<p>I think every student should take an introductory course in business management because basic principles of business are important in many non-business fields [ex. doctor opening up private practice]</p>
<p>Find out what lecture class is the one that everybody wants to take because the professor is fantastic. Take that, whether it’s music history, philosophy, or the causes of the Civil War. That’s the one you will never, ever regret taking.</p>
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<p>and Hunt’s comment about taking the fantastic professors. That matters more than the material.</p>
<p>D1 took a comp sci class fall semester because she’d heard that the professor was amazing. So amazing, in fact, that she just declared as a comp sci major. She had no previous experience in programming–this was a bolt from the blue. </p>
<p>I’d modify the advice to ask friends about choosing classes slightly: talk to any upperclassmen and ask them what classes they recommend.</p>
<p>Another vote for statistics. Even if it’s just Stats 101 or “Stats for Non-Majors” or its equivalent.</p>
<p>I did not take statistics in college (I took a higher-level calculus class instead), but once I got to graduate school I did take a stats class.</p>
<p>I’ve since realized that so many different professional fields are enriched by statistics, not just “science” fields or business.</p>
<p>Interested in the legal profession? Stats can help you. Journalism? Non-profit work? Teaching? Medicine? Consulting? </p>
<p>I can’t think of a single field/career where a basic statistics class wouldn’t be helpful. I think it also is helpful to be able to talk about in a job interview too, regardless of field.</p>
<p>Beyond statistics I would say a basic computer science course, preferably one where you learn HTML (at the very least). Again, this is something that can be useful regardless of potential career choice, and is an excellent skill to have on a resume.</p>
<p>(And yes, folks in admissions use statistics and HTML ;))</p>
<p>^^ I love Hunt’s suggestion. </p>
<p>My son is taking a Hinduism course, linguistics, and American history of the 1960s–all things he’s interested in and didn’t have time to take earlier. As he gets into the Vietnam War, he’ll be studying my last semester of college in his last semester of college.</p>
<p>You can learn a lot about personal finance by reading extensively, which he’s been doing for a while. He opened an IRA, so he’s well ahead of where I was at his age.</p>
<p>Another vote for Statistics for any major.</p>
<p>As for the Art or Music Appreciation classes, I’d agree with the caveat that they might be better to audit. My first “C” ever was freshman year in Music Appreciation. I learned a lot and enjoyed it immensely. However, when the professor played pieces of music we were expected to identify, I was LOST.</p>
<p>Luckily, I wrote a fantastic 10-page paper on a piece of music by Bach. The professor asked me if I actually wrote it myself before handing it back with an A written on top. Geez, I’m not stupid, I just cannot differentiate between various composers.</p>
<p>Looking through the course catalog, I’m like a kid in a candy store - I want it all but can’t.</p>
<p>I think now more than ever I value the nature of my Spanish major (Iberian Studies) - I can take an art history class, a class on religion, a class on literature and a history class and still have it all come together in a coherent way.</p>
<p>Thanks for the personal finance book suggestions - I’ve downloaded a couple of them as Kindle samples.</p>
<p>The pick-good-professor suggestions are great - the thing is, in my experience, NYU is such a huge school that still leaves a surfeit of choices (that’s a good thing!). On top of that, math, econ and philo are some of NYU’s strongest departments, and I’ve heard good things about the undergrad teaching in econ and philo.</p>
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<p>That’s what I’m struggling with. I’m pretty darn good at teaching myself - I placed out of Spanish 4 two years after I started teaching myself Spanish, without ever having taken a Spanish class. And yet when I got to NYU and took Advanced Grammar with a great prof, I realized that I couldn’t have replicated that professor’s insight from years and years of teaching this material.</p>
<p>That doesn’t mean I think taking a class is always worth it vs picking it up outside of college. I guess what I want is to maximize my time in college, so that whatever I learn from the professor is substantially more than what I could have learnt on my own. I guess the way to do that, really, is to take classes with the best profs I can. It’s a happy bonus that those classes might well be Logic, Microecon and Stats.</p>
<p>I don’t mean to be offensive, but I think many of these courses, while very useful, seem like not a good use of college tuition (when you could so more easily pick them up outside of a regular university setting). Things like ‘business communications’ or ‘business writing’ or ‘personal finance’ are not university level courses (I speak from the perspective of someone who teaches in a business school). In top business schools, they are offered as add-ons and taught by sessional instructors. Up there with ‘resumes for success’. Ugh.</p>
<p>I vote for things that are actually much harder to gain a lot from outside of a 4 year university setting. Things like micro and macro economics, philosophy, critical analysis, or statistics.</p>
<p>Speech. It is so important to learn how to form ideas, communicate clearly, and know how you are perceived by others. When I took speech in college, we were videotaped. To this day, I remember the chagrin I felt when I realized I said “you know” every 5 seconds. I also had some annoying mannerisms. This was the single most helpful class I took outside my major.</p>
<p>Personal Finance was an elective course. We were paying for the term anyway. My DS saisd the information was excellent. I don’t think this is any more or less “valuable” than paying for any other of the above mentioned courses.</p>
<p>My Geology class saved us money!</p>
<p>When we moved near the Great Lakes, a course I’d taken in Glacial Geology caused me to focus our housing search on two long roads: Ridge Road and Moraine Avenue. The entire suburb, flat as a pancake, was on floodplain with mucky soil (so get used to it, I was told). But from that course, I knew those two streets would be a long strip of sand-and-gravel with excellent percolation. We bought there, never flooded and got full use of the lower level. The realtor must have thought I was a piece of work, but we really dodged a bullet there. </p>
<p>I’m voting for Hunt’s idea, in general. Take one class that is with the “wow” professor, in anything. It will kindle the Love of Learning to see something taught beautifully, thoughtfully and with conviction.</p>
<p>I dunno about the rest of you, but I am trying to wrap my mind around the idea of a private university with large numbers of full-pay students, many with parents NOT in the top 1%, that gets many of these students to enroll by encouraging them to take out loans, AND offers a Personal Finance class. </p>
<p>To add insult to injury, by the time many of the students are seniors, they will have realized that they will not be going to medical school, OR to a top law school, or to Wall Street. (Some might also have realized that had they gone to the cheaper school, they might have been in a position to apply to med school, but I suppose that is a topic for countless other threads.) Perhaps the class syllabus would cover topics such as “How to choose your next higher education program wisely, whether community college, trade school, or terminal MS degree”, “How to pay back loans on an entry level salary in a field with uncertain job prospects”, and so forth.</p>
<p>Maybe I’m overthinking all of this, and sorry for getting off-topic…</p>
<p>Frazzled…the course covered things that would benefit these students as they were looking to life after college. Look…It was just a suggestion. I didn’t bash anyone else’s suggestions.</p>
<p>I really wasn’t trying to bash anyone’s suggestions, but just encountered a moment of cognitive disconnect there, especially since Frazzled D is entering her senior year with a major/minor in unrelated fields, a few completed prerequisite chains, and has many of the same questions as OP… My apologies.</p>
<p>I checked - the school Frazzled D attends does not offer this type of course (does NYU?), but as she moves into the world of work I would certainly encourage her to read up on these issues and appreciate the suggestions of personal finance guides. We read these types of guides as we were starting out, as did Frazzled S. </p>
<p>I might also encourage her to take a class or two in accounting once she graduates, especially if she does not find a job immediately. She has no plans to apply to professional school or graduate school, but does not have the type of major or minor that would lead directly into a job, especially in a poor market. It is ok with us - we planned on the possibility of a gap year following graduation and Frazzled D has no loans - but might not be ok with other parents.</p>
<p>In the meantime, i am encouraging D to look carefully at the professors who would be teaching her senior year courses, in line with what many of the other posters are suggesting. Unless the professor is very, very good, I do not think I would want her to spend the time or the money on learning something she could learn on her own or at our local cc, just to please us.</p>
<p>NYU offers personal finance and business writing classes as part of its continuing education division. As a full-time undergrad, I don’t get credit for those classes. Even if I did get credit for them, there’s a good chance I’d opt for the self-study route, for many of the reasons starbright and frazzledtothecore mentioned. All the same, the fact is that I haven’t really been thinking about personal finance or business writing, and I’m glad they were mentioned as things college kids should learn before graduation.</p>
<p>“Geez, I’m not stupid, I just cannot differentiate between various composers.”</p>
<p>Music appreciation or art history can be more difficult than some STEM classes, but that’s not a reason to avoid them.</p>
<p>Take a course about wines and enjoy yourself.</p>
<p>Oh, I agree, mini. I would take that class all over again if given the chance. Only I might have audited so that I could have learned it all without it ruining my GPA. And it’s true, I was a science major. ;)</p>
<p>If you can take a class on the psychology of happiness, you should.</p>
<p>For decades all anyone studied was pathology, and now they have some really great, evidenced-based classes on what produces happiness over the course of a lifetime. I can’t think of anything better than a class that talks about how to be happy, what to do to increase happiness.</p>
<p>JMO</p>
<p>ETA: The most famous of these is the Harvard Seminar, but I think most schools have them now.</p>
<p>Reading through all the recommendations for a college - level stats class, how much of that material do you think would be covered in AP Stats? I know that, theoretically, APs are college-level, but…
I don’t mean to divert from the main discussion, so sorry! just curious</p>