"Depth and Breadth" of undergrad curriculum

WilliamC
Sun, 23 Dec 2007 09:08:12 +0000

You’re completely golden on the languages. Looking at Harvard as a proxy for “top program in Classics”, they’re asking for:

“Competence in both Greek and Latin sufficient to allow the student to take courses numbered above 100 upon entering Graduate School.”

Those 100 level courses appear to be the “advanced undergraduate” courses, i.e. the ones that come after the intermediate prose/poetry pair.

For archaeology they ask for that level in one language and “above the beginning level” in the other.

Really… Nobody at the undergrad level has much depth simply because there is so darn much to learn. If you develop a specific interest that might carry over to grad. school, that’s where your honors thesis will come in.

As you probably already know, be sure to save all your papers since your honors thesis won’t be ready in time for grad school apps. You’ll likely have a few 10-15 page papers in the upper level language classes and (if you’re lucky) some 15-20 pagers in upper level history/archaeology classes. Be sure to attend all the colloquia and such you can manage and once you find a professor or two you like try to take one or two additional classes from them with an eye to using them for LoRs.