It’s the beginning of the semester, and maybe some of you got stuck with all full-year classes – I know it’s happened to me, and sometimes they just seem to drag on and on and on. But for the lucky ones, the new year might have brought one of the changes a student loves to see – a new class schedule. This brings a rush of emotions – excitement (insert joke about me being a dork here,) nervousness, and sometimes, anxiety.

Being a student at the University of Toronto means that we don’t only have to take courses related to our majors, but we also must take breadth courses we would never dream of taking otherwise. So far, I’ve taken courses in statistics, global systems and change and, currently, I’m taking a physics course. To be fair, however, all these courses were designed for people like me – people in the humanities and social sciences who have minimal inclination for the hard sciences and maths.

But why make us struggle at all? Why make us sit through entire semesters of classes that we have very little interest in? It’s easy to complain and see the cons of breadth requirements, but I’d also argue that there is a silver lining to the UofT breadth course system. Though it may not be apparent when you’ve already buried your head in a textbook trying to explain the forces of nature, here I’ll do my best to explain why I think the breadth requirement system works.

First, the cons of the breadth system:

• Finding topics that you’re at least a little interested in can be difficult.
• When you’re invested in writing long essays and reading 100 pages a week for each of your other classes, trying to also learn new styles of studying and new topics can add a lot of hours on to your study time.
• Planning your schedule to find courses that both fit your timetable and don’t take away from your other requisite classes is almost a modern art nowadays.

Here’s why the breadth course requirement system is necessary and good for us:

• It exposes us to worldviews and ideas that simply can’t be taught in the soft sciences.
• Being in such a wide array of classes can help us meet new people who are in all sorts of majors, rather than being with the same set of students in all our classes.
• Ultimately, having classes all over the spectrum of education forces students to be well-rounded with an appreciation for other methods of learning. It can spur new interests – who knew I had a knack for learning why things work beyond watching “How it’s Made” on Discovery Channel?

Understandably, many students hate trying to fit in courses that don’t match our majors in to our timetables. I know when I first got to university, I despised the idea of having to take science classes despite telling myself I would be done with them once I graduated high school. Like many others, I’m still having a hard time fitting them in to my schedule before I graduate next year.

However, now that I’ve had a few breadth classes done with, I can see the value in the breadth course system – and I’ve learned to appreciate the change that these courses bring to my schedule.