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Lighter workload for North Campus students provides flexibility to explore, critically think about real-world issues

By Salim Zymet

March 3, 2011 1:02 a.m.

Friendly debate from students of North and South campuses usually boils down to an issue that has plagued thinkers for centuries: freedom.

For me, freedom conjures up images of John Locke, the Patriot Act and the current uprisings in the Middle East.

That’s why I love North Campus, because I love humanity, our potential, our history, our various peoples and our philosophies.

Gandhi and Nelson Mandela would have been right at home in North Campus since they both practiced law. Martin Luther King Jr. and his sociology degree would also fit right in.

Now I don’t mean to insinuate that folks in South Campus don’t care about what’s happening in the world, or anything important, just that they care a lot less.

I apologize for the thinly veiled insult. The amount of studying South Campus students have to do does seem to keep them too occupied to read up on current affairs.

Which is, for all intents and purposes, why North Campus is better than South Campus; we just have way less work to do.

North Campus offers the freedom, and flexible schedules, that we always wished for in high school.

While there are some lower division series requirements for North Campus, once you hit upper division courses, there is generally complete freedom within a major on what courses you want to take.

You just have to take a certain amount. This allowed me to take courses on topics as varied as political theory, American politics, Israel, international relations and war and peace.

Even better than the flexibility offered is loads of free time. All of this extra time can be well-spent by taking in the grand establishments that are Royce Hall and Powell Library. The beautiful architecture embodied by these two magnificent works of art is truly a thing to behold.

Meanwhile, south of Bruin Walk, the most beautiful thing you’ll see is the Grilled Cheese Truck. Indeed, South Campus also has no reliable place to eat, while we have the North Campus Student Center and Lu Valle Commons. At least according to these foolproof metrics, North Campus is better.

Despite our relative lack of work, we North Campusers still learn something, just not in such an old-fashioned, memorization-based manner. North Campus classes are often based on papers, which employ critical thinking much more than a timed test can.

While South Campus students are forced to memorize the periodic table of elements, hundreds of formulas and every inch of the human body, North Campus students can choose to learn about the lead-up to World War II, The Beatles and how to run a government.

While we’re sipping lattes and learning about things that matter to the world, South Campus students are racking their brains trying to figure out ways to cram more unnecessary information into them.

I don’t think I’m alone in how I came to draw this distinction.

When I’d ask teachers back in middle and high schools why I was learning a specific formula for a math or chemistry problem, I’d often get a blank stare followed by a “Because it’s in the book,” or “Because I said so.” So I began to think that math and science truly had no connection to the real world.

Clearly that isn’t the case at a campus at UCLA, where many students participate in lab research that can immediately be applied to the real world.

But at the end of the day, I still believe that humanities can more readily be applied to solving problems in the real world. Achieving world peace and ending poverty are the two biggest goals of any Miss America entrant, and they are also the two things North Campus is most adept at addressing.

While we use our minds to analyze situations, literature, history and so on, South Campus students use their minds to compute. You either memorize all the bones in a human body or the factors of a mathematical formula. Or you fail to do so.

In many ways, the North Campus vs. South Campus debate goes back to the debates in grade school between those who preferred English and those who preferred math and science ““ creativity versus predictability and rigidity.

And these debates may be just as inconsequential, but who’s to say a lighthearted argument amongst peers is such a bad thing?

Think North Campus students should get real? Comment below.

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Salim Zymet
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