My Favorite Classes at Vandy
With my third semester winding down and a lot of requirements for AXLE, my major, and premed out of the way, I wanted to share some of my favorite classes I have taken so far. So, without further ado, here they are:
American Popular Music: I decided to take this class solely to fulfill the American History and Culture AXLE requirement, and it ended up being one of my favorite classes. I’m not going to lie; I was definitely looking for an easy class to fulfill this requirement because I am awful at learning history. This class surveyed the history of music in the United States, and it was the perfect way to learn about American history through the lens of popular culture and music. Our midterms included a listening portion in which 30 seconds of a song were played, and we would have to identify either the genre, artist, time period, or some other characteristic about the song.
HIV/AIDS in the Global Community: This was a class for my Medicine, Health, and Society major. It was all about the history of HIV/AIDS and the social, political, economic, and medical dimensions of the disease. I didn’t realize there was more to HIV/AIDS than the medical component until I took this class, and the topics we covered were applicable to any field in health. Highly recommend if you’re an MHS major or thinking about major/minoring in MHS.
Organic chemistry: I was pretty terrified of taking orgo because of all the negative stigma surrounding it, but I surprisingly really enjoyed learning the material. I did not expect orgo to be so different from gen chem –there’s no math! Lesson learned: don’t let a certain reputation of a class get to you.
Spanish: The Spanish department here at Vandy is phenomenal. I haven’t heard of a single “bad” teacher in the department. I took the intermediate Spanish class as well as the intermediate Spanish writing class, and I learned way more in just one semester than I did in all 4 years of high school. If you’re looking to take up another language, ¡tomas una clase de español!
Commons Seminar – Girls Like Dinosaurs Too: During the spring semester freshman year, there are 1 credit hour classes called commons seminars available to freshman only. I highly recommend taking advantage of this opportunity as a freshman because the topics are super interesting and you only get this opportunity once! My commons seminar was called “Girls Like Dinosaurs Too, and it was all about women in science. The obstacles that famous female scientists had to face were unbelievable.
I honestly cannot think of a single class I have taken that I didn’t like. That’s the thing about college: you get to pick what you want to learn. Vandy is a great place to do exactly that with our fantastic professors and enthusiastic students.