People are a strange sort, don’t you think? When we were in school, we couldn’t wait to graduate and become working adults. And now that we are indeed earning our own wages, we think back on our university days with a sort of glazed-eye reminiscence. If the thought of heading back to school for the good old days hasn’t popped into your head yet, these five university courses will certainly make you want to!
1. Wasting Time On The Internet
Yes, you read right. The University of Pennsylvania will be offering a new creative writing workshop in Spring 2015 aptly called ‘Wasting Time On The Internet’. According to the university website, the only course materials required are a laptop and a wifi connection, as students are asked to “stare at the screen for three hours, only interacting through chatrooms, bots, social media and listservs.”
2. Bachelor of Science in Defence Of The Ancients (DOTA)
Pinoy undergraduates who are avid gamers will rejoice at this piece of news. According to Pinoytrending, a few universities in the Philippines will be offering degrees for online multi-player game, Defence Of The Ancients (DOTA) in 2015. The motivation behind offering this two-year degree to train professional DOTA players is raise the competition standard in international tournaments, referring to The International, an annual DOTA 2 tournament aired on ESPN.
3. Masters in The Beatles, Popular Music & Society
It is perhaps fitting that The Liverpool Hope University set up such a unique Masters degree course, in Liverpool which was home to The Beatles. Beatlemania lives on in this one-year Masters degree course, which examines how the Beatles came to be and the resulting impact their music had on the world.
4. Harry Potter And The Age Of Illusion
This module is certainly a mouthful to say in one breath but it will certainly appeal to hardcore fans of the Harry Potter series. There will be no invisibility cloaks and magic potions, but students at Durham University will get to “place the phenomenon that is Harry Potter in its social, cultural and educational context, and understand some of the reasons for its popularity.” Example of topics discussed include “Gryffindor and Slytherin: prejudice and intolerance in the classroom”, and “welcome to Hogwarts, the commodification of education”.
5. Viking Studies
The four-year Bachelor’s degree programme from University College London aims to “develop your knowledge and understanding of the Viking Age through the study of the medieval and modern Scandinavian languages, Old Norse literature and medieval history”. Fascinating stuff. According to the university website, students also spend their third year at a university in Denmark, Norway or Sweden. By the time they graduate, students are expected to have near-native competency of a Scandinavian language of their choice.
What other unusual courses would you like to see in our universities? We say, how about a module on the Game of Thrones, where we will get to master the intricacies of the Dothraki language?