College Regrets, Much Too Late

I was listening to music on shuffle the other day and the song John Barleycorn Must Die, by Traffic, came on. I first heard it when I was a freshman in college, and I somehow learned that the mythical details of Barleycorn's treatment were an echo of the Osiris story in the Egyptian pantheon.

The next year, I transferred from the small liberal arts college I attended my first year to a larger public university. I chose Egyptology as one of my courses, I assume largely because of that Osiris interest and the way it fit into my overall interest in mythology. The professor was a good teacher, as well as an Egyptologist who went on digs and did primary research. I took two other classes with him.

Which is all well and good, but looking back on it, I regret that I spent so much of my history degree (and my undergraduate education overall) on specific topics and none of it on more general overviews.

In history, I specifically ducked the required course on historiography in favor of a graduate seminar (Women in Ancient Greece and Rome). Which again, fine, sort of. But I wish now that I had been required to take historiography!

I only took one intro class to a discipline — linguistics. And it was great! I wish I had taken intro to sociology, for sure. World civilization. And philosophy. I didn't know what epistemology was until I was out of college.

My university had barely any distribution requirements (it was the late 1970s), and I took advantage of that to do what I wanted. The advisors — I barely remember that there were advisors — just signed off on your paperwork.

I think I've learned a lot of what I could have learned in these types of classes since then, as a self-taught learner, but it would have been more compact and influenced the direction of my life if I had done it earlier. 

And it was mostly because of a song.