Spring 2019 Class Overview
It’s spring semester already! Time here at Vandy is flying by, so I’m making yet another semesterly post on the classes I have the opportunity to take here. I’m particularly excited for this semester because I’m getting to take classes more specific to my majors now that I’ve mostly completed all of my pre-medical requirements. For those of you who have not read my posts before, I am a Neuroscience and Psychology double major on the pre-medical track with hopes of becoming a psychiatrist after graduation and medical school.
My only pre-med class this semester is the second half of physics, a yearlong class which I began in the fall of 2018. This course is lecture-style, but has a lab component that meets once a week and there are demonstrations of the principles we learn about in many of our classes, which keeps the course interesting. While I am not a physics whiz by any means, I like this class simply because it forces me to think in an analytical, mathematical way that I normally don’t in many of my other classes.
Additionally, I am in one neuroscience class this semester which examines the neurobiology of addiction. I am unbelievably excited for this course as a hopeful substance abuse psychiatrist, and can’t wait to learn more about the subject. Because the class is only 35 people, it’s an intimate learning setting and allows for more in-depth interaction with the professor and subject matter.
All of my remaining courses for the semester are psychology courses. First, I am taking Cognitive Psychology, which is a larger psychology course and part of the psychology major distribution requirement. The course covers attention, language, reasoning, and other aspects of human cognition, which should be really interesting. Another psychology distribution course I will be taking this semester is Social Psychology, whose title is a bit self-explanatory. I’m really excited for both of these courses and to see how the subject material applies to my own life and interactions with others. The final psychology course I’m taking this semester is Child and Adolescent Psychopathology, which is taught in the Peabody College of Education and Human Development, not in the College of Arts and Sciences like my other courses. The fact that I can take classes in other Vanderbilt schools other than my own is a really cool part of being a student here, and the psychology major is a perfect segue between my college and Peabody.
Stay tuned for updates on how all these classes went later in the year! Thanks for reading, and if you have any questions regarding life at Vanderbilt, feel free to contact me at alex.rains@vanderbilt.edu.