supercheesegirl

so i can take classes in harvard's extension school for $40 a class and get graduate credit for it. the graduate credit part might come in handy if i want to, say, get a second masters in museum studies, or a certificate in publishing. i want to get more information on both those programs, but i started thinking that this summer maybe i could take a class just to take a class, and pick something fun and/or interesting to get me going on wanting to take classes again. the only problems with taking a summer class are that first of all, i'll be out of town on vacation with my parents for over a week right at the beginning of the summer term and so would miss 2-3 classes (i'd miss 2 sessions of a MW class and 3 of a TTh), and also, most of the summer classes are scheduled in intensive blocks in the daytime, which i couldn't do because of work. the evening classes all meet twice a week for 2.5 hours/class, so i would also have to consider whether i want to give two nights a week to a class that runs all summer long (June 28-August 20).

that said, here's some ideas on fun classes i could take (all of which meet at least the evening class criteria):

- Intro to Irish Myth and Folklore
- Advanced Nonfiction (although i'm leaning away from taking a writing course right now)
- Travel Writing (see above, but this would still be interesting)
- Principles of Editing (not sure if the publishing class i took in greensboro would count as the same thing, in terms of working toward a certificate in publishing as a possibility)
- Witchcraft (offered through the folklore department, and seems like an interesting historical kind of class)
- Intro to Historical Linguistics (because it would be so cool. i love this kind of thing, language families and stuff)

these classes can be taken for undergraduate, graduate, and no credit, so i'm not sure what that means in terms of the workload. at uncg i had a few grad classes that undergrads were also in, and it meant that a masters student had to write the final paper several pages longer than an undergrad did, and a phd candidate had to write several more pages than that. hmm. i'm a fast and good reader, so i don't mind a lot of reading for a class (that's kind of the whole point for me, so i'll have a reason to read stuff i otherwise wouldn't read), but a heavy load of writing would be a lot of work. especially for me, because i nitpick obsessively over essays, i can't help it. i think the folklore classes would probably have the least amount of writing associated with them, but linguistics would probably be the most interesting for me. not that irish folklore wouldn't be endlessly interesting, but i do have some knowledge of that already just from reading Yeats for a semester, while i feel like linguistics is this whole huge fascinating field of knowledge that i just know tantalizing tidbits about.

i also noticed that harvard has really neat summer intensive programs in foreign languages, like Latin, Sanskrit, Greek, and Hindi, as well as a class in German that is intended to move one toward reading proficiency for research purposes. nothing i can make use of for this summer, but knowledge to file away for future reference in case i ever make good on my threats to apply to phd programs. it would be so cool to be able to read greek--that's something i realized halfway through college that i should have started when i was a freshman. it would also be cool to get my spanish back up to speed, but that's something i'm not going to worry about for a while.

so what do YOU think?

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