The key to finding interesting and worthwhile classes

I like St. Joe’s. I really do. I may spend a lot of time as The Hawk’s Editorial Page Editor writing about things the university could be doing better, but I will say without hesitation that transferring here two years ago was one of the best decisions I could have made for my academic and professional careers.

Since coming to this school, I’ve traveled to a new continent, worked directly with a local nonprofit to help them develop their social media presence, learned about American mass incarceration from people serving time in prison, developed a marketing campaign and worked on a weekly newspaper. I owe several of these experiences directly to our complex, sometimes maligned General Education Program (GEP).

Without taking courses that fulfill more than one graduation requirement, a student could take up to 22 classes towards their GEP credits. That’s over half of the 40 courses required of the average St. Joe’s student, and it’s a lot—too many, I would argue.

If the purpose of college is to figure out personal interests and channel them toward a future career or graduate program, then having as many as 22 general education classes leaves little room for electives that could potentially change the course of a college career.

That being said, the GEP does offer some flexibility beyond the core classes required of all St. Joe’s graduates. With that flexibility, I’ve taken classes that I’ve found both interesting and illuminating. Here are three of my favorites.:

1. The Inside Out program is offered each semester and gives St. Joe’s students a chance to take a class alongside incarcerated students. The theme of the course and the GEP requirements it fulfills can vary based on the professors teaching it, but I took it as Inside Out: Dimensions of Freedom to meet my philosophical anthropology requirement.

I got to speak with and know incarcerated (or “inside”) students from all walks of life, allowing me to break down stereotypes I had about people serving time in prison and making me aware of some of my own biases.

What I absolutely loved about this class was the different take it had on the service-learning program at St. Joe’s. There was a real emphasis placed on mutual learning rather than service alone.

2. I didn’t know what to expect when signing up for my faith-reason course last semester, but my Myth and History in the Bible class was absolutely fascinating.

The topics of our reading assignments ranged from the history of Neanderthals to the purpose behind the biblical story of Jonah (it uses the Assyrians in an example of God’s forgiveness but was actually written after the end of the Assyrian empire).

The class used both scholarly articles and primary sources for readings. Our textbook was a compilation of ancient texts which provided historical examples of biblical themes and motifs. If you’re even kind of interested in anthropology and ancient history, I would absolutely recommend this class.

3. No class I’ve taken at St. Joe’s better exemplifies my program of study (a communication studies major with a Spanish minor) than Current Events in Spanish Language Media.

It counted as both an upper-division elective for my Spanish minor and an integrative learning course (ILC) for my communication studies major. Throughout the course, we discussed how to evaluate a news source and the ways that coverage of a topic changes based on where a source is from.

I really enjoyed the collaborative environment this class fostered and how the events we discussed were, in a way, crowdsourced from what interested each of us (there were weekly student presentations on current events in Latin America and Spain).

And as an ILC, it really did fit perfectly with my communication studies major. I probably would have taken Current Events in Spanish Language Media even if it had not counted toward the GEP, but it did help me understand the thinking behind ILCs.

Whether it’s an ILC or a “signature core” requirement, I’ve found that the key to making it through the GEP is choosing classes that I find genuinely interesting, and not making those decisions based on whether a class is offered at a convenient time or the amount of work I’ll need to put in to do well.

Even if I get stuck in a class that I truly can’t make the most of, I like to remind myself of what an incredible privilege it is to be in college at all.

With that perspective, the annoyance of a mandatory theology class is pretty microscopic.