There Are Too Many HASS Classes I Want To Take by Aiden H. '28

I’m out of class, which means I’m naturally thinking about only one thing—what classes I’m going to take next! This is not because of a deep internal love of school or academia, nor a longing for summer to end and be stuck in the blizzards on campus. It is solely because I love calendars and class planning.⁠01 This also means that I love the first two weeks of class when I get to experience a new schedule and class life and then immediately hate it when I get used to it and don’t about my classes anymore

So as I started looking at my Hydrant⁠02 A website for MIT students to visualize semesterly class schedules in calendar format and Courseroad⁠03 A tool for MIT students to track their entire undergraduate course requirements by semester. for the fall, I noticed something is happening for the very first time: there are too many HASS⁠04 Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences classes that I want to take.

For a school so deeply characterized by nerdy science stuff, I feel overwhelmed by how much I don’t want to do that and instead take like 7 music classes. Buttttt since I’m constantly working against myself and have a lot of degree requirements left, I can only really fit one HASS class (what is typically required/expected)⁠05 Unlike STEM degrees at other universities, MIT students are required to take 8 HASS classes in any subjects (not just boring intro comp) to graduate. These can happen at any time and classes towards HASS majors/minors count (with some minor stipulations and details being glossed over), so this breaks down to one a semester for most students. into my schedule for next semester. Instead of casually moving past this fact, I’m choosing to immortalize my desires for what next semester could actually be here.

The list of HASS classes I’m interested in⁠06 Note that this is only based on the fall schedule, so there are even more for the spring! are as follows

1. 11.164/17.391 – Human Rights at Home and Abroad
2. 15.275 – Entertainment, Media, and Sports Lab
3. 21H.141 – Renaissance to Revolution: Europe, 1300-1800
4. 21H.331 – Julius Caesar and the Fall of the Roman Republic
5. 21L.003 – Reading Fiction: Jane Austen
6. 21L.009 – Shakespeare
7. 21L.024 – Literature and Existentialism: Life, Death and Freedom
8. 21L.433 – Film Styles and genres
9. 21L.620 – Introduction to French Literature
10. 21L.703 – Studies in Drama: Stoppard, Churchill and Company
11. 21L.705 – Major Authors: Epics of Human Choice: Spenser’s Faerie Queen and Milton’s Paradise Lost
12. 21M.080 – Introduction to Music Technology
13. 21M.284 – Film Music
14. 21M.295 – American Popular Music
15. 21T.201 – Acting with the Camera
16. 21W.778 – Science Journalism
17. 24.118 – Paradox and Infinity

If I did in fact choose masochism and took all of these classes, it would total 201 units (about as much as most degrees) and an average of 132.6 hours of work each week. My schedule would look as follows:

AKA impossible! So now comes the intense process of deliberation. Things to keep in mind:

• I could easily minor in Literature. I’ve gone super back and forth on this, because I only need a couple more classes, but there are two things standing in my way that make me question it. First, the minor has specific requirements about taking different types/levels of classes, and the ones I’m most interested in don’t fit these requirements. Second, I don’t know if lit classes feel entirely ~worth it~ to me. While I always love the recommendations, I take the classes as just that: recommendations of good, important media. The day-to-day class conversations and assignments don’t provide me anything that I couldn’t get post-college just reading on my own. Nonetheless, some of them sound interesting.
• I have other classes I need to take, too. When planning these classes around my required technicals for next semester ( 10.302,⁠07 Transport Processes 6.1010,⁠08 Fundamentals of Programming 6.C06,⁠09 Linear Algebra and Optimization and 7.003,⁠10 Advanced Bio Lab for those interested), a lot of the best classes get knocked off purely out of scheduling conflicts I can’t control.
• Some classes are just harder than others. This can be explored during the first week when I test classes and get different syllabi, but as much as I’d love to commit to a bunch of different HASS classes, I simply won’t be able to give enough time to a class with multiple essays/exams/psets/projects next semester.

At the end of all these deliberations, I still find myself deliberating, as I’ll continue to do up until classes start. But for now, I’m somewhere between 21M.080 and 15.275.

Let me know if you have any class suggestions/warnings until then!