Flyby Investigates: Humanities 10a

Humanities 10, lovingly called Hum10, is one of those classic Harvard classes students wake up for in the morning and think, ‘Ah, I love the smell of a liberal arts education!’

All jokes aside, Hum10, in Professor Alison J. Simmons’ own words, is “an evolving beast.” This is the first year Humanities 10 has been offered as a replacement for the required freshman Expos course. (There’s a way to get out of Expos?!) Curious about this new freshman track and the class that’s been garnering so much attention, we spoke to students currently in the course and Professor Simmons to find out more:

When asked why he had wanted to take the course, Nick D. Horneado ‘19 replied that “the main one [reason] was how scary it the course seemed.” Students read a book every week, and acceptance into the course relies on an application process at the start of the school year.

Indeed, the workload for this class is no joke - those of you looking to get easy Gen Ed credit (you know who you are) are out of luck. Professor Simmons said that when selecting students for the class, they expect that students consider it to be their main course. However, the class seems to be a success - much like every senior can ‘objectively’ say that their House was the best, the students Flyby interviewed uniformly shared their excitement about the work that they would be doing. It appears this may be the only class at Harvard in which students are actually doing their reading.