Need Advice on IHUM Courses

cardinal2014
Sat, 25 Jun 2011 00:43:08 +0000

I took Humans & Machines and loved it.

Definitely one of the least painful IHUMs. What I remembered was hearing my friends complain about Word and Image and Fate of Reason… and I think Art of Living (I’m not sure all of those are fall quarter IHUMs though), and being pretty thankful that Humans & Machines was laid back so I could spend less time writing papers and more time studying for chem midterms.

You go to movie screenings on Sunday afternoons, and you’ll end up writing a paper synthesizing themes in the films. And, no final - instead, a group project that is graded pretty easily. There are like three “quizzes”, which you should do fine in if you mostly go to lecture and watch the films. But seriously, seriously not anything you need to worry about. I freaked out over these quizzes and papers for no reason.

I didn’t really do much and ended up with an A-. Attended most of the lectures, watched most of the films, went to section. I didn’t spend any time at the Hume Writing Center or revised my papers, which might’ve made the difference between an A and an A-. Note of advice on the papers: talk to your TFs. Be their friends. Go to office hours. No shame in being IHUM kid if it gets you a good grade in the class. Talk to your TFs about your thesis topics before writing your papers.

And, if you actually went to lecture, they were almost always pretty enlightening, or at least entertaining. A lot of people thought it wasn’t that interesting, because I’m thinking that a lot of engineers expected Humans & Machines to be more techie than it actually was. I liked the topics, I like watching movies, and it was an easy class, so it was win-win-win for me. Also, Jon Daehnke was the best TF. Bummer that he’s not teaching IHUM anymore, though.

And a note about SLE: I didn’t really consider it, because everybody told me that it’s isolated from the freshman dorms and a breeding ground for weird artsy humanities kids. Although there’s definitely a lot of truth to that, SLE kids seem to have actually gotten something out of their humanities education, and they don’t have to take PWR (which sucks IMO). Anyway, I wish I had considered it a little bit more - but probably still would have taken IHUM/PWR.