Photo Credit: Sara Bell
I am currently enrolled in a possibly-unprecedented combination of classes: the English Major Senior Essay, which is the department’s name for a senior thesis, and the second semester of Literature Humanities, a class typically taken by first-years. “How?” would be a very reasonable question; “why?” even moreso. I transferred to Columbia College from the School of Engineering and Applied Science, where first-years are not compelled to take Lit Hum specifically, and a fortuitous combination of studying abroad and strange timing has lined these two classes up in my transcript.
This combination—the butt of many jokes from my friends—was initially an upsetting prospect last September, when I realized that the semesters ahead of me were dwindling, and that this set of classes was probably going to be on the docket for my final term. One of the oft-cited benefits of the Core Curriculum is its propensity for uniting students around diverse experiences of shared texts; it forms, in some ways, the strongest basis for unity among Columbia undergraduates. Little could be further from the typical Core path than taking Lit Hum in senior year; mention this situation to a Columbia student, I have learned, and they will almost surely laugh before asking if you’re serious. To not have taken Lit Hum in my first year had been somewhat socially isolating, and I worried that to be taking it my senior year would feel both lonely and ridiculous.
Furthermore, Lit Hum is the most English-y of the Core Classes. It is designed to be an accessible literature class for a variety of students who are inclined to read and write and analyze in various, not-so-specialized ways; my position is akin to a fourth-year physics major taking Frontiers of Science. I was worried I wouldn’t get much out of it as a senior, and most people whom I tell about it have the same suspicion. The timeline just wasn’t right.
The Current Situation, however, has done little if not disrupt the timeline. I mean this both in the sense of life and death and the sense of triviality in which it has manifested in my own life: thanks to these unprecedented times, I find myself having conversations with my parents I didn’t anticipate having for another year, and making moves in my career I had expected to make 8 months ago. Not only has this weird wrinkle in my transcript become less weird and more absurdly great (my Lit Hum teacher has described it as “hilarious”) but it’s actually made my experience in both the Senior Essay and Lit Hum strangely profound.
Each Tuesday and Thursday I log on to Zoom to talk to a group of mostly first-years who are attending school with me from all over the country. Most of them have never been on Columbia’s campus as a student, and I’d wager that at least a few have never been, period. But they have that same wide-eyed energy, that same kind of emotional reaction to the text. They notice things in the text that probably never would have come up if we’d been reading it in a class full of senior English majors. The most surprising thing, though, is how much Lit Hum actually has to do with my thesis endeavors. My adviser and I were recently talking about the impetus for literary research: she mentioned that I ought to have “confidence in my own curiosity,” a sense of strength in the questions that the text raises for my own individual critical eye. When I close my laptop and walk away from a really good session of Lit Hum, it seems to me that my classmates have embodied that very same thing.