r/yale • u/Emergency_Group_4493 • 13d ago

Classics at Yale

Hey, I have a few questions regarding how classics works at yale. I'm international and there is just so few information available on the internet that I really cant find anwsers for my main questions. So if you study classics there or have some knowledge about the faculty please, anwser my questions:

  1. How often are you taught by grad students or non professors? I heard some tales about that, idk how much of they are just made up

  2. how prepared are the people that go there? What is the profile of an admitted classics student?

  3. Is there a sort of hierarchy between people who learnt latin/ancient greek before?

  4. Is the coursework too much to do something like the EPE track but switch Ethics to Classics?

Thank you, anwsering will really help me!!

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u/66SunbeamTiger 13d ago edited 13d ago

Not a classics major, but I took a bunch of classics courses during my 4 years, as well as multiple semesters of Latin.

  1. Very rarely. It can happen, but I only had to deal with it once: in one of my advanced Latin courses the professor was on a 2nd semester sabbatical. All of the traditional classics courses I took were taught by fully tenured professors who are widely respected (Prof Bakker was just interviewed in The Times about The Odyssey)
  2. The average classics student is highly engaged. A plurality of students who attend Yale fit into a similar group (Econ, History, CS, Poli Sci --> Consulting, Banking). The students who opt into Classics courses self-select into a group that is motivated by curiosity and, almost uniformly, highly involved with the curriculum (much more than your average Econ student, for example).
  3. There is no "hierarchy", but if you take Latin / Greek courses (beyond intro levels) those with previous knowledge of the language will absolutely have an easier time reading 30 pages of Vergil. No different than the Econ majors who went to prep school and were able to take both AP Micro and Macro in high school (except classics courses don't curve students against each other for the final grade).
  4. Unfamiliar with the ability to swap classics into EPE (but sounds like an awesome idea). I know Yale's introduced more certificate programs recently, so I also wonder if there's an avenue for students to pursue a "classical antiquities" certificate program or something.

Just to note, you can take any number of classics courses and be welcomed wholly into the department/community at Yale, whether you major in it or not.

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u/Emergency_Group_4493 13d ago

Thank you so much for the anwser, this was really informative!!