My Courses

Soc 301
I think it was in my third or fourth semester that I took SOC 301, which was the basic sociology course. I tried to get a waiver as it covered the very same material and used the same text as the one sociology class I had attended in Pune, but I was firmly told that all graduate students had to take it, even if they done its equivalent earlier. My resistance was mainly due to the standard text, by Johnson [based on the famous sociologist, Talcot Parsons] whom I had found dreadfully boring, even if mostly sensible and the orthodox guru, in my Pune days. To my horror, who should the lecturer be, but Johnson himself! He was as erudite and as boring if not more so in person than his book was. So I sat at the far back in the 120 strong class [basic courses often had such huge class strengths] and whiled away my time as I had done years back in my Intermediate class.

On the other hand, my statistics certificate from the Indian Statistical Institute was given full credit for one basic course, while the other that dealt with some updates and new applications I did not balk at, and have found useful since too. I also took a self-study course on social change under Paul Wiebe, who had done some interesting research in South India. [Years later, I found he was the Principal of Meera's school in Kodaikanal]. There were also two classes in economics, one of my minors [the other being marketing, that included both Seymour's courses] I recall the basic economics one I did, which I enjoyed and from which I gleaned some idea of economic theories and trends. So my courses covered the full range - regular lecture, self-study, hands-on research methodology, technical courses, etc.

This incidentally gave me an appreciation of how such courses were handled in the USA as against the way they are typically done in India. The great difference as I saw it was that in the former, the process is more set in the learning mode while in the latter it is set more in the teaching mode, i.e., more is pumped in all the time in India, and one disgorges much of it in one seminal exam, while in the US university, one is guided, persuaded or left to explore one's way to the learning goal, and then judged as much on one's efforts and capacity [as gauged by the teacher] as on the paper one turns in. I was and still am firmly convinced that the US system is vastly superior to ours – maybe things have changed by now, but though this seems clear in IITs and IIMs, it does not seem so in the run of the mill university course.
My social change class was based on Everett Rogers' theory of innovation adopters, which fascinated me. I was to use this as the theoretical basis for my thesis [both the intended one and the actually used one].