General Education Review

I think I am one of the few people who didn't take the Myth-Folklore and Indian Epics classes for gen  ed credit (One counted for my religion minor and the other for my anthropology).

In general, I've had an okay, but very limited experience with OUs gen ed programs. I was concurrently enrolled in high school my senior year so I came in with quite a few general ed credits already earned. However, I have had a couple of great gen ed classes, and a couple not so much. Most of my gen ed classes have been good experiences, and I think that gen eds are important, especially early on in college, to help students try out new things. I changed my major three times before finally deciding on professional writing, which I hadn't known existed until my adviser had me look into the program and recommended taking the intro classes to get into Gaylord College of Journalism. I think that first year especially gen ed classes helped me see what I did, and equally important, did not want to study for the next three years.

I think my favorite gen ed class was an Intro to Astronomy class that I took freshman year. Science and math have never been my favorite subjects, but I've always been interested in astronomy, so I decided to take that class for my lab based physical science. To this day, that is one of my favorite classes. We would have regular lectures that were always interesting but then one night a week we would go to the observatory and do hands on work with the telescopes and comparing different planets and stars that we saw. It was a difficult class, but it was extremely interesting and rewarding.

I have definitely had some bad experiences with gen ed classes too, but I won't go into specific classes. The biggest problem always seemed to be when the professors didn't put much effort into the gen ed classes. Another gen ed class I had freshman, I was really excited about at first because I thought it would be interesting. But unlike the astronomy class, the professor always showed up late, never had lectures prepared, and outright told us that it didn't matter because we were all just there for gen ed credits so she wasn't going to spend time on it. That was probably my worst gen ed experience at OU.

Timeless Books by Lin Kristensen. Wikimedia