Beware the 200-Level Course

It happens to the best of us: the realization that, academically, you are in over your head. I remember it happening to me when I signed up for an advanced physics course in high school without ever taking ordinary physics, as I followed my school's overeager custom of taking advanced courses without their prerequisites. Perhaps you are familiar with the feeling. You walk into the room on the first day of class, thinking, "Well, I've never taken a real math or science class before, but hey, I'm here to learn." As you take your seat, listening to your fellow students talk while waiting for the teacher to arrive, it begins to dawn on you that 98 percent of the other people in the room are making jokes in which the punchline has something to do with the topology of a bagel. The thought enters your mind: "Perhaps I am too dumb for this class."

Since college started, I have not experienced that too much. Sure, the beginning of my first year of classes was intimidating, but it did not take most of us long to realize that one does not actually have to do the reading to make quasi-intelligent points during a Core class section. Concentration courses started to become more challenging, but even then, all you needed was a good study group or a friend to read over your paper, and you were well on your way to academic delight, or at least a B. But this semester, that sinking feeling from high school physics has churned through my stomach again. I was dumb enough to sign up for two courses listed as "Primarily for Graduates."

Grad students. From undergraduates, these words often invite a mixture of scorn and fear. Yet contrary to popular belief, grad students are not actually evil. It's just that they do the reserve reading. If you look at a syllabus from a graduate-level seminar, you may be astonished to learn that most of then assign no tangible work whatsoever except for a final exam or other project due at the end of the term. Lo, take heed, ye foolish undergraduates, and learn ye the Ways of the 200-Level Course. You see, in graduate school, they no longer have exams and papers scattered throughout the course to make sure that you are on top of the immense reading list. The undergraduate mentality of waiting until the first "assignment" is due before doing any work, therefore, becomes completely useless. And you cannot fake it, because they will know. In a graduate-course discussion on Shakespeare's King Lear, for example, neither the other students not the professor will be wowed by your fine-tuned commentary which you duly gleaned from your Core class last year. Instead, the grads will parry by demonstrating how a particular verse in Act IV differs in the First Folio, which incidentally resembles the Middle English root of the verb as it appears in Sonnet Number 42. So what is the seminar-jocks' secret? They did the reading--and then some.

As undergraduates, all of us are here to read, to study and to learn. But we are also here to meet people, to try new activities and to pursue our passions. Grad students, too, are pursuing their passions. Unfortunately for you, however, their passions include memorizing the books carried by The Coop's textbook division under the label "Recommended Reading." You just cannot compete.

Perhaps no incident can better describe the feeling of being in over one's head than my experience shopping for classes this semester. I was interested in a particular seminar, although I suspected that my preparation for the course might not quite be up to par. But in the hazy glow of shopping week, I decided to give it a try. I hiked over to the classroom, hidden deep within that strangely inaccessible ring of studies and offices in Widener Library, and pushed open the door. As I scanned the faces of the ten people in the room, I recognized one of them: my junior tutor. It was time to go home.