What doesn't kill you makes you stronger

At some point during the summer (perhaps you've already gotten it), an application for what Yale calls Directed Studies (DS), a freshman-only humanities program, will arrive in the mail. If you decide to take the plunge, write the essay, and apply to DS, and, lo and behold, you manage to get in, you should know that there are many different takes on the true nature of this ambitious program:

Directed Studies

Directed Studies consists of three full-year survey courses that examine the development of philosophy, literature, history, and politics in the Western tradition. The courses begin with works by the Greeks, including Plato, Herodotus, and Homer, and they end with modern thinkers and authors such as Nagel, Brecht, and Arendt. Along the way you'll come to view the various works not as self-contained, but rather as responses to what had come before and anticipations of what would come later. Professors continually emphasize the connections and relations among the texts.

By the time you're finished with Directed Studies, you'll have a solid foundation in philosophy, literature, history, and political thought which will allow you to pursue a wide variety of other humanities courses at Yale in the years to come. Your discussion sections will be small (only about 15 students), and, unlike many other introductory courses in the humanities, it will be taught by a full professor.

Directed Suicide

Directed Studies is a yearlong experience of pain, torture, and insomnia. Your weekly reading will be about 350 pages, and readings are assigned over breaks. The difficulty of the reading will range from Homer's The Iliad and Voltaire's Candide as the easiest to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Tolstoy's War and Peace as the most difficult.

You will have a four-to-six-page paper due every Friday, and will often find yourself working on it past 2 a.m. Friday morning, while your friends are still getting their groove on at B&K or [[Sigma]][[Alpha]][[Epsilon]]. There are also finals for each of the three subjects in D.S. at the end of each semester. You will have covered or surveyed roughly 60 books by the time you are done with the entire program.

[[Delta]][[Sigma]]

Directed Studies is a special group of students doing intense coursework in the humanities. Most of the students in DS are motivated and interested in the subject matter, and all of them are fairly intelligent. You'll meet everyone from science majors who have not done much work in the humanities to those who have encountered most of the works in DS prior to coming to Yale.

Some people will come to section with all of their reading done, some without having opened their books. Some people will speak loudly and often, and others won't speak all year. For the most part, however, your time in DS will be spent with people who have had some experience with or are interested in the same broad topics you are. You might not like them all, but you'll be spending your entire year with them as a community of scholars.

The Truth

In practice, DS will probably be a mixture of these three things. Most of the works you read in DS will be interesting and worth the time and effort, and the professors in DS are quite knowledgeable about the subjects that they teach. On the other hand, you should know that for many survivors, DS has been the most academically and intellectually challenging thing they've ever done.

In fact, you will probably do more reading in DS than all the reading you did in high school and grade school combined. With conscientious effort and a fair amount of diligence, the workload will probably be quite manageable. Plus, you will come out with a good understanding of the Western tradition and a stronger ability to speak and write eloquently about what you know. The work might be grueling, but you will probably find it worth the effort.

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