed up for Michael Wood's comparative literature class. Since I was taking the class as P/D/F, I attended Professor Wood's lectures never actually intending to read the books for the class. This proved to be impossible. Professor Wood's enthusiasm for the novels he assigned was infectious, and I would leave a lecture on a certain novel and rush to read it. Lectures covered such an array of human emotion and experience that, despite my utter lack of literary knowledge, a few ideas from every lecture would manage to touch me and stick with me. Because his method of thinking about literature was so different from what I was accustomed to in my other classes, I found that the lectures and class discussions I had in Professor Wood's class lingered, staying with me much longer than material in other subjects I was more familiar with.
To me, intellectual growth and development are the real things Princeton has to offer its students. If I took my one literature class with any random professor, I would have sailed through it without reading any of the books, and somehow managed to get a "C-" in order to earn a Pass grade. Yet studying with a professor as engrossing as Michael Wood, I learned and developed as a thinker in a class I was never excited about taking in the first place. I am still not an English major, and I never took another literature course at Princeton, but I believe there is value in learning more than one way to approach and analyze problems. While students are always excited to learn how to approach problems in their own fields of interest, it is hard to appreciate and understand a different field of study without fantastic professors like Wood. Princeton is full of Michael Woods, and my advice is to try and find one of them — especially for the classes you are really dreading. Karen Karniol-Tambour is a Wilson School major from Netanya, Israel. She can be reached at karenkt@princeton.edu.
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