Old School
As someone who is as undeclared in actuality as the classification on my YES page says, I used this semester to shop around for tons of different options when it came time to choose classes. Right now I’m enrolled in courses from History of Art, Human & Organizational Development, Economics and Religious Studies, and gladly/sadly, I’ve enjoyed myself so much that I’m no closer to deciding on one major than I was at the beginning of the semester.
One of my favorite classes this semester didn’t actually start that way though. I don’t know what exactly I was expecting with Religious Studies 266: Devotional Traditions of South Asia— it definitely wasn’t a class that would normally be in my comfort zone, but the topic interested me and I hadn’t started on any of my International Cultures requirements for AXLE yet, so I decided to go for it.
The class became a lot of firsts for me— my first 200-level seminar, my first class under 15 people, my first foray into Religious Studies— but the most significant first was definitely the scariest. When I walked into Garland 301B for the very first time, to say I was shocked would be a vast understatement. I had known the class would be small and I had assumed there would be some older Religious Studies majors taking it, but what I had failed to notice in the course description was its cross-listing with Vanderbilt’s Divinity School. It didn’t take much longer than crossing the threshold into the classroom to realize my oversight and, with almost half of my fourteen total classmates being graduate Divinity School students, acknowledge the most terrifying first of all.
I was not only an undergraduate, but a freshman undergraduate in my first ever Religious Studies class alongside people who had chosen to make Religious Studies the center of their whole academic and future careers. No pressure…
Taking a seat for the first time, I was more than intimidated, but that couldn’t have been further from how I felt when it came time to leave an hour and a half later.
Instead of being unintelligible and far beyond my grasp, my professor’s lecture was accessible and interesting. Instead of being aloof or pretentious, the graduate students were friendly and inquisitive. Instead of feeling unprepared and under-qualified, I found myself more engaged than ever.
Stepping out of your comfort zone isn’t always the easiest and isn’t always something we have the opportunity to do, but Vanderbilt makes it possible in so many ways. With the AXLE requirements, I’ve been able to step out of mine for a while and not only discover new academic interests, but share a classroom with some of the most driven, mature students on campus.