Of art, literature, sociology and psychology

Randomly recalling university days, specifically a few of the humanities / social science electives I took. I was always more interested in these electives than my core programme. Actually, I scored better for these too... The irony, haha.

I remember a sociology one, at a time when professors were trying to attract students with wacky titles like “Sex, death, and population [something I can’t remember] …” It was an elective on population demographics and social processes, I think. Things I remember the professor saying were like, how male crime rates might have appeared higher than females but it was possible that the reported female crime rate was lower because females were possibly better at concealing their deeds… And the professor’s personal stand on nurture vs nature when it came to criminals, and her caution to students to prepare a really strong argument for ‘nature’ if that was indeed their position.

I also did one on Asian dance, which was really a poor decision on my part but that which I do not regret. Not only was it held over a few weeks during the holidays, it turns out that I’d already fulfilled the minimum requirement for electives prior to taking this course. -_- But I enjoyed it, learning about the forms of Asian dances including Chinese, Balinese, and Javanese etc. Also, the lecturer was a director in one of the local Chinese dance institutes, who really would pass off as a regular Singaporean uncle in his 50/60’s – it was slightly amusing to see him sometimes demonstrating certain dance positions. I think he said he used to perform Chinese opera.

I will never forget the one on Aesthetics and Creative Techniques in Moving Images. This course made me fall in love with LOTR and I've been an avid fan ever since. Mainly focused on cinematic techniques in LOTR as well as old classics like Citizen Kane, it was quite a memorable course, including hilarious moments that C and I will always remember. How the lecturer had some problems playing a clip so we ended up hearing Bilbo go "Frodo, the door!" like a million times. How, in learning to create storyboards, the lecturer tried to teach us that the duration of 1 sec is equivalent to saying tak-tak out loud, as if it was a truly universal measurement. 

Just today, I recalled taking one elective on understanding psychology through Shakespearean literature (I think). Honestly, I had completely forgotten about this but a vague memory returned after coming across a similar title of another course elsewhere on the internet. And now, I regret not remembering anything from it! If I could dig out any old notes on this…

Those were fun times, having ‘tasters’ of social sciences and literature. Have I mentioned how I selected my choices for preferred streams in Secondary 2 – that I chose Triple Sciences above Literature because I thought I’d have a better career options with science than with literature? What was I thinking at 14?! (Art was also one of my preferred choices until the school scrapped the programme for my batch year because only 15 students had chosen it. What were we thinking?)