[S1E15] A Few Good Men
Lee Coffin:I love words. I read them, write them, speak them, play with them. I love a good pun. I'm intrigued by the origin of a word, the way words arrange themselves into ideas, sentences, stories, songs, slogans, podcasts. I keep a note on my phone that keeps track of new words I discover. The note is called Wordplay, and "quinquennial" is its most recent edition. If you're curious, it means every five years, kind of like a school reunion. So I'm a vocabulary collector, a wordsmith, a word nerd. I often think I should have studied linguistics, and I might have if that had been a major at my college, but I'm not sure it was even a class I could have taken.
[S1E15] A Few Good Men
Barbara Will:The humanities are basically the study of culture, so the study of art, literature, music, philosophy, religion, media, film, foreign languages, history, all of the good topics that ask questions about our culture, about our world, about our past, and about our future. It's about people in their cultures, who are producing artifacts, so it's also people who made pots in Ancient Rome, or a present-day filmmaker in China. It's people who are making things that they've left to future generations to think about, to understand, to analyze, and to appreciate.
Lee Coffin:What I love about the three of your stories is that you followed your intellectual curiosity. You know, your love of books, and reading, and learning, and asking questions kind of guided you into parts of the curriculum that you might not have known a lot about. I think if you jump ahead of the admissions story into first-year advising, you know, when I've done that over the years, I often say to students, "Be open to exploring. Don't just lock yourself into some narrow understanding of, 'Well, I'm good at this, so I'm going to study that,' because you don't know." I mean, like my linguistics example in the intro. You might not have ever heard of the discipline, because that wasn't a high school word, but the content of that is exactly what you'd like to study.
Lee Coffin:I come right back to my own kitchen as a teenager, where my dad was saying like, "You know, you got to get a good job. You're going to college, and this is going to lead you to something," and it of course did, so for those of you listening, and by those of you, I'm talking to high school seniors, and juniors, and maybe sophomores, who are looking forward and getting that question posed to you, like, "So what will you major in? What do you want to study?" 041b061a72