Sharing & Caring

Hello world, and happy almost-Thanksgiving Break! Thankfully, it’s been a slower past two weeks than usual; time has gone more slowly and I’ve been less busy, so I’ve had more time to get work done and bask in the Williamsburg fall. (Seriously, it’s gorgeous here this time of year.)

Anyways, I know in my most recent post I promised to write more broadly about the academic experience here, to not be so focused on my own stories. But I wanted to share something so simple and so great that I’ve been able to do in the past week, since it’s indicative of what William & Mary academics are all about. Over the past few days, I’ve been sitting in on my friends’ classes. During freshman year, I did this fairly frequently, both to procrastinate on my own work and to decide what types of classes I wanted to take in the future. This past week, I was mostly trying to alleviate late-semester burnout, but in the process, also ended up having way more fun than I thought.

Last week, I went to my friend’s multivariable calculus class, offered in the Math Department. It’s been three years since I took calc and a year since I took Research Methods, so I was a little apprehensive. In between the professor’s explanation and my friend’s notes, though, I am pleased to report that I followed along from beginning to end of the problem! It didn’t turn me into a math major by any means, but I remembered how reassuring numbers are and how not everything has to be interpretive and qualitative. Sometimes, there’s just a right method and a right answer.

On Wednesday, I trekked to the third floor of Tucker for Old English, a seminar offered in the English Department, with two of my closest friends. A big thank you to Professor Monica Potkay for letting me sit in, because I was so into it. I won’t bore y’all with the intricacies of Old English meter, or the demands and rewards of interpreting a dead language that may have had different patterns of inflection for everyday speech and recited poetry, or anything else fascinating that we touched on. But I definitely plan on taking the course if it’s offered before I graduate and will bore you with the details in post in a semester or two!

Yesterday, I went to The Beatles, a cross-listed course between the Music and American Studies Departments, with my boyfriend. In a word, the class was YOOOO. The course moves chronologically through The Beatles’ discography; yesterday’s lecture focused on The White Album. We covered While My Guitar Gently Weeps, coincidentally one of my favorite songs ever; Happiness is a Warm Gun; and Birthday. For each song, we split time between lyrical and musical analysis with enough cultural history to make sense of the words and sound. Some of the musical terms went over my head, but other qualities—shape and tone and tension—resonated, and of course I geeked out about reading lyrics. Call me a nerd, but I couldn’t stop smiling the entire hour and twenty minutes. Also, I’m still listening to While My Guitar Gently Weeps on repeat. These three classes eased my late-semester burnout for the time being, but more importantly, have gotten me excited for the opportunities coming my way for the next three semesters.

At William & Mary, I’ve made friends who will let me come to their classes, which I expected to some extent. Like that expression we all learned in kindergarten, sharing is caring, and I’ve definitely found a group of people who share their intellectual curiosity with me, who lend me books from their sociology courses and actually want to talk about rape culture and toxic masculinity when we’re driving to Chipotle, because that’s an actual thing that happened to me this week.

More surprisingly, though, I’ve also encountered the types of professors who can make such an impression in a fifty-minute class session. I had no background in multivariable calculus, Old English, or The Beatles, but each professor had a unique and infectious energy for their subject, and I can imagine the same scene playing out in classrooms around campus every day, every semester. This spring, I’m taking two government courses in my areas of interest (Politics of Eastern Europe for the comparative side, Contemporary Political Theory for the theory) and three English classes on totally unfamiliar material, so I’m definitely excited to see where those end up taking me. Also, though, who knows what other classes I’ll sit in on next semester, what else I’ll end up caring about? Stay tuned!