Learning the Ins and Outs of the General Education Curriculum

This is a historic year to be a Harvard freshman—not only because capricious budget cutting may render your favorite academic disciplines nonexistent, but also because you’re the first class to graduate under the new General Education curriculum.

Which means you guys are guinea pigs. Bad news first: The program was passed just two years ago, and it isn’t fully formed. Administrators are still trying to recruit professors to teach new classes, most Gen Ed classes are large lecture courses, and there aren’t many new non-humanities course offerings—for the time being.

But don’t despair: freshman year is still the time to try out classes that look exciting, and 221 courses do count toward Gen Ed’s eight categories. So, chances are that you’ll be able to find some options that aren’t excruciatingly boring. Plan on taking one class that counts for Gen Ed credit each semester, and don’t put this off since you’ll have plenty of other requirements to deal with later—your concentration, for example.

The eight categories are: Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding, Culture and Belief, Empirical and Mathematical Reasoning, Ethical Reasoning, Science of Living Systems, Science of the Physical Universe, Societies of the World, and The United States in the World.

Three types of classes count toward Gen Ed: courses explicitly labeled “General Education” in the course catalog, old-school Core Curriculum classes that still count for Gen Ed credit, and departmental alternatives. The latter two should be listed without course descriptions in the Gen Ed section of the course catalog.

Gen Ed administrators encourage some spontaneity in course selection— “we want freshmen to find courses that ignite their intellectual curiosity”—but there are incentives to plan ahead. Harvard’s “secondary fields,” or minors, typically require five to six classes, and foreign language citations require at least four courses past the introductory level. If you’re pre-med, there goes another swath of courses. Your concentration will likely require 12 to 16 classes as well.

So with only 32 total course slots available in your undergraduate career (unless you choose to take five classes per semester, which is doable but not ideal), you may want to reconsider padding your resume with a Portuguese language citation if your family is already from Brazil.

A final note: Freshman seminars don’t usually count towards your concentration, but they are a great opportunity to get to know a professor and not worry about grades. Take advantage of these, especially since small seminars may soon be a thing of the past in this era of budget cuts. Just don’t forget about those Gen Ed requirements!

Here are a few Gen Ed courses being offered next year that have received good reviews from students in the past:

Culture and Belief 11, “Medicine and the Body in East Asia and in Europe”: Instead of writing response papers, students get to produce an iMovie each week to respond to the readings.

Science of Living Systems 11, “Molecules of Life”: Here you’ll learn about sex, drugs, and aging...in other words, biology from a college student’s perspective. Reputed to be unconscionably easy as well.

Culture and Belief 22, “The Heroic and the Anti-Heroic in Classical Greek Civilization”: Under an old name, this class was a student favorite in the Core Curriculum. Classics Professor Gregory Nagy is renowned for his pop culture references and his ability to bring to life stuffy characters in ancient texts.

Ethical Reasoning 12, “Political Justice and Political Trials”: Every student we’ve talked to who’s taken this class highly recommends it. History Professor Charles S. Maier ’60, a former Crimson editorial chair who’s been teaching at Harvard since 1967, is something of a legend.

—Staff writer Bonnie J. Kavoussi can be reached at kavoussi@fas.harvard.edu.

For more information on the ins and outs of Harvard life, visit the My First Year homepage.