What You Can Do

What You Can Do

What You Can Do

The Classics Minor is an interdisciplinary minor with participation from departments in the College of Letters, Arts, & Sciences. A total of 26 credits are minimally necessary for graduating with a minor in Classics. Eight of the 26 credits must be either in Latin or in Greek; the remainder may be chosen from the list of approved courses for the minor, at least nine of which must be upper division.

Some Classics Majors of Note
  • Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Sigmund Freud
  • William Cohen
  • Toni Morrison
  • Jane Addams
  • Willa Cather
  • J.K. Rowling
  • Karl Marx
  • Ted Turner
  • James Baker
What People Say About Classics

Its correlation with high GRE scores (according to Educational Testing Service [http://ftp.ets.org/pub/gre/generaldistribution.pdf]):

Fields whose students scored highest mean ‘Verbal' GRE: VERBAL QUANTITATIVE
Classics 613 600
Classical Languages 610 621
History of Science 605 666
Philosophy 588 632
Semitic Languages 585 616
Psycholinguistics 581 641
Comparative Literature 580 585
  • “It took Latin to thrust me into bona fide alliance with words in their true meaning. Learning Latin…fed my love for words upon words, words in continuation and modification, and the beautiful accretion of a sentence.”

    —Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings, p. 31.
     
  • “Law schools report that by yardsticks of law review and grades, their top students come from math, the Classics, and literature—with political science, education, economics, ‘pre-law,’ and ‘legal studies’ ranking lower.”

    —Harvard Magazine, May-June, 1998, p. 50.
     
  • “What employers appreciate is that Classics provides mental training in a whole range of different disciplines, and produces graduates of exceptional intellectual flexibility. In our world of rapid social and technological change, it is the capacity to react to new and unforeseen developments with flexibility which employers value most, and it is widely recognized that Classics and related subjects produce just the kind of graduate they are looking for, with an unparalleled capacity to adapt to new circumstances and learn new skills.”

    —the Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford
     
  • “As for my passion for writing, I have had the benefit of a classics education. What was called a liberal arts education which allowed me to have a sense of history and to study the classics, so that I might gain as much wisdom from studying the past that I might be a better person to deal with the future. That is what I have tried to do. To use words to help persuade one in an argument or on an issue is not inconsistent with being Secretary of Defense. It is a great asset to have.”

    —William Cohen, from a press conference in Marrakesh, Feb. 11, 2000.
     
  • “I am appalled, even horrified that you have adopted Classics as a Major. As a matter of fact, I almost puked on the way home today…”

    —Ed Turner to his son Ted, circa 1958.