Satire, Sarcasm and Sass: Waste of time – Integrated seminars are useless to students and professors

During college, most students have to sit through some pointless classes unrelated to their majors. It is just a part of the college experience to fill general education credits that are outside of their chosen field of study.

However, at the University of Idaho, students have a large variety of classes to choose from when it comes to figuring out which American experience class to take or which cultural studies course they are most interested in.

Claire Whitley

There is one thing that no student can escape, and the mere mention of the course brings ripples of groans that reverberate through UI undergraduates everywhere. The nefarious courses are called integrated seminars, or ISEMs. No one, not even professors, like or even care about ISEMs.

If requiring freshmen to complete the three-credit ISEM 101 course isn”t bad enough, ISEM 301 courses are even more pointless. Forcing juniors and seniors to take a one-credit course on a topic that is usually irrelevant to their chosen degree breeds resentment among the students in question.

First of all, a one-credit class isn”t worth being bored to tears by an unpassionate professor who lectures about a topic that won”t pertain to anything in my field or my life after college. Secondly, it”s unrealistic that some courses are pass or fail based on one assignment in an eight-week course. No upperclassman wants to sit in a classroom for weeks in order to complete one assignment that can be done in a few days. It makes us feel like children.

These classes are a joke. People sleep in the back of the room, the professor drones about a pointless topic from a lackluster PowerPoint and our graduation somehow banks on us pretending to listen. Students have no other option but to stare blankly at the wall, carpet or ceiling, attempting to count the number of dots on the white tile.

I don”t understand what students are supposed to learn during their ISEM 301 course. Many students have no choice but to take ISEM 301 classes on subjects that have no use to them or their major, so what are they supposed to get out of this mandatory experience?

I already know how to make a PowerPoint, I have better presentation skills than my monotone professor at the front of the room and I could write a whole list of things that would be more worth my time than sitting in that classroom for two hours each week.

In short, whether or not I take the class shouldn”t keep me from graduating when I have already invested so much time, effort and money into my education.

By this point in my life as a junior in college, if I haven”t learned how to create an effective PowerPoint or how to communicate effectively with groups of people, an eight-week ISEM 301 course won”t help. It would be like majoring in journalism. Pointless.

Claire Whitley  can be reached at  [email protected]  or on Twitter @Cewhitley24