I attended the Rose Café which featured Professor Dan Schwartz, who discussed and provided various pieces of advice that originated from his new book How to Succeed in College and Beyond: The Art of Learning. I thought that talk was highly interesting and filled with many insights. My favorite piece of advice that he gave us was to “take teachers”. Professor Schwartz vouched for the idea that building relationships with teachers who truly care can greatly improve one’s educational and college experience. As someone majoring in computer science, almost all computer science courses are becoming more and more oversubscribed due to the explosion of interest in the major. Unfortunately, this means that our class sizes make it difficult for teachers and students to develop any deeper relationships or connections. However, going forward, even if developing these relationships in computer science courses is somewhat tough, I can certainly attempt to take courses in areas such as the humanities, where class sizes are generally smaller and these relationships are easier to build.
I also thought the professor’s remarks on greek life were quite insightful. He criticized the system by arguing that diversity doesn’t really exist in the system. Each fraternity generally has a narrow set of beliefs and perspectives that are only reinforced in the presence of other like-minded individuals. Thus, the professor states that individuals miss out on an opportunity to expand their horizons, which is generally a large benefit of college.
While I agreed with the professor on most of his viewpoints, I also believe that each person seeks to obtain certain and different experiences out of their time in college, and thus, there truly is no one right path to succeed.
As a computer science major I couldn’t agree more; it has become incredibly difficult to forge meaningful relationships with the teachers since the class size is very large and they are often indisposed with their projects or research. However, I disagree with Professor Schwartz’s comments on Greek life. While it is far from perfect, I’ve found that members of my fraternity are incredibly diverse. We come from all over the US (some brothers are international), major in different subjects, and have opposing ideologies which we debate. We are not pigeon-holed into a set of beliefs or perspectives, and we value our diversity.
Hi, I really like your point about building relationship with professors. When I was a freshman I was very reluctant to bond with teachers until I enrolled in the Spanish class, which had a class size of twelve people and I got to interact with my instructor day by day. It was actually an awesome experience and I learn so much from my professor. She holds very high standard with everyone’s work and I got to push my self for better performance each time. Though seemingly hard, I think it is really worth the time to start building relationship with professors.