Questions about Departments?

dangerousSanFran
Mon, 08 Aug 2005 12:38:40 +0000

I’ve had Evans and Mankoff, and I enjoyed both of them a LOT. Evans is a hard-ass but if you speak up in class it helps a lot. Mankoff can be scary but you should definitely visit during office hours and get help on your paper topics before you write them. I’ve found that if you are having trouble with a professor 99.9% of the time you should visit them during office hours. Most professors are a thousand times better one on one. Just remember that you aren’t going to hurt anyone’s feelings by dropping a class. With my experience as a student and a child of two professors, they would much rather you drop the course and take it when you have more time to dedicate to it than staying in the course and doing poorly. Professors KNOW that you are smart - otherwise you wouldn’t be at Kenyon. You don’t have to prove it to them by killing yourself with courses. Every freshman thinks that they can handle five classes - but most realistically can’t. I know that you want to prove how great you are, and you are incredibly excited about learning new things - but you have four years to do so. If you take a class like IPHS or an intensive intro course to a language you should only take FOUR classes. I tried to take five with an intensive intro course in Italian and i almost drowned.

These are just things that I wish someone had told me. Hope they help.