Class

Intro

At the beginning of September, I was a part of a program called Sophomore College. Sophomore College is two weeks of one class at the start of sophomore year. You apply to one of several programs. There are small class sizes, and there are lots of cool activities.

Speaking of applied classes in the school of education…

Ed193a is a class that trains students to be peer counselors at The Bridge, Stanford’s 24-hour, free, anonymous peer counseling service.  I didn’t come in to it thinking that I would want to be a peer counselor.  I actually just got an email, before picking my classes, entitled: “Ed193a – Be a Better RA, Friend, and Leader!”  I thought that the class would teach me some good listening skills, and I knew a friend who had a positive experience in the class last term, so I decided to take it.

Overall, Soc22 was interesting at times, but fairly basic.  It went over the sociological study of social movements – basically, reaffirming intuition about social movements and using a lot of jargon to do so – and applied that to different social movements. 

Overall, I liked SLE a lot more this term than in previous terms.  The readings were more contemporary, so I could relate to them, gain from them, and write meaningful papers, and I meshed well with Greg Watkins, my section leader this term.  Because I’ve been so busy this quarter, I didn’t quite do 100% of the readings, but I made an effort to get through the ones that I found to be interesting.  And I sort of got the gist of the rest.

The last two terms, I took programming classes.  During spring term, I took a ‘theory’ class: it’s still about computer science, but the focus is not on how to program, but on learning the ideas that will lead to better programs later.  This class was an introductory probability/statistics course that was focused on computer science, so while we would learn the same general probabilistic principles that they teach in other probability courses, we would also go over the applications to programming. 

My Experience (3)