I’m an English major-turned Psych major-turned English major and, unfortunately I have to take a science. And not one of my beloved pseudosciences like Psychology or Sociology. An actual Hard Evil science. Naturally, I turn to the Dope for advice. Which one should I take?
My choices:
Astronomy: Something tells me this is going to be hard and have weird hours.
Biology: Memorizing bones and dissections, I imagine. Ick.
Chemistry: Probably full of pre-meds.
Geography: No idea.
Geology: Rocks. Lotsa rocks.
Physics: Hard. No way, dude.
Comments, thoughts, advice, swears?
My criteria: I want to do as little work as possible and get a decent grade. I do not want to further my intellectual development or make myself a better person or work hard or any of that. I’m not a math or science person and never will be.
If they offer a History Of Science course, and count it toward your science requirement, go with that. Your other major studies probably included enough of the basic material to let you ace this one.
Otherwise, I’d suggest Astronomy unless it’s heavy on the math and physics aspects.
Third choice: Geology. I know very little about it, so I’d want to take it for that reason. There’s a lot to know about rocks.
Additonal option (if offered); Meteorology. That way you could predict your own weather at least as well as The Weather Channel or your local weathergeek.
Astronomy IS heavy on math and physics. Don’t take it unless you’re REALLY good in algebra (at the very least: calculus is probably better) and physics. I know this from other people who THOUGHT they’d get an easy escape from their science requirements by taking astronomy. I was a biology/biotech major so the math/sci requirements I had to fulfill didn’t require me to take astronomy at all (though they did include calculus and physics, not to mention organic chemistry as well as general chemistry), so I probably COULD have taken astronomy had I wanted to. But I had my hands and brain full of other things, so I didn’t.
BTW, I just gotta mention to the OP here (other than the fact that I’m obviously biased towards biology, LOL): Just like you’re being required to take a science course you see having no use for, it works both ways. I was a science major forced to take a freakin’ SHITLOAD of social sciences and liberal arts courses which I had no use for. Grrrrr!!! Not only did i hate 'em and consider them a waste of my time and money (I was working my way through college), but hell, I wanted to be a MICROBIOLOGIST!! and the REASON I was in school was to study SCIENCE, not that other crap. (I called all of my non-math, non-science courses “lobotomy courses”). So if all you have to take is one or two science courses, consider yourself lucky and quit your complaining.
Let me sidle back in and add that the requirement is a course/lab combo and what I listed is what I can take. I think there may be some “for non-majors” courses in there, but I’m not sure.
I have HEARD through the Great School Rumor Mill that Geography/Geology are good choices for Taking It In College And Never Use It For The Rest Of My Lifers. But I think Geography might entail drawing maps n’ stuff, which I’d suck at.
Yersinia, I’ll trade you. I love pointless social science classes and the reason I’m in school is I want to finish my degree and get out! But nooooo, I have to take some lame science courses when all I want to do is be a hippy writer.
Thanks all. I do have an advisor, but advisors and I are never on the same page. I ask, “So, which one is easiest?” and they chuckle benignly and say, “Oh, you shouldn’t worry about difficulty.” Yes, I do, cause I don’t want to be here longer than I have to be!
Yes, if you’re looking for easy way out for godsake don’t do chemistry, if it’s a half-decent course you’ll find that it is very hard (speaking from my own experince when I did a chemistry A-level, I spent about the same time studying for that as I did with my two and half others [physics, maths, mechanics] and it was still my worst grade).
Personally I’d say physics or astronomy, but then again they were my orginal major at university, so I probably would say that.
General biology courses at the introductory level tend to involve quite a bit of reading and memorization, but they aren’t that hard. They are good courses for coming up with mnemonics to remember things (which could be fun for you as an English major). IME, introductory biology classes in university don’t usually include dissections, since the classes usually are too large to make it cost-effective. Dissections are reserved for the people who actually CARE to learn biology. I don’t know how big your school is, though, so that might not hold true for you.
General chemistry is tough for most people. I hated it, and am terrible at it (although I love organic chemistry and now sort of wish I’d tried harder at the time…but you can’t change what you did in 1999 in 2003!) OTOH, if you have very little knowledge of atoms and the periodic table etc, a well-deigned and well taught course can be worthwhile.
Based on your comments, I’d say stay away from astronomy and physics, since the math can be pretty tough. The information in the astronomy class in particular might be very interesting, but I have the feeling that it’s more work and more in-depth than what you’re looking for.
I have a friend who is a geography major, and he says its fairly easy, even in the upper years. Lots of memorization, and although theres not much drawing of maps, he gets to colour a lot of them!
I don’t know anything about geology, though it might be sort of like geogrpahy in its level of difficulty.
I survived both biology and geology as a non-math non-science person. (I had to do a couple extra semesters of science because I hadn’t had enough in high school, and I wanted to get out of taking an extra math class.)
Geology was BORING, except for the stuff about earthquakes, but I’ve BEEN in an earthquake. The problem there was that I already knew everything in the book about quakes. Otherwise, lots of rocks, some of it was interesting, some of it was not.
Biology – mostly boring. Find a lab partner who likes cutting things up if you don’t; I had one who wanted to go to veterinary school so I let her do it.
Since a college degree has become a de facto certification that you are a Worthy and Honorable Person Who Should Be Hired for American employers (even if your degree is in Molecular Biology and you’re applying for Fry Cook II at Burger King), I’m going to say “Yes.” I’d be much happier not going to school, but it’s impossible to get a semi-decent job, or even move up in a crappy one, without a college degree. They make the hoops, I try to jump through em, bitching the whole way.
I didn’t think Geology would have a lot of people answering, it seems to be a pretty rare department. Might be interesting though.
I took physical anthropology as a science course. It was quite interesting and not too hard. All about the history of the first proto-humans and how we evolved and Neandrathols and stuffs.
In most colleges, freshman astronomy is a cakewalk. Limited math, more of an overview of the field and history. It’s quite common for people to take freshman astronomy for an easy way to get their science requirement.
But sometimes that’s not the case. I took a one-year freshman astronomy class that was full of arts majors. This particular class was taught by a great astronomer, and he expected people to learn something. There was even a limited amount of calculus. The arts majors dropped like flies, and by the end of the year the class was probably 1/3 the size it started at.
But I’d still vote for astronomy, because you’ll learn things that are worth knowing even for an arts major. You’ll learn about the universe and our place in it. The most interesting questions of our time are coming out of astronomy. It’ll give you a new appreciation of the space program, and a sense of scale.
I was just going to let my one post do it on this topic, but seeing the votes against it because of excessive math/physics made me want to add that my one-year course had minimal math.
Mine was much as you’ve described it, Sam Stone.
I was already interested in the subject by way of trying to learn the constellations and some basic facts about the visible stars and other phenomena like the clusters and galaxies and such.
Never really intended to get into astronomy in any heavy way. I have a low-power scope that’s helpful with the moon and planets and the extended objects, but due to my location I rarely use it.
The main thing you mentioned that the OP specified was a way of helping to distinguish real science from pseudo-science (if I read correctly). Just finding out how much is really known about the universe by way of earthbound tools and now satellites and probes helps one to see the frivolity in the astrological claims.
If math is the only scary thing about Astronomy at that school, a simple examination of the course objectives would help determine if the fear factor is justified.
I’ve just completed an Astronomy degree, and after having tutored for all of the intro-level astro courses for the past four years, I can say the following: if you have a good solid understanding of basic algebra, can convert units, and can effectively wield a calculator, you shouldn’t have any trouble. I think calling the ‘astronomy’ classes is a bit misleading, as ‘astrophysics’ is a better label, but most people didn’t have much trouble after they got beyond any math phobias and realized it wasn’t too bad.
I’ve taken tons of phyics classes (which I always found to fairly difficult), but I’ve never had biology, chemistry, or geology (which around here is known as ‘rocks for jocks’), but I did take a meteorology class, which was both really easy and interesting.
I’d go with Geology, although there may be lab requirements: spending afternoons in a room with a box full of rocks, testing for Moh’s hardness scale; or drawing contour maps based on elevation benchmarks. I don’t remember any math, though I took it only at the community college level. With a grandfather as a geologist, not much in the class came as a great surprise.
Once upon a time, I was in your position, being a social science major faced with clawing my way past science requirements. I don’t know how big a school you’re attending, so I don’t know exactly what they offer.
At my school they offered a couple of self-paced courses, statistics and physical anthropology, which by their self-paced nature were very easy to ace. Which I did, and I retained very little, as I suspect was common amongst those taking the courses.
That’s one potential option.
Later, when I realized I had been focused on degree requirements and was about to graduate from a good school with what I felt was a paltry knowledge of even things relevant to my major, I did an about face and dived into the “hard” sciences. Psychology was my major, and the department at the University of Texas was dominated at the time by what we called the humanists, whom I felt paid scant heed to the brain as an organ. While there were courses in physiology, psychopharmacology, etc., they had biology requirements; hence few psych majors ever took those courses.
Blah, blah, blah…
On to another alternative. While geology has been mentioned, there are different courses. At the school I later attended, both historical and physical geology were considered introductory courses. Without a doubt, historical geology was one of the most interesting and fun courses I ever took. The brain calorie requirements were minimal, and the course had dual objectives: 1) it took you from the beginning, as far as known, through the development of the Earth as it is today and 2) it took you from the beginning of Geology as a science, examining all the blind alleys and thoughts that occurred to people along the way, through how we arrived at the basic accepted tenets of the field today. [/geopitch]
Another vote for Geology here. A genuinely interesting class that is more mass memorization than science - at least at the intro level. And it’s kinda fun, too, picking up rocks in the parking lot and saying “Oh - plagioclase feldspar. And here’s some dolomite.” And then your friends will say “What the HELL are you doing?” and you’ll say “Never mind, dudes. It’s Science. You wouldn’t understand. Now, let’s get some beers.”
Interestingly, I’m in the hard sciences stream (engineering to be exact) and I wish we got to study some social sciences. I’d love to be able to take some meteorology or geology courses.
