The 14 Weirdest College Courses
College: the faraway land of freedom from parental supervision, all-night Netflix, soft-serve for dinner, and electives that sound ridiculous and amazing and absolutely useless. Although some of the following are, unfortunately, no longer taught, they’ll give you a taste for the upside-down, definitely-not-in-Kansas-anymore world of college. Hold on to Toto, Dorothy!
Elvish, the language of The Lord of the Rings
U of Wisconsin, Linguistics
Brush up on your Elvish so you can bring a layer of reality to your day dreams about meeting Legolas—with the the man who served as the primary linguistic consultant for the LOTR movies.
Arguing with Judge Judy: Popular ‘Logic’ on TV Judge Shows
UC Berkeley, Freshman Seminar
A seminar emphatically not about law or legal reasoning, but rather the weird twists of logic that regularly appear on popular “Judge” shows.
The Hunger Games: Class, Politics, and Marketing
American University, American Studies
You get to read, discuss, and write papers about the best literary trilogy produced this century.
Tree Climbing
Cornell, Phys Ed
“[This] course will teach you how to get up into the canopy of any tree, to move around, even to climb from one tree to another without touching the ground.” In other words, this course will teach you to become an Ewok.
How to Win a Beauty Pageant: Race, Gender, Culture, and US National Identity
Oberlin College, Comparative American Studies
Ok, so the subtitle gives this one away: you won’t be learning make-up tips or spraying your hair into a hard and shiny shell. But you’ll get to study the history of the beauty pageant, which makes, at the very least, for good ice-breaking ice-cream social conversation.
Maple Syrup: The Real Thing
Alfred University, n/a (honors seminars)
This history of maple syrup production as well as a crash course in making the stuff yourself with field trips to restaurants and festivals.
To Hogwarts, Harry: An Intensive Study of Harry Potter Through the British Isles
Central Michigan University, English
Um, an intensive course on “the living history of Harry Potter” with a required field trip to the UK during spring break????? *faints*
Wasting Time on the Internet
University of Pennsylvania, English/Creative Writing
“Distraction, multi-tasking, and aimless drifting is mandatory” in this creative writing class that requires no extra books, just laptops and wifi and a willingness to look at Facebook, cat GIFs, and movie trailers for up to three hours at a time.
Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame
University of South Carolina-Columbia, Sociology
Check your super fandom at the door: “this is not a course in Lady Gaga but in sociology; and it is not a course about Lady Gaga as much about the culture of fame as exemplified by the career of Lady Gaga.” Still, for a course allegedly not about Lady Gaga, it sounds a lot like a course about Lady Gaga.
#SelfieClass
UCLA, Writing
Finally, a class that allows you to justify taking 50 selfies when you wake up with perfectly tousled hair…and then think, in a critical essay, about how those very selfies “produce or obscure a sense of your identity.”
Surviving the Coming Zombie Apocalypse: Disasters, Catastrophes, and Human Behavior
Michigan State University, Social Work
In this course on disaster management and human behavior during crisis, students are plunged into a simulation of, you guessed it, a zombie apocalypse. They must rely on various clues and details to decide how to proceed in the given scenario.
Politicizing Beyoncé: Black Feminism, US Politics, & Queen Bey
Rutgers, Women’s Studies
This class, which aims to “position Beyoncé as a progressive, feminist, and even queer figure,” means you can dance to “Single Ladies” and call it “studying.”
“Oh, Look, a Chicken”: Embracing Distraction as a Way of Knowing
Belmont University, Freshman Seminar
The course description speaks for itself: ’Oh, look! A Chicken!’….This course will pursue ways of knowing through embracing [little ants, carrying a morsel of food across the table] what it means to be a distracted [I could sure enjoy a peanut butter sandwich right now] learner as well as [OMG–I get to go to the beach this summer] developing an awareness [I need to trim my fingernails] of one’s senses.
Ice Cream Short Course
Penn State, n/a
A 7-day class on the “nuances of commercial ice cream manufacture” that, in its earliest incarnation, brought Ben and Jerry into the ice cream biz for which it deserves endless support and praise.
The truth, as you’ve probably realized by reading the subtitles for these courses, is that they’re mostly (looking at you, tree climbing…) pretty serious. College professors will call their course almost anything in order to entice students and draw attention to their field, especially in departments like English, which are losing out in the media wars against STEM subjects. So, go ahead, indulge your Katniss/Gaga/Beyoncé/LOTR/zombie/selfie/Internet/maple syrup obsession. Since you’re passionate about the subject, you’ll probably get an A.
