While I’m a victim of fawning over my social media profiles, I’ve also never been safe from doing the same thing with my transcript. Once I remember it exists, I spend a long time looking at my college career thinking about the classes I chose. Before I settled on my major, I let myself explore a variety of disciplines before finally choosing Medical Humanities as well as International and Arab Studies.
As my college career comes to an end and registration approaches, here are some of my favorite classes I’ve taken and some recommendations for the upcoming semesters. They’re all intro-level courses, so you can take them as free electives if they aren’t relevant to your major.
ENGL 116 – World Lit: Coming of Age Theme
My first semester of college was already on my schedule since they usually make it for you, and this is still one of my favorite classes I’ve ever taken. It felt relevant as I entered a new stage of adulthood, being that I was starting my degree and all. It felt magical to relate to all the characters in the stories and bring it all back to myself, back when everything felt so fresh and I had no idea where anything was on campus.
INTL 100 – Intro to Global Issues
Since I had always loved geography and learning about different cultures, I always knew that I wanted to study international relations. Since Montclair didn’t offer it as a major, I decided to take it as my minor. This was the main required class for it and it was nothing like any other class I’d taken before. Instead of having a set professor, we had rotating ones from different disciplines come in and instruct us on entirely different topics each week—of course, relating it back to global issues and the rapid globalization of our world. Some topics we covered included religion, corporate responsibility, ecotourism, the clash of civilizations, the death of democracy, and the economies of the future.
RELG 218 – Death, Dying, and the Afterlife
The fact that I had this class in the middle of winter from 5:30-8:00 only deepened the eerie sensation that it brought to me every week as we studied the death rituals of religions across the world. From Buddhist traditions of sky burials—where bodies are taken high up to be eaten by birds—to African spiritual traditions of connecting with ancestors and attributing stickiness to the aura of death, I confronted my fears of mortality as I couldn’t escape its persistence in my life during this time. I was able to think about it from every angle: a good death, a bad death, how I wanted my death to look (we even made sample obituaries that I can’t get off the internet to this day), as well as my purpose in life and how I would want to be remembered.
ANTH 101 – Physical Anthropology
As soon as I walked into this class for the first time and saw the room filled with skeletons, I knew that I would love it. We had labs almost every day, always facilitated by our professor. We learned about osteology and finding wounds and illnesses in the body after a person’s death through the teeth and skull, the difference in skeletal structure between humans and animals, as well as our ancestors and what it all has to do with our mobility and the way our bodies are right now.
ARTH 280 – Intro to Art Therapy
We did weekly journals that combined art and writing, which only affirmed that my favorite part will always be the writing. Although I loved making cute drawings, I always felt I wanted to write something on them to fully express myself. I was happy that it wasn’t only the drawing. So that would definitely be the difference between me and creatives who express themselves through their art— a lot of it is up to interpretation, when I just want to say a lot of things flat out. We also learned about the history of art being incorporated into professional therapy and how it can help those who are on the opposite side of the spectrum and would rather say things through their art instead of their words.