Minors and Majors

My time spent at UMBC has had its ups and downs, with fun classes and boring classes just like anyone else. There have been good professors and bad professors, but only two of them have convinced me to make major changes to my academic plan.
It was my freshman year and one of the first classes that I had in college. I had always enjoyed my history classes in high school, so naturally that was what my major was when I first got to UMBC. When I got to my first history class, though, I started having second thoughts. The professor was rarely prepared for class and showed up late several times. Also, he spoke in a low, monotone voice so that staying awake through the lectures was a challenge on top of learning the material covered. When there were lectures that were semi-coherent, the professor would often ask very drawn out, seemingly rhetorical questions that nobody knew the answer to because we hadn’t yet covered the material. After waiting for at least ten seconds for someone to answer, he’d yell at the class and ask us why we didn’t know anything about U.S. History. Luckily for me, and several other people in the class, most of our grades came from easy quizzes on Blackboard that followed what our book said instead of what little information we may have gotten from the professor. After such a negative experience with history, I changed my major to sociology after my first semester and haven’t looked back since.
My best educational experience, though, didn’t come from one of my sociology classes. Instead, it was a creative writing class that I added to my schedule at the last minute because I couldn’t get into a sociology class I wanted. In high school, I had gotten decent grades in English, but I didn’t consider myself to be an expert writer by any means. In my creative writing class, we spent most of our time revising and talking about the stories we had written instead of using our time to read lots of books and talk about them. The class itself had no more than twenty students in it, and the professor let the students do most of talking, only jumping in to the conversation every now and then to offer what we could improve on. Unlike the history professor, my professor for creative writing never talked down to us to show that she knew the material and we didn’t. Instead, she acted like just another student in the class, albeit a wise and well versed one on the most important aspects of successful writing. I finished the class with an A and soon after, started pursuing a minor in writing.

- Joel