Exploring the Distributives
Dartmouth has groups of requirements for graduation in addition to the requirements for your declared major. Before starting my studies, I was not so enthusiastic about this policy, as I thought it would restrict the kind of classes I wanted to choose. However, now that I am in my junior year, I realize that these distributive requirements enriched my studies instead of restricting them. Plus, I noticed that I naturally fulfilled them without even trying to!
So, what are distributive requirements?
Dartmouth requires every student to take classes in different areas of study, such as in social sciences, natural sciences, technology, traditions of thought, literature, arts, and laboratory. I ended up fulfilling a good chunk of these requirements through my psychology major. A lot of the psychology classes naturally fulfill the social sciences, such as Social Psychology and Abnormal Psychology. As I am also interested in neuroscience, I took classes such as Introduction to Neuroscience and Neuroscience of Mental Illness, which ended up filling two of my natural sciences distributives. As part of the psychology major, we are also required to take a statistics course, which fulfills the quantitative & deductive science distributive, and a laboratory course that fulfills, naturally, the laboratory requirement.
Other distributives I ended up fulfilling because of my potential interest in English literature, while my introductory creative writing course in fiction helped me complete my art distributive. In addition to the distributives, there are also world culture requirements, which means all Dartmouth students need to take courses in Western cultures, non-Western cultures, and culture and identity. All distributive requirements can also fulfill world culture requirements. One of my favorite classes I have ever taken at Dartmouth, Staging Rebellion, a theater course about Latin American guerilla theater, fulfilled my non-western culture requirement. Similarly, the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies course I took my freshman fall, called WGSS 10: Sex, Gender, and Society, was the perfect course for the culture and identity requirement.
In short, my experience with the distributive and world culture requirements proved me wrong. They were a natural part of my academic experience at Dartmouth rather than hindering it. I have yet to take classes in technology and traditions of thought, so stay tuned!