DS panel April 16, 2024

Summary

Highlights

• Kaa Linog introduces the Directed Studies program and shares her academic background 🌟.
• Students share their personal narratives and express how DS influenced their academic directions 📖.
• Panelists discuss the demanding reading and writing expectations in the program 📚.
• Engagement with Western canonical texts is explored, with students sharing diverse perspectives on its significance 🌐.
• Students give insights into balancing DS coursework with extracurricular activities at Yale 🎭.

Key Takeaways

• Directed Studies offers a rigorous yet rewarding academic journey with rich philosophical, historical, and literary insights 📚.
• The program fosters a tight-knit community where intellectual and social bonds form naturally among students 🤝.
• DS enhances critical thinking and writing skills, offering thorough preparation for various academic pursuits ✍️.
• Balancing DS with other Yale activities is possible, though it requires discipline and time management ⏰.
• The program's focus on Western texts sparks valuable discussions about its relevance and impact on various fields of study 🌍.

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction The chapter titled 'Introduction' begins with the speaker welcoming everyone and acknowledging that more people will arrive later. The speaker emphasizes that there will be no penalties for late arrivals. They ensure that everyone can hear them clearly and ask for quiet from the panel to proceed. The session is intended for those interested in learning about director studies, confirming that attendees are in the correct session for this topic.
• 00:30 - 02:00: Self-introduction and agenda The chapter begins with the speaker expressing regret for not being able to address a certain issue at the moment. The speaker, Kaa Linog, introduces themselves as the Program Director of Director Studies and a lecturer in English and Humanities. They mention their work on climate change, focusing on how the humanities can improve understanding, communication, and thinking about climate change. The speaker sets the agenda for the session.
• 02:00 - 03:00: DS student introductions In this chapter, a teacher or facilitator introduces a group of Data Science (DS) students. The facilitator prompts the students to introduce themselves, asking for their first names and a brief personal detail. The first student, named V, introduces themselves, mentioning they are in Pearson College, from Texas, and hinting at another unspecified origin.
• 03:00 - 05:00: Panel format and encouraging questions The chapter titled 'Panel format and encouraging questions' introduces a group of individuals saying their names, colleges they attend, and where they are from. These individuals include Syria from Hopper College, Lizzy from Davenport College and Boston, Miles from Sabre College and Greensboro, North Carolina, Kaye from Franklin College and Queens, New York, Nick from Berkeley College also from New York, and Andrew from Davenport and New Jersey.
• 05:00 - 08:00: Logistics and events information The chapter titled 'Logistics and events information' includes an introduction by a student named Kenisha from Franklin College, who is originally from Queens, New York. Kenisha explains the structure of the panel discussion, mentioning that she will first ask questions to student participants, followed by a Q&A session with the audience. She encourages the audience not to be shy and reassures them that no question is too basic, addressing a common concern among participants about feeling intimidated.
• 08:00 - 11:00: Discussion on DS weekly structure The chapter titled 'Discussion on DS weekly structure' emphasizes that new members are not expected to have prior knowledge or familial legacy to succeed. The program encourages asking basic or thorough questions to learn effectively. The discussion touches on logistics, including participation in the academic fair.
• 11:00 - 13:00: Reading load and essay writing The chapter covers events and activities related to the Distribution Studies (DS) program. During the afternoon, leaflets will be distributed between 1:30 PM and 3:30 PM, providing an opportunity to meet other DS faculty, current, and former students. In the evening, there is an event at Gry Matter Books, a charming bookshop located at 264 York Street.
• 13:00 - 16:00: Challenges of DS program The chapter 'Challenges of DS program' describes an informal gathering organized for students to have an open and honest discussion about the Data Science (DS) program. The event features Insomnia Cookies and lemonade and is distinctly marked by the absence of faculty, allowing for candid conversations. Students are encouraged to ask any questions they might have, and peers are expected to respond truthfully. The chapter sets the scene by posing an introductory query about what a typical week in the DS program looks like, implying that this could lead into further discussion on the challenges faced by students in the program.
• 16:00 - 19:00: Balancing extracurricular activities with DS The chapter discusses the weekly structure of a program balancing extracurricular activities with a DS (Data Science) curriculum. It outlines that there are three classes each week, with each class having two seminars and a lecture. The lectures are scheduled on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, while seminars are distributed across the week, for example, two seminars on Monday.
• 19:00 - 23:00: DS community and social bonding The chapter discusses the structure of a typical week for students, including six seminars and three lectures. Additionally, students are required to submit an essay every Friday night unless it's an off week. The chapter hints at the importance of reading in this schedule, though details are not fully explored.
• 23:00 - 27:40: Debate on the Western Canon and DS The chapter discusses the experience of managing coursework in a DS (Directed Studies) program, particularly focusing on the challenges of balancing a heavy reading load with weekly essay requirements. It highlights the importance of having a strategy, such as dedicating Sundays to reading and then tapering off before each class. It emphasizes the continuous effort needed in working on papers and reading outside of the scheduled class times compared to other courses.
• 27:40 - 56:00: Open Q&A session This chapter titled 'Open Q&A session' features a discussion on managing workload and reading assignments. Participants discuss the challenges of navigating reading loads, especially in courses with heavy reading requirements. The conversation suggests the need for effective time management and structuring weeks based on the reading assignments. One speaker humorously acknowledges the significant amount of reading involved.

DS panel April 16, 2024 Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] we're going to get started I know more people are going to show up that's okay I'm not going to Mark anyone down for lateness um so uh let's get started can you all hear me okay can the panel be quiet please so we can get started thank you um welcome um if you are here to learn more about director studies then you are in the right place if you are
• 00:30 - 01:00 not here to do that then I'm sorry uh I can't help you uh not right now um so thank you so much uh for coming um I'm going to start by just introducing myself I'm Kaa linog I'm the program director of director studies uh outside director studies I'm also a lecturer in English and Humanities I work on issues to do with climate change and how uh the humanities can help us understand climate change and talk about it and think about it uh better um we have a
• 01:00 - 01:30 group of fantastic DS students that I feel like I'm blocking the view of so I'm just going to wait how should I do this I stand over here okay um fantastic group of DS students um so uh if you wouldn't mind just introducing yourselves just first name is fine um and maybe just say one super brief thing about yourselves why don't we start bow with you hi is it on oh yes hi my name is V I'm in Pearson College I'm from Texas but I'm originally from
• 01:30 - 02:00 Syria I'm Kwo uh I'm in Hopper College I'm Lizzy I'm in Davenport College and I'm from Boston I'm miles I'm in sabre college and I'm from Greensboro North Carolina I'm Kaye I'm in Franklin College and I'm from Queens New York hi I'm Nick I'm in Berkeley College and I'm also from New York hi my name is Andrew I am from New Jersey and I'm in Davenport
• 02:00 - 02:30 College hi I'm Kenisha I'm in Franklin College and I'm also from Queens New York great all right so the way this panel is going to work uh today is I'm going to ask uh student participants some questions and then in the second half we'll open up the floor and have you guys uh ask questions so please don't be shy I know we're all sitting around we don't know each other but uh no question really is too basic I feel like one issue I have with real is that sometimes it gives off aice Vibe of that
• 02:30 - 03:00 you should sort of just be in the know when you arrive and you should just know everything because you know three generations of you already went here or something um but please don't assume that's the case that is not how we operate in director studies if you already knew how to talk about Play-Doh we don't want you we want people who need to learn how to do it right so please ask super basic questions um or very you know hyperal questions whatever you prefer um so I just wanted to say just a couple of logistics things we will be at the academic fair this
• 03:00 - 03:30 afternoon between 1:30 and 3:30 uh we have more uh leaflets to distribute there you can uh encounter not just me but other DS faculty uh people who teach in the program as well as both current and former DS students and then tonight apparently wasn't added uh to the program uh immediately but hopefully should be up now tonight we have an event of gry matter books uh 264 York Street uh which is a very cute little Bookshop
• 03:30 - 04:00 um where you can have cookies from Insomnia Cookies and lemonade and entirely unfiltered conversation about the program because there will be no faculty present there will just be students um and you can ask them any questions you like and hopefully they will give honest answers all right so I thought we would start with um just the most most kind of obvious question which is what um does a typical week in DS look like I was wondering if one of you
• 04:00 - 04:30 could have a go at just describing what is actually the structure of the program on a on a week to week level don't be shy just jump in yeah I got it great okay so essentially week to week you'll have three classes and each of those three classes meets twice a week in seminar and then each of those classes also has a lecture so you you know you have a lecture Monday Wednesday Friday and then depending on how your seminars are distributed you could have you know two seminars on Monday and you know two seminars on on uh or on Monday
• 04:30 - 05:00 Wednesday and then you know a couple seminars on Tuesday and Thursday so that's it sort of just depends on you know which professor's classes you're in but yeah essentially you'll have six seminars a week and three lectures a week and then you'll have an essay that's due uh Friday night depending on whether or not it's an off week nice anyone want to add something to that that seems like essential information about how the week Works no yeah oh maybe in terms oh yeah maybe in terms of how like reading is broken up because that's a big part of
• 05:00 - 05:30 your week at DS because you have to balance a heavy reading load and also a weekly essay that you have to write um so yeah I guess it really differs for everyone but I tend to like read a lot on Sunday and then read less the night before every class and then also work on the essay incrementally so even though DS is like there on certain class days you're also kind of constantly working on like papers and reading outside of class so I feel like that's important to remember I feel like a lot of courses
• 05:30 - 06:00 you might be able to do a lot of work the night before like you might be able to do your homework the night before and things like that and it would be done by the time you're in class and then DS it tends to be a little bit harder to sometimes navigate the reading load depending on the week so that does also force you to structure your weeks a little differently depending on what the reading is yes so what Kenisha is saying very politely probably because I'm here is that there's a lot of reading uh like a lot um and so just to kind of clarify the readings are in three courses right
• 06:00 - 06:30 we've got uh historical and political thought we've got philosophy and we've got literature so um literature and philosophy you probably are sort of reasonably familiar with what it is historical and political thought I was hoping that maybe one of you could explain what subject what course that actually is how would we describe it it's not political science it's not history it's something else right who who would like to have a go at articulating hmp great Andrew um yeah like like
• 06:30 - 07:00 Professor Lin said um hmp it's it's neither historical like strictly historical thought or neither strictly political science it's a really great intersection of the two um I think the best way to talk about it actually is the way we go chronologically through the year um through authors and I just realized that I forgot the first person you read was it herodias oh the Bible there we go way back yeah um so we start with the Bible and then we get into um you know ancient GRE Roman thought so some Herodotus getting into tacitus
• 07:00 - 07:30 Plutarch those Roman authors um and right now in the spring we're talking um we started with makavelli um and we're getting into the 18th 19th and 20th centuries right now um this week I want to say is deys Bo yeah um we just finished up Douglas um and so really the topics that we discuss in hmp are probably of the three tracks the most um you know broad we talk about the history I mean when you're reading through cities you're going to talk
• 07:30 - 08:00 about you know those Wars um but there's also you know tying in strands of philosophy I mean when you read someone like maell you're going to be tying in a lot of philosophical thought um and and so the intersection of those two ideas is really powerful I mean for me personally hmp was my favorite track um just because of the breath of of you know knowledge that we cover over the course of the year um also some of the heaviest readings if I'm being honest with you I mean Herodotus gets pretty gets pretty dense on
• 08:00 - 08:30 yeah comes up a lot I think uh people find it heavy so I think that a lot of DS students have a kind of hierarchy in their head right of which subject order three they find the easiest and what they find the hardest what they connect with the most what they perhaps connect with a little bit less and so with with that said I would love to hear from a couple of you if you could tell us just what you felt the highlights were for you throughout this year in DS and why that was a highlight so just a couple of people who haven't booken so far come W do you want to yeah
• 08:30 - 09:00 yeah so a highlight for me uh doing DS was being able to explore uh like the humanities and like a different way of thinking uh I came into Yale uh like knowing that I wanted to be a stem major of some sort but doing DS it really opened my eyes and like what other type of academics were out there and it really like shifted my focus on what I wanted to study um and it just like opened a whole new door for me and like all this new knowledge that I got from
• 09:00 - 09:30 DS has been really useful so that's why I've been liking it that's lovely yeah I mean I think getting to know the professors has been a big highlight for me I know like last semester my professor Paul fredman for h&p was amazing um and also like they're they're very very very good at what they do I remember we mentioned briefly like All Souls College from Cambridge or like Oxford wherever um which no one really knew about and then the next day he brought in a fellow from All Souls to talk to us just for like 15 minutes like these professors are really really really good academics and across all tracks they have like their specialty
• 09:30 - 10:00 that they really really like but they also can teach you about anything that on the syllabus like they know how to deliver the information in a way you can understand regardless of what subject it is um so that was very very helpful having these like small seminars these really really good professors for me yeah I think just to add to that uh our faculty teach DS because they want to right nobody has to teach DS they uh are passionate about it and they do it because they love taking these sort of you know incredibly Broad views on history on literature and
• 10:00 - 10:30 philosophy on values on cultures on all these things but then also getting into the nitty-gritty of it and learning to get that right in a seminar room how to actually talk about it in detail even with no pre-existing knowledge of you know Herodotus or pelian Wars or anything like that we don't expect you to know any of that stuff when you arrive right so uh we have professors who are excited about introducing you to this material rather than continuing conversation you've already been having
• 10:30 - 11:00 um so um that's highlights and that's great now let's talk about some of the challenges um and so having a lot of papers uh to write would come up there as well as the reading load so who would like to speak to that maybe just some experiences that you've had in terms of your trajectory of learning how to you know turn in a five-page paper most weeks not all weeks but most weeks of the Year yep I can talk a little bit about that so DS was my first time
• 11:00 - 11:30 encountering a lot of these texts and I can say they're maybe intimidating the beginning um for literature for example looking at the length of the Iliad that at first I was like I don't know how to tackle reading such a text like this um but I would say one of the greatest things is honestly talking to your professor um I went to my professor and I was like I don't know like how to section off this book where to start because it is so long and honestly he was like split the book in half and then half again and then and just keep going until you make these kind of sections that you can handle and that was honestly one of the best things that I
• 11:30 - 12:00 could do uh because it really helped me break down the book into something that was less um intimidating and um this kind of goes to the highlights question but I was say on looking at you know the ilad and being like I just read this just a great accomplishment and you can feel really good about it but as for the essays there's a lot of resources here um and there's a lot of them that are for DS students specifically and then just for General Yale students and I try to take advantage of all of those so you may have heard about the povu center who has their writing tutors there are DS utas which are sophomore so they really just did the program and can be really
• 12:00 - 12:30 helpful to working on your essay um then we have the Wednesday tutors in Sterling which are really really helpful so there's a lot of resources and then of course there's your professor who you can go to and be like I have so many ideas I'm not sure where to start and as everyone was just saying these professors really want to be here so I remember like meeting with my literature professor professor Spitz this semester for an hour and a half talking about my essay and it was super helpful because I really got to figure out what I wanted to talk about and how to talk about it and she was just willing to stay there
• 12:30 - 13:00 and continue talking to me so there's so many resources here so if it does feel intimidating you'll find a way to navigate that thank you um anyone else want to speak to this um uh just the kind of challenges and how to navigate them I'll go one thank you uh so this past weekend I had my first all nighter for my paper um cuz it's not bad making it till April yeah I mean yeah if you have other classes you're going to have other work like um just balancing everything out like I
• 13:00 - 13:30 had a midterm that week so I had to push my paper off till the last second but um it's very doable it's very rewarding too and like uh just know that uh you might have to like pull a couple all nighers here and there just to read or do some essays but it's it's fine it's worth it yeah great um so with that in mind then I'm wondering what your thoughts are on how you can balance the cour workk of DS with having
• 13:30 - 14:00 an outside life at Yale so uh and with outside life I don't even mean a social life you know let's not go crazy I mean having extracurriculars right uh Yale first years are in my mind unhinged in how many uh extracurriculars you take on uh I'm you know every year I'm baffled by what you decide is a reasonable uh load and then you go ahead and do it but you obviously seem to enjoy it so talk to me about that those of you who yeah are involved in other things Lizzy yeah
• 14:00 - 14:30 so I actually came into Yale as a prospective physics major and I still am a physics major but I've added philosophy to that um because of DS outside of DS I do physics research I also play in the concert band The Jazz Band the orchestra pit Orchestra pretty much if there's a musical Ensemble I'm in it um and balancing music and directed studies has really been a challenge that I've had to face cuz I'm
• 14:30 - 15:00 also taking stem a lot of stem classes on top of DS and I found that it's overall a very rewarding experience you know I have rehearsal every night this week until midnight cuz it's Tech week for Westside Story but I'm still going to write my paper it's maybe going to need an extension but it'll still get done and I find that stop laughing at me and Lizzie are you asking me for an extension right now is that no I'm not asking you for an
• 15:00 - 15:30 extension no we can do that right I'll be okay I'll be okay it's literature this week my favorite papers to write um but basically I find that my extracurriculars are sort of my outlet to really express myself creatively um in a way that allows me to fully be present in directed studies so I would encourage anyone who's maybe not considering DS because they are wanting to engage in a lot of extracurricular activities to not let that stop you because I find that my extracurriculars
• 15:30 - 16:00 if anything serve me in a really impactful and meaningful way so I'll add to that I I love the talk um so I am currently I'm in mot court with Kaylee uh I I do debate at the union I do improv I write for the ydn on the occasion I'm on the board of like some like cultural clubs whatever I joined DS because I knew I wanted to do a lot of things which I know sounds weird but I was really bad in high school of like balancing different types of for different types of courses I went
• 16:00 - 16:30 to an early college so I had like a regular college experience like junior senior year and trying to balance like lab work with reading for certain things with like musical courses I I I was really bad at it so I took gifts because I knew the structure was going to be a lot it's a lot of work but you know what's coming every single week you know you're going to have to read for these three classes you have one paper and you're good um so I took that knowing that okay I'll be able to do that like in the I try to do that from like 9: to 5 each day and then I have time for my clubs in the afternoon um so while it does seem like a lot of work the routineness of it does make it a lot easier to get involved in things because you know what's coming up for the
• 16:30 - 17:00 entirety of your year like you know what's going to be happening in August or you know what's going to be happening in April in August like you're already prepared for it right so that's one thing to just um those of you who uh have the hand out you can take a quick look at uh there's a copy of the schedule from fall and schedule from Spring just to kind of get a sense of this is what it sort of will look like pretty much uh next year right and so you can see there you don't have to look at it and fully understand it right now because it's not going to be your schedule but all it is is a list of
• 17:00 - 17:30 here's what the lectures are going to be on this week here's when the papers are du here's when there's some extra events that we encourage you to come to that we are organizing for you um and so on just to give you an overview and you are right you will know that in August all the way through the year right so you will have that set up for you nothing will conflict so that's um probably a good thing um I want to ask Nick uh question next because if you don't mind sharing I remember that back in January Nick you uh for like two days dropped
• 17:30 - 18:00 out of the program and decided you weren't going to continue spring and then you changed your mind because you are here now and uh I remember that and that's partly why I wanted you on this panel today because if you could maybe talk about that and what the what the thinking process was yeah of course um I don't know I guess this really like this is kind of a long story because I came into DS like super excited like super ready to be a part of the program and then I realized that it was way more challenging than I had originally
• 18:00 - 18:30 anticipated um both in terms of like the workload itself uh the readings the papers um but also just like the intellectual weight of it all because like other people would go home and their homework would be like oh do this P do this reading well for us it's yeah comprehend the entirety of the western canon in 10 weeks right um so I think a lot of that anxiety got to me by the end of the fall term and then I thought like hey like maybe Yale could be different for me maybe my first year experience could be different maybe I wanted to
• 18:30 - 19:00 like Branch out and like do some other things um so yeah I ended up dropping for a few days and then I talked to a bunch of my friends afterwards because honestly like Yeah The People You Meet in DS like or at least I'm I'm hoping will like stay close with you for like the rest of your Yale experience and I guess like they kind of teased me a bit they were like oh Nick you can't just drop like that like come on lock in lock in bro um and then wait are you saying you were PE pressured back into the program this
• 19:00 - 19:30 is not the message I want but I feel like the support was nice and then I also realized that like DS is really something Irreplaceable um it's not something that you'll have a chance to do at Yale ever again and I feel like just thinking about those um like thinking about what I wanted my first year to look like eventually I came back around and I decided to stick it out and I've been really grateful that I made that decision well with that in mind I actually do want to ask another question about the community right so I actually think that d yes is fairly unique at
• 19:30 - 20:00 Yale at least in terms of being so explicitly both an intellectual and social Community right and it's an intellectual community in the sense that we're all doing the same things we don't all think the same things very very far from it about the things that we're learning about but we are still in a community and I think that then turns into a social Community a lot of the time right so I was hoping that uh a couple of you could talk a little bit about that what your experience has been just to build on Nick's uh Point yeah
• 20:00 - 20:30 I'd say that the DS Community is actually like absolutely amazing I've really enjoyed it I came to y not knowing a single person at this uh you know University and like you'll have a couple communities once you get to Y you know you'll have like your Residential College you'll have your froo and DS is just another one of those communities that you're able to you know have access to and be a part of and I'll say that like you know uh kind of like trauma bonding so like you know everyone everyone in DS not not actually trauma though of course but it's like you know you get together you you get together on like you know Thursday or Wednesday
• 20:30 - 21:00 night however early you want to start if you have like your friend group um you you like you you get together snacks start riding your essays you know take breaks to talk keep writing the essays you know we meet up and like do readings all the time if you're really confused with the reading you kind of like work through it together uh during finals like me and my friends we just went to like a a room in HQ and they have like four massive chalkboards and we just filled them out completely with like the lit you know the entire like lit uh semesters of of worth of readings so like it it really is a great community and you know hopefully once you find
• 21:00 - 21:30 your group you'll I think really appreciate it a lot more I remember we were all sad when Nick was saying he was you know thinking but you know ultimately uh uh you know he was able to say which was great all right quick someone else uh add to that before all you remember is trauma bonding uh about DS so uh yes can we save us yeah so I have the pleasure of having a sweet mate that is also in DS um so me and him like it's actually like really fun and underrated of just having like a convers
• 21:30 - 22:00 philosophical conversation at night like you you're never going to have like the same stance on anything um in DS in my opinion and me and him just always go back and forth and it's like a great way to like kind of review the material that we learned in seminar that night and it's like a great way to just bond with other people and like kind of practice your debating skills if you're into that and stuff um I just just add to this that we had a reunion a few years ago where we had a big kind of event way before your time um uh maybe four years
• 22:00 - 22:30 ago uh just before the pandemic where DS alums came from um uh I think the oldest alums had you know been in the program in 1954 um and uh you know they were still a lot of them were still friends and arrived as big groups you know um which yeah I I don't know what to say about that I find that astonishing uh I don't know whether it's uh weird and kind of you know a result of trauma bonning or whether it's uh genuinely just a a sign
• 22:30 - 23:00 of the uh you know genuine bonds that are being that being formed in a program like this but it's it was astonishing to me to see and I've have no doubt that you'll be the same um when you come back here in 50 years time um so um I thought that we should address uh what is sometimes the elephant in the room about this program which is that we read texts from the West right the so-call Western Cannon which is not really a term that I like to use but let's say that we use we read texts that come from a variety of
• 23:00 - 23:30 Western Traditions some NE Eastern Traditions but let's face it mostly European right mostly European Traditions so um does anyone feel like they want to take on a question about that how they feel yeah Kisha and then m i can jump in on that because that was actually my biggest reservation about taking DS before I started um was I even went to like the panel during my Bulldog days to like see what everyone would say because for me I was thinking a lot like my thought process was if the Western Canon and was if the Western Canon is
• 23:30 - 24:00 what you're constantly exposed to in your world like why is that what I would want to study at Yale when I could study something more specific that doesn't get as much recognition and something that would give me an entirely New Perspective on how our world is and just introduce me to new things that I hadn't been exposed to before whereas a lot of these Works You' probably heard of them before you might have read a little bit of them if you had to like take like an apus history class in high school or something like that um or you might just know who the authors are kind of just know their General Vibe or when they
• 24:00 - 24:30 wrote like it so based on that I was kind of conflicted about doing DS because I was like do I want to spend my first year and then you're also spending six classes your first year which is a really big commitment doing the Western Canon and just like fully learning about that and I think what finally kind of convinced me to really see the Western Canon and what like DS has to offer you academically is even though even if you don't want to study the West in the rest of your academic Journey it's still underpins a lot of our like culture
• 24:30 - 25:00 political thought a lot of how we even like structure academics at universities is fully influenced by the people that we're reading in this course and I think just like understanding the impact that all of these people are going to have on the world around you like kind of just made me think if I want to do anything even if it's not related to the West I should know who these people are and I should be well read on this material because it really helps you understand a lot of like other things in academics it help you understand a lot of other disciplines and I've definitely seen
• 25:00 - 25:30 that be true my first year um I think everyone can kind of like relate to this DS experience where you read something and you see it pop up everywhere like you see it pop up in movies and other books you see it pop up in the other DS readings you're doing and by the end of the program you feel like so accomplished by that like you're very well read and I think knowing the kind of basics of all of these authors is incredibly helpful like in my other classes like my other like economics classes I'm taking like a political science class this semester we will
• 25:30 - 26:00 literally have excerpts from like Hobbs Leviathan or makavelli put up on the slides and I know what they're talking about and I'm able to get a larger context and meaning for whatever we're learning even though it's like very far removed from what we're doing in DS so if anyone has any concerns or hangups about that I would highly recommend approaching it in that way not just is the Western Canon what you want to be focused on for the rest of college but how can it provide you a grounding for more work later on I'll just say one brief thing and then hand over to else which is that one way that we we think
• 26:00 - 26:30 about it these days D started as a cold war project right it started as a way I think quite explicitly of showing the superiority of the West that is not how we think about it now I think it's good to be honest about that that's how it came about and how it was funded initially uh but that's not why it's still around the reason it's still around is because the West is something that has happened to all of us right regardless of what we actually think about it it's exactly as Kenisha says it's something that uh it provides the
• 26:30 - 27:00 fabric of how we operate in our lives uh whether we critique it or we appreciate parts of it is almost irrelevant to that right miles um so I actually applied in aam studies um and now I'm going to be hopefully like Humanities and aam double major um and part of that is because yes I found it like important at some point or another like Kisha was saying to engage with these texts it's like a sort of like academic currency Wherever I Go part of like my my Bonafide be by do I know my Aristotle have I read my Plato um so it feels important to me just have
• 27:00 - 27:30 that like oh yeah I know what I'm talking about and even throughout the history of like like black de boy himself he talks about in the reading this week like he taught like children like Cicero for some ungodly reason which I don't know if you should be giving children Cicero but whatever um like it is a sort of like academic currency you need to have to prove yourself in certain spheres and you do see the the threads of the DS readings in other readings that may be more specific like Duo's the Bo's discussion of like self-consciousness felt very like Hegel esque and that was something we pointed out in class yesterday it's like you see the trends that you point out in other classes or like other parts
• 27:30 - 28:00 of the track come up in the more Niche text and I can imagine going into like my FM classes next year that I'm going to see shades of ploh shades of Aristotle and whoever I read so having that background is important and plus it is it is one year like you're going to be here for four years I can take six classes here to get a solid grounding of the entirety of the western Cannon and then go to my more Niche field and not feel like I lost anything so I felt like that was a worthwhile like if it was it was four years I might have a bit more questions but like this is not your entire Yale career you can specialize
• 28:00 - 28:30 after if you'd like you know up until the 70s it used to be two years and it used to include Natural Sciences so you took like DS chemistry DS I don't know what they did DS astrophysics but that is no longer the case uh it is one year definitely and I should also mention that it does take care of a significant amount of pre requirements for you which is a a pretty helpful kind of setup um I think it's time to open up and just see if you guys have questions if so what they are and then if we can um you know help answer answer them in any form so
• 28:30 - 29:00 hands up if you do yes great let's start with you so my question is about like the class kind of set up so with how many classes do we have to take does directed studies count as like one class or is it like a bunch of classes yeah I I can see how that's confusing actually because we talk about six classes and then you know however many seminars a week so basically when you come into Yale you'll be expected to take four or five classes in your first semester take four not five by the way take four uh
• 29:00 - 29:30 just it's your first semester you're learning how to be a college too that's you know just my advice totally outside of DS um three of those classes will be taken up by DS right so um each semester of the year so you will either take one or two or probably some of you crazy people will take like three outside that but uh I don't want to know if you do but um but three classes are taken up by DS so is that answer your question yes great
• 29:30 - 30:00 yeah it's interesting I mean people kind of choose different things what to take care of sort of outside the yes right depending of course what their majors are I mean what have you been taking a lot of people take uh econ uh I'm pretty sure you did I remember back in the fall was thatu yeah did math okay you're math sorry okay math Eon I mean you're right those are the kind of things that people tend to take um but not everyone what else yeah Andrew yeah I take French right now I know people who are taking Latin or Greek things lot
• 30:00 - 30:30 of people do languages yes yes right um okay more questions yes does anyone do that anyone look at the great books um schools like are you you mean some Johns I I suppose Colombia would be one where they do um that's where I came from and I taught before
• 30:30 - 31:00 here um anyone considered any others like that a little bit um Columbia main is the one that I was like going back and forth between I've done after going through DS I've kind of become more aware of like the Great Book sort of like ecosystem in higher ed I was not like totally aware of it coming in um but I I really wanted to be able to still experience the broadness of Yale in my latter three years that was important to me like I was I was making a list over the summer before I got here like books I should read at some point or another before I graduate and like the DS books were most of them but like that was that was it I didn't want to spend too long sitting and engaging with
• 31:00 - 31:30 these texts cuz I do want to like learn other things um like I want to get into something that will maybe be more applicable to what I want to do like professionally um I just want to Branch out a bit more so like a pro like a college that was like fully focused on great books or like a a stronger great books program it might fit with what you want to do but at least for me I found the the mixture of the intense focus in DS combin with the broad Liber Arts of Yale to be a good balance for me yeah I'll just uh add to that that there are plenty of you know smaller liberal art
• 31:30 - 32:00 schools right that have a setup where they do kind of like a version of DS but much less intense and spread out over four years right and that's a you know a great thing to do but it's a very different experience exactly as miles says you know this is a year where you kind of cram in a whole lifetime sort of experience of uh of these texts into one year it's very intense which is a drawback but the I think there are massive upsides which is that you get to experience all of these things at the same time and realize how they're all connected right and that's sort of one
• 32:00 - 32:30 of the sort of mind blown experiences that you can have um yes more questions yes can I answer that um I can take this one usually the standard is five to six pages for the essay um but admittedly some professors are more strict or less strict in regards to that um I have some professors who give a pretty strict five
• 32:30 - 33:00 page like endpoint they say like if you have a paragraph like on the sixth page I might like you know remind you again that it should have been a five-page essay but also like the longest essay I've turned in I think was like 13 Pages or something like that so oh no don't don't do that yes don't submit 13 Pages um I think also just to kind of add on to that is to uh to your question is also that there are prompts right you will be get getting prompts from your your professor most of the time the professor themselves will come up with
• 33:00 - 33:30 the prompts in Philosophy for reasons that are not clear to me frankly they all decide the prompts all together as one unit or the faculty um so you will have the same prompts as all your friends in philosophy but elsewhere it will depend a lot on the teacher because the instructors also that come to DS come in from different departments so they all have quite different styles you know and different teaching styles yeah Kisha yeah I'll just add on to the topic of essays um because some professors like in your classes have really creative prompts so I will say one of
• 33:30 - 34:00 the essays that my favorite essay that I've wrote so far um was a conversation between Eve from the Bible and then um ofilia from Hamlet um which is like such an interesting group of characters to be honest but it was so much fun it was a dialogue between them so I got to like actually create like my own play which was so much fun Professor Spitz great Professor um so the professors really V vary in what they want um like My Philosophy Professor last semester was like you know if it doesn't reach five pages that's fine honestly it could
• 34:00 - 34:30 be shorter than that and I was like great because he recognized that philosophy is so abstract that what you're focusing on might not fill all five pages like you may want to focus on a really small thing so long as the substance is good the like the word count can vary from there and then there are obviously some professors who are like you know make sure you're really analyzing The Prompt and if you go over that's fine but each Professor is different um but it's really up to them about going up to them and being like you know I want to write about one of the prompts or I want to write about my own thing cuz I found something else interesting and they will really give
• 34:30 - 35:00 you the guidance in how to manage that and how to navigate that good yeah and I'll say that one of the coolest things is that depending on the different topic so you know a discussion can like go any way right depending on who says what you know the you you guys could be analyzing one page while another class is analyzing a different page um and depending on that some professors will create new prompts that sort of fit that uh fit that discussion and allow you to go you know even more into that and even then let's say that you know you have a list of 10 prompts and you're not really uh interested in in discussing any of
• 35:00 - 35:30 those things many professors will allow you to just email them or come during office hour and just say I'm really interested in this portion of the the text or the you know interactions between these two characters can I talk about that and then they'll be like yeah sure just write up a prompt put it at the top of the essay or email to me I'll approve it and then you're good to go so um even if there is or or it could be about like you know a a you know two different texts you know professors are very very you know easygoing when it comes to like witch prompts or you know essay length things of that nature just because ultim they understand that the the goal is to increase your you know
• 35:30 - 36:00 analytical thinking and your writing skills through these essays and they just want you to do that through like something that you're actually interested in I will also just say that Diaz is a great opportunity if you are feeling like you're on the shy side as a first year to practice going to office hours with intimidating professors because you will have plenty of reasons to do so and to talk about papers and they will really want you in there right so um feel free to to use us as practice um yes more questions um if you could could change something about DS what would it
• 36:00 - 36:30 be come on don't hold back yeah uh hold back a little bit Yeah I won't um more time with the text like they're they're really good and they're really dense and like when we came in DS have the air of a place where like you could tell the past few years they kind of gave them a lot and the students were not enjoying it they kind of cut back for us to make it actually manageable which great but like reading like n or Burke or like de Bo and you have like two seminars in lecture in the lecture after the seminar and that's it you're moving on to a
• 36:30 - 37:00 whole new text wow like I could spend like we could spend semesters on every single book in the syllabus and I do think like some of these books they're great but I would prefer a little bit more time on some of the more important ones and we might can like you know push the rest of them to the side that's just me though that's just me it's an ongoing vigorous and thriving debate debate that I hope you will join uh next year with even more views about what should stay and what shouldn't stay on the syllabus and one of the biggest problems of course is this problem of what could you possibly cut right without feeling like
• 37:00 - 37:30 you're missing out on something uh amazing um yes so I know you guys you like have Focus like taking areally physics major how do you feel like you can balance that well withs Tak up so much of your schedule freshman year even though you have the rest of years of college do you feel like you're behind other people who are potentially majoring the same
• 37:30 - 38:00 um I would love to hear from your views I just want to say one thing just as a kind of logistical point to that which is that the only major that you actually can't combine with Ds is engineering right so those of you who are very committed apparently environmental engineering is okay so I don't know if that's much less serious or whatever but uh but all the other engineering Majors you cannot combine withs it's just not possible with a pre requirements all other Majors you can combine at least in theory so let's hear it all right yeah so as I said I'm going to
• 38:00 - 38:30 be a physics major and I'm directed studies hasn't change that for me um I just decided to do the joint physics and philosophy major instead of just purely physics um but outside of DS as I mentioned earlier I do a lot of physics research and I'm in a couple of physics clubs and I find that you can still be a stem major if anything it's really interesting to have more stem majors in seminar because they provide a really unique and important opinion on the
• 38:30 - 39:00 texts but if you're considering a stem major um NDS I would highly encourage you to do it um not only does it get rid of all of your Humanity's requirements you don't have to take another Humanities class for as long as you're at Gale obviously I think you should because I think the humanities are great but you don't necessarily have to after you've done DS um speaking to whether I feel that I'm behind um other people in my major sometimes you can feel like
• 39:00 - 39:30 that I mean because of directed studies I wasn't able to take the advanced physics classes I had to take a more lower level one just because it didn't the other ones didn't fit with my schedule I feel like I haven't necessarily gotten that same like intensive physics background this year because I chose to do DS but honestly that was a sacrifice that I was willing to make I'll still end up okay with a Physics degree and I'll still be happy that I did DS um but you know that obviously
• 39:30 - 40:00 just because it happened for me doesn't mean that it necessarily has to apply for everyone who's a stem major in uh and considering directed studies I mean there's a lot of classes that don't actually conflict with Ds um that you can take that are high level um it'll just be a lot of work so consider that I guess yeah I think it just takes a lot of planning right and you need to be uh you know thinking ahead a little bit right and reach out to D of departments and say okay what do I need to do and other updated requirements just kind of
• 40:00 - 40:30 think ahead a little bit um in in terms of that yeah uh to quickly add on so I'm an applied math perspective applied math major and honestly your first year you're only going to be doing prerequisites for your major so you won't really feel that behind um like next fall like I already set up my schedule and it's it's not like I'm behind anyone else in that major it's just that I've gone through all the distribution requirements and finished my PRX so it's like you're like like still in the same place one thing I'll just add also is that you will not have
• 40:30 - 41:00 to take any writing classes right you will just know how to write whether you want to or not you will just know how to write by this time next year if you're in DS because you will have written so many papers you will just know how to do it that will just be what it is there's a reason why all of ydn seems to be sort of xdss um uh because they know how to write on a very tight deadline right um more questions yes sorry many it really varies um so I don't have
• 41:00 - 41:30 good stats for you this year we had seven people drop out of the 120 uh no wait 118 sorry and then we had no okay now I'm going to do math um uh we had 117 and seven drops so we have 110 now yes that's pretty standard uh the pandemic was different uh because we also had a much smaller cohort and there was a larger drop off because a lot of people just uh decided to take you know uh a semester off and fair enough you know uh so they you know took a semester
• 41:30 - 42:00 off not just from DS but from Yale uh but apart from that that's pretty much uh the level yeah oh I'm sorry actually you've already asked question so I just want to make sure that um we get more people yeah what do you think guys what would be the estimate Andrew so the Baseline I I'd say is you you're going to expect a book per class per
• 42:00 - 42:30 week and and that varies quite a bit because you can read sapo's fragments one week which and they're really small which will take you I don't know 30 minutes or you could read The Iliad which is quite long which you don't read for a week but yes uh true I'm trying to come up with a number in my head of the average last year's panel I thought it was all over and we wouldn't get any people applying because somebody came out and said oh you read a th Pages a week and I thought oh my God uh we are
• 42:30 - 43:00 not reading a th000 Pages a week but I wouldn't be surprised honestly if it's between 200 500 some weeks do you think that's fair yeah one thing I will say is like for example The Iliad the the format that we had it was like 700 pages but the font was larger and of course it's not in like your your your regular Pros so it's like you know and then some of the text that we have it's like 50 pages but the words are really small so I feel like it really varies based on like the version that you have um and
• 43:00 - 43:30 again like we read saffles fragments was like a line a page so it does really vary but like when we got back from spring break I think it was like 200 pages in total for all three classes it was like 50 like so it really varies but it's also structured in the way that you're not coming back from Spring Break and having a thousand pages to read which is really never the case yeah and another thing that's important to consider is like especially for philosophy rarely will you read the entire text you know what's going to happen is philos you know the the philosophy texts that we're engaging with are a lot more dense so what you'll
• 43:30 - 44:00 do is like one of our one of our philosophy readings was like three pages right and you're just going to go and then you get get through those three pages you know annotate them if you'd like that's your thing and then you'll get into class and you'll you'll just go through those three pages so like the idea behind the reading is to be able to be like a beneficial contributor to your class right it's not to like you know uh Tire yourself out trying to read 500 pages a week that's definitely not the idea of the program it's to get as good an understanding with the text so this way that you can like productively
• 44:00 - 44:30 contribute within your you know seminar experience and then also like these are just interesting texts to know about right and you have you have like the world's leading you know figures at the at the head of the seminar table who like some of them literally wrote the text that you're reading in class so you know why not you know read it so this way you can ask them you know whatever wild questions you could come up with just to better understand the text and then also connect them to other ones thank you um yes more questions uh you at the back very last row
• 44:30 - 45:00 so you apply so thank you for asking that question because that's a good logistical thing to know right so the application is open it closes I want to say the last day in May at 5:00 p.m. May 31st if that's a Friday then that's the day it's it's on our website so you can just go and see there it's a very straightforward application um you uh you know you have to matriculate first of all but then uh you have to just answer two questions uh one is tell us about a book that you read that changed your mind about something and the other
• 45:00 - 45:30 one is why why do you think uh DS would be a good fit for you and what do you see yourself as kind of uh doing uh within the program so it's very straightforward um I would say that we do have more applicants these days than we used to so um it is competitive but I will say this this one thing which is that if you're weight listed for the program it is definitely worth hanging in there we have wait people who were on the wait list in the Pro on the panel I want to hear from you come about that
• 45:30 - 46:00 because I remember you joined exceptionally late like you know two hours before the deadline or something yeah it was very late anyway um and uh it's totally doable it's not like being weight lless of for Yale right where you know forget it right it's not like that it is definitely worth hanging in there and the reason is because you know your first years and people change their minds and you know they're totally committed to the program and then they arrive and realize no actually have a completely different trajectory in mind and I'm you know um AA studed major and
• 46:00 - 46:30 I want to you know perform plays all the time so I'm not going to do this whatever it is right means that there's a lot of movement right in in the program so if you're weight listed definitely hang in there and think that there's a real possibility that you will get in I would say about uh 60% of applicants get a place but the rest all of you are weight listed and you know you have a decent chance of getting in K do you want to speak to that yeah so I was weight listed for the program and then I did every uh I did everything
• 46:30 - 47:00 that any other non DS student would do like I set up my whole schedule and everything um went through my whole first week of classes uh you know made new folders on my computer and everything and all of a sudden I got an email um saying that I got there was a place in the program and I actually went to uh Professor Lind goog's office saying like I don't know like I I already started like my for first week of classes I'm already like like three books behind like I don't know if I
• 47:00 - 47:30 should start it now and um she just gave me the full three books I was behind on she said hey over the weekend go through them if you enjoy it then join if you don't then it's fine and um I read through them and I was like you know what this is really interesting it's really fun and uh so I got rid of all the classes that I was taking just like all four of them gone and then I replaced it all with uh DS classes and it was it worked out well so happy with that and a lot of the time you do get
• 47:30 - 48:00 admitted into the program a lot sooner than that so you don't actually have to kind of you know um uh go about it the way come we do but I'm really glad you stayed um more questions yes yeah can yeah I could talk about that a bit um so first semester I decided to take five courses instead of four which I would advise against which I was Adis against actually but like when I was thinking about the other
• 48:00 - 48:30 class I wanted to take I took like a math class and then an economics class um which are both what Professor log mentioned earlier that a lot of people take alongside DS I would highly recommend take a class that employs a different skill set and has a different kind of like work structure than DS so that's why I would say like personally I was like I'm not going to take another English class with Ds I don't think I want to take another like ethics or like philosophy class with Ds just because that would be those other classes are also even if they're not seminars their
• 48:30 - 49:00 still main assignment is reading so I wanted to take like math or economics because those are both like problem set based classes and it allows you to employ a fully different skill set when you're taking those classes and in that way like sometimes those classes were a really nice break from DS because like our I think maybe half this panel was in that econ class last semester um I don't know how many people sorry so many people in DS were in that class but it's like a I think it was like a 400 student class like it's one of the biggest classes at Yale so was like fully lecture style um it gave you a nice break from seminars I think sometimes to
• 49:00 - 49:30 just be in a class where you can more like passively take notes and then work on problem sets with other people and then my math class was kind of like a small lecture of 25 kids um and then that was also a similar structure of just like a weekly P set and just um working on problems with other people so I would highly recommend if you're in DS unless you're really into like a lot of reading doing like a math an econ or a um language on the side and also this is just like a logistics note to be a sophomore um at Yale I think your first
• 49:30 - 50:00 semester you need to take like either two of a language QR which is like your math classes and writing so if you're in DS you'll get the writing one over with but I think you do need a quantitative reasoning class or language so I think that kind of helps you Branch out and forces you to also take different styles of classes would one of our coures also takes care of the social social science uh requirements which is Handy um great more questions uh we have uh yeah we have time for a couple more uh
• 50:00 - 50:30 yes yeah that that is a little bit unfortunate um if because because the program is designed really for people to be in it the whole year and as you can tell you know most people do stay in it so if you you I think you do get partial credit but it's very much up to the uh Majors that you are applying to how they going to assess that I think that there's you know flexibility some wiggle room sometimes that they will decide to count
• 50:30 - 51:00 you know count it as a whole credit but definitely not always so that is something to just keep in mind that it's probably not a good idea to commit to DS if you feel confident that you're only going to take one semester uh because I think it it might sort of you know mess up your requirements a little bit Yeah is it structured so it's one week English and next it knows everything all at once once um so uh you have hmp and you have
• 51:00 - 51:30 literature and you have uh philosophy every single week right so in total um well you have three courses which means that you have six seminar meetings in total every single week and three lectures every single week um okay um yes are theams what are the exams like do you guys want to not as bad as you think it's going to be yeah I I kind of overprepared for I just want that inscribed over that well it's actually we take them in here so I want that
• 51:30 - 52:00 inscribed somewhere in in here they are not as bad as people think yes Kaylie yeah I just want to add on to that um so yeah the finals were honestly fun to study for like Kenisha and I would be in her suite and then we would be like opening the text and like close your eyes I'm going to read out a quote and you have to say where it's from and who wrote it so it's like I don't even know how to describe the game that it's like but it can be like a game to study for um after you take the first final you kind of sit there and you're like wow I studied so much and I'm now realizing that I know most of the content on there
• 52:00 - 52:30 like we were giving each other like quotes that were like in the middle of the book that would be so ambiguous and hard to get and then like one of the quotes on the the final would be like the first quote in the book which is like super memorable so it is manageable you can study for it it's fun to study for sometimes um you might take yourself too seriously for a semester and be like I have to know everything I have to know like everything they said every point but it's really not like that it's just as so long as you read the book in the past and you understood what the the author was saying it's manageable to take the final what I I just want to add
• 52:30 - 53:00 one thing which is that one of the reasons why the exams are not as scary as you might think even though they're you know three hours per piece and you know they're significant and they are on everything that you have studied that semester but it is not a course on the content it is not a course where we're testing you on the content we're testing you on skills right can you say something interesting about this passage of philosophy very often we'll even give you who wrote it and uh where it's from right in order for you to say something interesting under time pressure right
• 53:00 - 53:30 that is really what the exams are about yeah I would also add two things one you're sitting where we took them um so like we we took them here in like a big group which is very very fun like call people who relate to the exam like hey guys we have a l exam this morning and watch them comeing in pajamas um but also like there is also like an essay writing portion for all the exams which is not nearly as terrifying as writing your weekly essay the weekly essay kind of got me a little bit but the essay on the exam was really really chill I remember from my LD exam I did like some funny I I I started writing jokes in my essay and like playing with the structure of it and my professor liked it my professor liked it it fit the
• 53:30 - 54:00 prompt um so the final exam they're really like you're going to over prepare just you know you are going to over prepare because it's your first Final in college you read all these books you're scared to make sure you know all the quotes and middle of the books but like it's really it's really chill you've done all the preparation by going through the program you know what you're talking about by time you get there and what we also say about the exams is that they are still there for the reason that if you are someone who has a little bit of trouble participating in seminar cuz you feel like you know the conversation is is kind of running ahead of you or you feel a little bit shy then this is your moment to shine to show that you
• 54:00 - 54:30 were there all along and that you cared and that you were into these texts and that you read them and that you have something to say about them right so it's also another way for you to kind of display that yeah so you apply earlier no no no as long as you apply before uh uh the last of may we read all applications afterwards it's not on a rolling basis it is just you know we read them all in one go so it
• 54:30 - 55:00 doesn't matter you can leave it as long as you like and you know have a practice go and you know do all of that yeah uh not really to be honest what we're really looking for and are people who are curious enough and open enough that they can read a book and let it change their mind right so hopefully you will all have read something thing at some point that you felt change something about how you view the world
• 55:00 - 55:30 and view yourself it is not like the admissions essay to Yale where you tend to talk about maybe like your identity and your background and I mean you can bring that in but it's not so much that it's more about saying I this kind of thinker or I thought I was and actually this book has made me maybe a different kind of thinker and here's what I think about that it can be a non-fiction or a fiction book doesn't matter people write about all kinds of things you know really yeah I wonder if you could describe what seminars look like a little bit just like how many people sit
• 55:30 - 56:00 in on a seminar and what really takes place yeah any any of you yeah okay great uh so seminar could be like 10 to 15 people I think the biggest one I've been in is like 15 people and essentially what it is is you know 15 DS students 10 to 15 DS students you have the professor and then usually the professor will you know send out like you you have all the readings you know you guys have you know access to those right now and you'll just go through that week's reading everyone will have like you know their book out on the table a notebook and the professor will be like okay let's get started usually
• 56:00 - 56:30 they'll give like a brief introduction of the text the author maybe some of the historical background and then you'll go into sort of an analysis analysis of the text and then usually after a bit of that uh like it's it's very collaborative right so the professors will like very much try not to you know just speak the entire time they'll they'll like open the floor many many times for questions comments even if you like didn't necessarily agree with something they'll they'll ask you guys to you know to to chime in and say like oh I actually interpreted it in this way and you know it it's