Four years ago, had a mysterious fortuneteller, "The Farmer's Almanac" or a magic eight ball told me that before earning a college degree I would design my own class about hobbits and elves, create a television series from scratch and write a thesis about fedoras - all for course credit - I would have laughed in disbelief, scoffed at the improbability of it all.
But it's true.
Group Independent Study Projects may at first appear to be indulgences in nerddom or a way to sneak popular culture into academics. Before working on what was loosely referred to as a "'Lord of the Rings' class" in its early days, the only GISP I'd ever heard of was a socio-anthropological study of "The Simpsons."
But they quickly become serious academic pursuits. The GISP database on the Resource Center Web site lists projects such as "A Sociological, Psychological, and Aesthetic Analysis of Horror Films Since 1960," "The Art of Satire: Comedy Writing in Literature and Film" and "The Art of the Graphic Novel: A Study on the Form, Variation, and Production of the Modern Graphic Novel." The Lord of the Rings class my friends and I wanted to design ultimately became "J.R.R. Tolkien: Creating Cosmology and Making Myth." Contrary to popular belief, we never just sat around and argued over whether or not the films portrayed the books correctly. Correction - we hardly ever sat around and argued such things. But we also traced Tolkien back to Scandinavian myths and Old English texts and considered scholars such as Lévi-Strauss and Northrop Frye while doing so.
Another group of friends said, "Let's make a TV show." And, because the GISP called "Workshop in Episodic Storytelling for Television" gave us class time to write and film with the help of scholarly texts, we did. Our show, "Double Blind," aired on BTV that very semester.
This is not to say GISPs don't come with obstacles. No professor in the Modern Culture and Media department could sponsor us because they "didn't have enough production experience," and we had to search high and low to find our two sponsors from the departments of Visual Art and Theater, Speech, and Dance. But, as cheesy as it sounds, GISPs really do make a student's dreams a reality.
Thanks to the recently established honors thesis program in expository writing at the English Department, the first half of which is an independent study, I could choose to write about whatever I wanted, in whichever way I wanted.
"What's your thesis about?"
"Hats," I could reply proudly.
Friends at other universities are always shocked, amazed and, most importantly, jealous when I tell them about the amount of freedom I've had to devise my own courses and create my own projects, for such privilege was foreign to them. But with this freedom comes great responsibility - researching and writing a course syllabus is a daunting task, and learning to look after yourself because there's no TA or professor constantly looking over your shoulder takes discipline and hard work. You come away from the experience not only smarter but more mature.
I know graduating senior after graduating senior before me surely has written this topic to death, but there are some lessons that just cannot be repeated enough. Saving and earning pennies may be cliché, but never ceases to be true; it never erodes with each passing articulation. So I'll just say it again. The open curriculum - it works.
