Word on the street: Forget the course catalog, here are some student-reviewed classes
Transitioning to college can be a daunting challenge for some students – for many, it is the first time that they will be away from home for an extended period of time. One of the ways to plan for the beginning of college is to take classes that will make the process of adjusting easier, or at least more enjoyable.
The Daily Tar Heel asked some students around campus to weigh in on what classes have been their favorite at UNC so far and why they feel this way.
Jeric Lalo
Exercise and Sport Science, first-year
“Surprisingly, like being just physically in the class, CHEM 102L. I like having control of things, being more active with what I’m doing rather than just somebody lecturing me, so with the chem lab I’m able to run through the whole experiment, record observations, see what happens and then chemistry has always been kinda interesting to me. Seeing what I learned in lecture actually happening right in front of me is pretty interesting to me – how one factor affects another thing with the experiments, and how one mistake can cause a big error in your data, so you have to be very precise and accurate with what you are doing.”
Nick Chilman
Undecided first-year
“My favorite class has probably been an African ethnography class I’m in, AAAD 214: Africa through the Ethnographic Lens. It’s interesting, I feel like I haven’t learned a lot about the history of Africa before. Even though it’s not a history class, I get to learn a little about it, and I always have enjoyed history classes so it’s cool to be able to learn about that part of the world, too. We do a project at the end where we have to read an ethnography and write an analysis on it, and I thought it was going to be a huge pain, but I ended up being pretty interested.”
Randy Parnell
Management and Society, junior
“I have two (favorite classes): one is Literary Approaches to American Studies (AMST 201), and the other is a comparative literature class that is PWAD 489. The professors were understanding toward the students. In my PWAD class, the professor also does a trip to London. He sponsors that, but he cares more that students write well than have a perfect grade. For the American studies class, it was a really interesting class because it made you think about how the world is around you and question certain things. What professor Holland did in that class was basically make you examine words, read them and then after you read them she made you look up where they came from, which made you question things around you and think deeper.”
Michael Qi
Computer Science, junior
“My favorite class has probably been COMP 401, which is like the first required intro computer science class. I thought it was pretty interesting. I thought it taught me a lot about computer science – it wasn’t exactly an easy class, but it definitely helped me a lot in terms of thinking logically, and even though it was a lot of work I thought it was really worth it.”
Caleb Willis
Biology, sophomore
To get the day's news and headlines in your inbox each morning, sign up for our email newsletters.
“My favorite class has probably been English 105 with Dr. Cohen. What made it an excellent class was, we did things that were out of the ordinary; the class was divided into three major units, the second unit was when we got to shadow the emergency department at UNC, which was quite the experience and had to write papers about it. The third unit was based around a comedy show of Bassem Youssef. He’s from Egypt – he’s like the Egyptian Jon Stewart, as they say – we got to listen to him and watch him live here and then got to write about it.”
Will Soler
Psychology and Religious Studies, sophomore
“My absolute favorite class I have to say would be this religion and culture class (RELI 121) I took with Todd Ochoa last semester. It’s an introductory level class, so it’s really good for people who don't know what religious studies is, but the reason I liked it so much was because A, Todd is such a good lecturer; this goes for all the religious studies faculty members, they are all good lecturers, but Todd especially really captures your attention while he’s talking and it’s like he’s telling a story. And B, the material really opened my mind to what religion is. Since taking that class I don’t think of religion as a concrete thing, I think of it more as this ubiquitous phenomenon.”
