Princeton courses take on a variety of forms. Perhaps the most common form consists of two fifty-minute lectures with anywhere from thirty to over a hundred students, and one precept with around ten students. Meeting three times a week, these kinds of classes are very common in the social sciences and humanities. Many people enjoy classes that meet only twice a week for two eighty-minute sessions. Every class structure serves a purpose and students can more or less tailor their schedules to reflect their learning preferences.
Seminars are classes that meet only once a week for three hours and have anywhere between six and twenty students. Typically, you will be assigned anywhere between seventy and two hundred pages of reading for the week. During class, you will be expected to come in prepared to discuss your own analysis of the readings and pose questions related to what you learned or found confusing. This means participation plays a very large role in your own success in the class. Assignments typically take the form of several papers throughout the semester, or perhaps one midterm paper and one final research paper. I’ve had a few seminars that have included a requirement to lead one class discussion during the semester, though of course no two seminars are identical. This is perhaps an unpopular opinion—at least according to the reactions I receive from my friends when I say this—but these are my favorite kinds of classes.
There are many benefits to enrolling in seminars. Three hours might sound like a painfully long time but more often than not I find that these classes fly by. I also know that the emphasis placed on participation can sound intimidating. What if you can’t think of anything to say? What if you ask a bad question? These were certainly all thoughts I had before taking my first seminar in my freshman year. However, I have found that the size and organization of the seminar greatly lends itself to increasing your own comfort with the subject material and participation more generally. Small class sizes are not necessarily unique to Princeton, but they are definitely a defining aspect of the University—one that I am very thankful for. Often, a sense of camaraderie develops amongst seminar students and the professor for this reason. This makes seminars a great opportunity to learn from your classmates, build close relationships with your professors, and develop your own skills in public speaking and text analysis. Put simply, I'm glad I took a chance on seminars despite being initially intimidated by the thought of them.
I have written previously about a class I took during my sophomore fall, Central Americans and Asylum in the United States. This was a fairly large seminar, but it remains one of my all-time favorite classes during my time at Princeton. I learned a lot about the asylum process through our discussions and involvement in real-life asylum cases. Junior year, I took a seminar called Playing Dead: Corpses in Theater and Cinema in the English and Theater Departments. We read plays I’d never been exposed to before, as well as watched a variety of films and movies related to the course subject. For example, I loved watching one of Guillermo del Toro’s movies and feeling like I was being productive since it was for a class. This semester, I am taking a seminar called The History of Incarceration in the United States, and another anthropology seminar on borders (which also has a few graduate students enrolled!).
Over the last four academic years, I have taken approximately ten classes that have been seminars—roughly a third of all my classes. As I prepare to select my courses for my last semester at Princeton, you can rest assured that I will be taking at least one more.