The Smiley Smile Message Board

For those of you who are in college or who went to college, what is the most useless course you ever took? I was a human rights minor who didn't plan on going into anything human rights related post-college, so a lot of those courses were useless. By far the most useless class I ever took was White Racism, a class purely devoted to historical and contemporary racism against all types of non-white groups. Interesting? Yes. Useful? Absolutely not.

What do you mean by "useful"?

Useless in the sense I am using it means lacking any practical application to it. You can take your major into account or not. A course can just be plain useless for everyone, or it can be useless for someone of your major.

For example, my sister once took a course on Wood Carving as a communications major in college. That would be an example of a useless course for her.

You never know when some teaching from a random course could help you later in life - so it may not be that useless!

I took some seemingly useful courses only to find out that the professors were not really qualified to teach them. Thus, I got the credits, but learned virtually nothing, rendering them basically useless.

Edit for grammer - apparently my education wasn't that great ;)

Ha, well, I could understand that with the Wood Carving.

I am a bit suspicious though of the "practical application" argument normally. I feel that secondary education should be more about contributing to your overall knowledge rather than readying you for a particular job or task.

Sounds like a real sh#tty course.

I haven't found many useful applications for my degree in music composition.  >:(

I came close to finishing my degree in Music Performance: Piano but lacked a few hours before I split upstate NY in 1992.

Most useless course I took: Music Appreciation. Somehow I was able to get away with taking it and using it as extra hours in Music. It was fun to be knee deep in Theory in the morning and later come back to play the recorder or watch the movie Jesus Christ Superstar. A very easy A (along with my Survey Of American Pop Music class). Most useless to me: Beginner's Golf. I still suck at the game (due to lack of interest) unless I'm on the WII of course.

there was a class at my college that I always wanted to take called "Begin Swimming" which analyzed the psychological factors that would present someone from swimming, and on the last day of class you have to go in the pool. It's a prerequisite for any of the other swimming classes.

I skipped college after graduating high school. Dumbest mistake I ever made. Over the years I've been tempted to take some kind of music or creative writing class.