Process Control: an entire semester on Laplace transforms, which was completely useless when I got a job and actually had to tune a PID controller.
Computer classes: learned to program in Basic and FORTRAN (it was the 80s). whee! That’s been useful, for sure.
Intro to Electrical Engineering: should have been a useful class, but the instructor spent entire classes making us hold hands in a circle while giving us motivational pep-talks about believing in ourselves. (did not go over very well with an entire class of engineers.)
But the winner was the one history class I had to take to complete my high-levels Humanities course req for my Chemical Engineering degree: “History of Women in England, from Elizabeth to Victoria.” It was me (male, engineer) and a dozen very nice but completely non-analytical lesbians in a class taught by an ultra-feminist man-hating professor. After the first month I think the prof decided I must be secretly gay, and started specifically excluding me from the Cause Of All Society’s Evils.
… Although I did get to reference “Mary Poppins” as a cite in my paper on women’s suffrage in England, so there’s that. I think the only thing I got out of that class was being able to explain to the (British) guy in the next office the difference between “queen consort” and “queen regnant” after the royal wedding.
Were the holes on your jeans, at lab bench height? You probably used bleach when you washed them, which reacted with what you’d rubbed off the bench.
That was how we identified chemistry students at school.
But at least it didn’t cause the dry heaves the cafeteria lutkefisk did.
Intro to anything. At Pitt the intro courses were so basic and general that if you learned anything during one, that was not the major for you. I totally skipped the classes for intro psych and ended up with a A+ for the class and a 4.0 for the department.
Some business course I had to take to fulfill my minor requirements. It was the most useless, easiest class I’ve ever taken. The professor lectured from notes and gave everyone a copy of those notes. I’m a diligent student, so I took notes on those notes, but you certainly didn’t need to. There were diagrams of what an “open door policy” meant with respect to managers. There were diagrams about the various communication modes and what “noise” was. Diagrams about the various stages of a team - the storming norming b/s.
Utterly useless. I remember thinking “isn’t this all common sense?” Wow. I did get to meet one of the special teams players on our football team, so there is that. He was in my team for a paper we had to write analyzing some business idea. Cute kid, but dumb as a box of rocks. He thought I was the smartest thing he’d ever seen, maybe because I could string two sentences together on a computer. Oof.
Algebra, geometry, statistics, physics, chemistry, biology, speech, english lit & composition, philosophy, history, spanish, latin, religion, entrepreneurial finance and all the geology classes I’ve used to varying degrees over the years. But never calculus and cal II was a real bitch.
Worst difference between promise and execution: a class I took on the history of the city, which on the sylabus sounded really, really interesting … however, the class was taught by an elderly prof whose one bright shining moment in life (apparently) was his platonic relationship with the writer of a certain very dry text on the history of the city, now alas long dead … the class was basically a shrine to this author’s memory. It coinsisted of memorizing minute details from this text (which was impenetrably dull) and regurgitating them, verbatum, on exams … no questioning of this holy text, or reference to anything outside of it on the topic of cities, was welcome, permitted, or rewarded with marks.
Given that we were expected to read the text (repeatedly) and essentially memorize it without questioning there was really nothing much to discuss in class … so classes took the form of long, rambling anecdotes of the prof’s relationship with the authour of the text. I can’t reproduce the flavour of them here, but it was obvious to everyone but the prof that the two shared a sad sort of one-sided love, in which the prof loved the authour, who in turn loved himself; the author died comparatively young, having written this one text, and the prof went on loving him with a deathless sort of passion.
All of which was no doubt sad and romantic, but it was damn boring to hear over and over again and had nothing to do with the history of cities. I tolerated this until the day before the deadline to drop the class, but then panicked and dropped it.
My brother had a religion requirement he had to fulfill. Text was the Bible. Open book test, but no marking the book allowed. He used post-it notes to mark specific areas. He aced the course, but felt funny cheating with the bible.
I change colleges a couple of times before I earned my BS and so had to go back and cover some classes that were not required at the school where I started.
I ended up taking History 101 as a senior and just sort of walked through the class, showed up every day, took the tests, wrote the paper.
Never studied, knew more about some of the material than the Prof did, way more than he wanted to cover.
I remember walking into the class one day and the other students were in a swivit because we had a test that day, I think it may have even been the midterm. I pissed them off by saying “Oh, we have a test today?”
I 4-pointed it which pissed them off even more.
That was a semester of tedium.
Semiotics. I never missed a class all semester, did all the reading, wrote A+ papers and a final that was so compelling the professor wanted me to switch advisors (to him). And I still have absolutely no freakin’ idea what semiotics is.
It was some sort of philosophy class but all I remember is logic. No practical application to anything that I can recall. I do remember telling the prof what a waste of time I thought the whole thing was on the evaluation. Who knows? Maybe 35 years later I might find it interesting.
CIS 541. Numerical methods. Taught by an emeritus professor. You are supposed to learn a lot of really intricate things about binary representation of decimals and how to mitigate the issues. We learned nothing. Not a damn thing.
He talked. A lot. About how people screw up because they don’t understand numerical methods. About famous engineering disasters that resulted from people not understanding numerical methods. He talked about the importance to the future of computing that Numerical methods represent.
He did not, even for one second, actually talk about numerical methods in a concrete sense.
Except for the last class before the exam. Where he ran through the final and gave us the answers. I have never, ever, ever been so pissed off about an A.
Wow. I don’t even consider those types* of PE to be classes, or I’d have mentioned them. Not only did I have Intro to Jogging, which only meant showing up and signing on a sheet of paper how long you jogged, but I also had a weight lifting class that I wound up being unable to attend for complicated reasons. I assumed the class would be dropped, as I wasn’t going to cheat.
And I still got an A.
*I did have a good P.E. class at the university where we actually learned the stuff you mentioned. Plus, it doubled as a health class, and got you two credits instead of one.
Cinema Studies 101. We got to see some good movies, but hell, I don’t think I learned a thing except that the Professor did a great Jimmy Steward imitation.
I’ve never considered any class I’d taken at uni useless, but there were a couple where my interest was nil:
Algebra II. I took this for a transfer requirement – I originally hadn’t been planning to stay at the uni where I was past sophomore year, and most of the schools I’d wanted to apply to had a math prerequisite. I’d flunked Algebra I in high school, so I took this class as redemption. Not my brightest idea (I think I got a C- for it, which meant the credit wouldn’t have transferred anyway). I don’t remember a single thing from it.
Intro Philosophy. It was a distribution requirement for my major. I had no issues with the theories nor the heavy reading requirement, but sitting in class with a group of die-hard amateur philosophers was a bit much. I’d walk out of there with brain melt.
Modern Poetry. It was a seminar required for my major. The prof was more interested in putting the pieces we were analyzing to music with his guitar. My entire class complained to the dean. The prof was fired. We then got a bona fide competent prof.
I’m of the opinion that most of college was a waste of time. I think that more classes in my major would have served me better than English, Calculus, Geology, Astronomy or any number of the other “core” classes. I think that Art History really took the cake in the useless classes category, though.
I suppose that these classes were interesting enough, but I could have graduated a year or two earlier if I hadn’t had to take them, and I certainly haven’t had any use for anything I learned in them.
My boyfriend would agree with you, mostly, here. He said his most useless class was one he had to take for his communications major, simply because the material was covered in the actual film classes, making this particular seminar kind of pointless.
Other than that, the one he still complains about (he graduated over 15 years ago), is Art History. He had to take it twice because his 4-year school didn’t accept the transfer from his 2-year school. He was pissed that he had to take it once so you can probably imagine his reaction when he found out he’d have to take it again. He learned the exact same stuff in both classes so you have to wonder why the 4-year school didn’t accept the transfer. He does still remember a lot of what he learned but it’s completely useless for him, other than occasionally surprising people that the nerdy techy engineer actually knows something about art.
New professor came in and we were her first class. At the beginning of the class, she’s looking at a terminal like “what is this?” Found out our new professor knew NOTHING about UNIX - NOTHING! Not how to log on. Not how to create/remove directories. Not even how to use vi (which is what we had to use to even enter our source for the class).
Luckily, I had already taken UNIX & C, so the first 3 weeks of class, I’m teaching the entire class (with my PROFESSOR taking notes from me).
Needless to say, we didn’t learn a ton that semester about COBOL, but just enough to get into COBOL II with another professor.
I mulled over the question, but I honestly could not think of a single that was really useless. You were required to take 6 English courses (2 points each), three in comp (which really was helpful later on when I had to write stuff), two in literature and, while I cannot say I enjoyed them, I still have the anthology and learned and a lot. The last was History of the English language which led to a long time interest in etymology.
I had a year of Anthropology that really fascinated me and is one of the texts I still have and look at from time to time. I took two years of physics and one of chemistry and still have a keen interest in science. I took lots of math courses and, while I cannot say I enjoyed calculus, it was necessary and I enjoyed the rest of them. I disliked German (I am terrible at languages), but it has been useful. I also took a couple PolySci courses and a novels course, all quite interesting.
On the other hand, I had nothing like bowling, took no philosophy, no sociology, no economics and none of those other BS courses. I truly think I did well by college.
A friend of mine took bowling for his PE requirement. He ended up becoming so good at it that he started winning money in tournaments. If it had not been for the requirement, he would never have taken up the game.
I took bowling too as my alternate PE requirement, but I had it with my ex-girlfriend (we had broken up the previous semester), so it was a bit awkward…