True confessions of a happy Directed Studier

By Jonathan Markowitz

I am a happy Directed Studies (DS) student. I am not overworked. I do not feel that I am missing out on cool freshman intro courses. I do not feel like I am still a high schooler with assigned courses that never examine anything in depth. I'm a Yalie and a DSer—and I am proud of it.

Directed Studies has its problems; all programs do. But the common attacks on the program, from DSers and non-DSers alike, ring false. It's attacked as limiting freshmen from sampling the spectrum of courses Yale offers. With only three non-DS courses to select, language requirements to fulfill, and the murky future of a potential major to worry about, DSers may appear to have limited their course selection prospects months before shopping period. But think about this: here we have 120 incoming freshmen with an interest in the humanities—at least enough of an interest to write an application essay in the midst of summer. If DS didn't exist, the population of English 129, Philosophy 116-117, and Political Science 114 would swell by—you guessed it—about 120 people.

DS is also attacked for not doing enough. It attempts to cover the major writers of western civilization from Homer onwards, an impossible task for a lifetime—let alone a year. Yet, after a year of DS, a freshman knows quite a bit more than she did before. She can read an op-ed piece in the New York Times and understand a reference to Aristotle. She can pick up any piece of literature and find buried themes stretching back to the Old Testament. She can crank out a six-page paper overnight without batting an eyelash and still wake up early enough to read those last 200 pages before section. She can talk to any other DSer, past or present, and carry on a conversation jumping from Helen of Troy to a joke about Gregory of Tours to a reference to Gandalf the cat.

In addition, DS provides a built-in group of potential friends who have the same background and the same interests. At times, the close-knit nature of DSers is viewed as a detraction: we're being elitist, we're being anti-social, we're being close-minded to the wonderful world of Yale that lies outside of DS. But community is only one of the benefits of DS. It's great to sit around at three in the morning discussing Kant, but it's better to be able to write an essay about Milton later that night.

The constant rush of DS papers, readings, and writing trains us for much of what will come later in our Yale careers and our lives. Even if we learned no factual material during the course of DS, learning how to deal with a hefty workload, analyze a text, and think clearly and quickly about a sticky philosophical problem are skills that will serve us well in other courses. Of course, these skills can be learned without DS. Many of us enter Yale with a feeling that we have already honed these skills, but DS provides an valuable opportunity for learning textual analysis unparallelled within the confines of a typical freshman course load.

And what readings they are, including some of the greatest writers and thinkers the Western world has produced in the past 2,500 years, books which have served as the foundations of a startling number of philosophies and disciplines. And, as hardworking and internally motivated as we all are, few would read the breadth of great books DS offers as voluntary summer reading.

DSers complain. Constantly. But if we weren't secure that it was worth it, we would be silent or we would be chemists. DS is huge: 2,500 years in 25 weeks of lecture, 18 papers, and thousands more pages of text. But at the end—or even now—I know more, think more clearly, have a great group of friends in different colleges, love the e-mail discussion list, and can't wait for Tim Bays' next lecture. I am a happy DS student.

Jonathan Markowitz is a freshman in Saybrook.

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