Every class I’ve taken at ND

Fall 2013: Freshman

• Statistics for Business and Economics: Huy Huynh
  • Only 8 am class I ever took, it was 4 minutes from my dorm room to the back seat of the class, so I rolled out of bed and back in pajamas every day, I got like 98%
• Intermediate Spanish II: Elena Mangione-Lora
  • Incredibly hard experience but it was amazing, she was a wonderful professor, I learned so much and my conversational spanish improved like crazy, though it’s gone now
  • I once hated the idea of making a poster so much, I performed “La Bamba” on my ukulele in front of all her spanish classes and high school spanish students and I got everyone to sing along
• Basics of Film and Television: Christine Becker (Friday’s breakout lecture: Dr. Melissa Dinsman)
  • Amazing first FTT class, learned so much that I continue to think about while watching movies in 2018
• Foundations of Theology: James DeFrancis
  • Amazing class – he got me back to Catholicism by opening his first class showing us how the 2 stories of creation ( the 7 days, and Adam & Eve) contradicted each other, so the Bible doesn’t even take itself literally. The metaphors are beautiful. He taught me not to be scared of the old testament – because the whole thing is a love story between God and his people. God is all about mercy, but he’s a jealous God because he loves us so much. He walked us through one section of the Bible that was all a code about the current oppressive regime with a bunch of symbols to represent real-world people and events. It was fantastic.
• Descriptive Astronomy: Keith Davis
  • This class was taught in the DVT, the Digital Visualization Theater in the Jordan Hall of Science – it was amazing. The ceiling was a dome and their technology let us visually fly through space and it was totally immersive and amazing. For homework, we went to the observatory on the ceiling run by the TAs. I kinda made friends with the TA that’s exactly like Sheldon Cooper from Big Bang Theory. Made some great friends in this class, ended up going to an SYR (a dance) with one of the guys in the group (not a date – his date cancelled and I was the backup but it was fun! we dressed up as Green day! so punk)
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• Physical Education
  • “PE Orientation” Swim Test: Joshua Skube (never met him – but that’s a funny name for the guy in charge of the swim test, he must be a “Skub”a diver haha)
    • The swim test is now abolished, as well as the whole P.E. system which makes me really sad. It used to be that every freshman had to take a swim test, and if you failed, you would have to spend 2 out of 6 sections of the academic year in a swim class. I passed mine.
  • Fencing: Denise Goralski
    • One of my PE sections was fencing and I couldn’t help thinking “My name is inigo montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die” and I wasn’t the only one. The rules are really interesting! The tech is pretty cool & I saw a tournament – very competitive!
  • Personal Nutrition: Stephanie Ryckman
    • Stephanie was an awesome teacher. I learned a lot in that class, I got to eat a lot during it, and I still use some of the info.
  • Weightlifting: Stephanie Ryckman
    • Again, stephanie was great. It was good to lift again since I lifted in high school. Haven’t lifted since though.

Spring 2014: Freshman

• Biodiversity: Its Challenge and Future: Angela Laws
  • This class was AMAZING. I learned so much about the environment and about species and about conservation. We’re really screwing the world up. Even when we think we’re changing things for the better, the issue is usually that we’re changing things at all. The poor professor always looked so panicked and stressed out – and that makes sense. Biodiversity is specifically the number of species – plant or animal – you have in an ecosystem – the more the better.
• Elements of Calculus: Nathan VanDer Werf (Grad Student)
  • This class sucked. I listened to so many youtube videos, I went in for office hours, I cried a lot, I am not built for calc. I hadn’t taken calc since junior year of high school pre-calc when I got my first D on a final (pretty sure I never got a C and rarely got Bs) so I took stats in senior year. The teacher was really awesome though. He clearly loved math and he tried SO HARD to help. He was a really good guy, calc just isn’t my thing.
• Introduction to Philosophy: Garett Smith (Grad Student)
  • This was a weird class. It was really all memorization, and endless memorization, and he was a really hard grader. He used his class to teach us about philosophers who were proving the existence of God, rather than disproving it – so that was nice because friends of mine were really struggling in their faith in Intro to Philo’s that were anti-God. I don’t like philosophy so much because so many times the “proof” is based on a critical assumption, but it was still a way to stretch my brain in ways it had never been stretched before – still benefiting from that today!
• Social Science University Seminar: The Economics of Happiness: Amitava Dutt
  • This was a crazy class. Only like 13 of us – we all got along pretty well and kinda became friends.
  • The whole grading system was 3 20-page essays.
    • Magic Bands & Disney World (I had just come back from Disney from winter break and I realized that I was super excited about supporting the “bad guy” (Disney as a corporation) who takes your money, which was confusing to me at the time lol))
    • TV Addiction – this is the one I cried in the professor’s office about, but he clearly forgot about it. He challenged me and exposed some ideas that I thought were absolute when really they were influenced by my upbringing. It was actually a really important step, though it’s still embarrassing to think about. haha
    • Chocolate essay – BEST PROJECT EVER. I got to make a bunch of people try and rate different brands of chocolate. The essay itself is published somewhere else in this book!
• Principles of Microeconomics: Mary Flannery
  • I was ALWAYS sleepy during that class. Prof Flannery was a wonderful teacher – she was like the sweetest little grandma telling you bedtime stories, which was why it was hard to pay attention. I learned about the Uber demand algorithm in that class though.
• Physical Education
  • Contemporary Topics 1 & 2: Stephen Bender
    • One week, we had to record what we did every half hour, and I discovered that I sleep exactly 7 hours if I can. I will hit snooze until I hit 7 hours without even realizing it. I continue to use that, knowing that 7 is what my body needs! It’s still true!
  • Curling: Diane Scherzer
    • I don’t remember this at all.

Fall 2014: Sophomore

• Accountancy 1: Bill Schmuhl
  • It was fine. I didn’t do great in the class, but I enjoyed the organization of the financial statements and the responsibility to communicate to an audience that isn’t an expert. The concept was better than the work itself, and it was the best class of my business intros.
• History of Television: Christine Becker
  • AMAZING. I learned how TV reflects an evolving society and evolving societies reflect TV. So interesting how the evolution of taste happens in network TV. I wrote a great paper with Pop & Grandma in this class, it’s published somewhere else in this book.
• Principles of Marketing: John Kennedy
  • This was a nightmare. The professor was a million years old and blatantly sexist. He would wink at all the young girls. The whole class was a semester-long project that made no sense. The whole class was just a game in how to please Kennedy, and at the end, they said he would give all the girls As. I got one. He clearly only gave whatever grade he wanted, there wasn’t even proof he read our papers.
• Statistical Inference in Business: Matt Bloom
  • This was so fun. I love stats. Prof Bloom and his assistant professor were researching the “statistics of happiness in the work place” and they would play the beach boys over speakers at the beginning of class and pass around a sand castle bucket full of candy. They were great. I learned to use SPSS which is a statistics software. They were so realistic. The final project was optional, but if you didn’t do it, you would get a zero lol. They said, “If you calculate your grade and you’ll get a B without doing the project, and you’re happy with a B, you don’t have to do it! We only want people who care about the project to do the project.”
  • So of course, I do the project. It was a blast. I put out a survey about stereotypes – which business stereotype is most likely to spend the most (Finance), be the most creative (marketing), be the most boring (accounting). It was really cool. I got over 350 responses by the time I had to write the paper. I think I got 500 the last time I checked. It was so fun. ND people love taking online surveys posted on FB at midnight because we’re all procrastinating on homework.
• Introduction to Business Ethics (1 credit): Michael Kronk
  • This was really fun and really interesting! That’s all I remember about it.
• Corporate Financial Management: Carl Ackermann
  • This was a hard class, but the professor is LEGENDARY. He does crazy things during class. He’ll give away free stuff – sometimes candy, sometimes cigars (I got a cigar once), he’ll randomly have a huge blow up decoration at the front of the room and never mention it, he’ll call someone who slept in and put them on speaker for all of us to talk to them, he makes useful references in the real world. He was the best. He cared so much about his students – and worked really hard to be able to teach us about personal financing and 401ks, etc. He remembers EVERYONE by name AND one thing about them – he has hundreds and hundreds of students a year. He came up to me studying in the bookstore a few times throughout the rest of college and always knew my name and wished me well. He’s a good professor.

 

Spring 2015: Sophomore

• Media Industries: History, Structure, Current Issues: Christine Becker
  • BEST CLASS I TOOK THROUGHOUT ALL OF COLLEGE. Learning about the business behind TV and film was amazing. I loved learning about production, about writing, about production executives, scouts, about the major media conglomerates and their regulation and their operation and how the whole ecosystem grows and evolves and it was all amazing and fantastic and if I never wanted kids I would have gone for those jobs in a heart beat.
• Business Law: Contracts and Agency: Laura Hollis
  • Laura Hollis was a theater major, then an entertainment lawyer, and she made this class so interesting and fun and awesome.
• Critical Approaches to Television: Mary Kearney
  • We didn’t get along during this class because I was a sassy, bratty piece of work because I’d taken 3 classes with Dr. Becker and didn’t like the way Prof Kearney taught because it wasn’t like Dr. Becker because Dr. Becker is perfect. It wasn’t her fault that this class was just a repeat of what I learned in a couple other classes. After finishing her class, we got along very well around the FTT department! I got to take this class with Aimee!
  • I did a project on the Goldbergs and how classic upper middle class white they are and I didn’t realize how it was a project on white privilege until now.
• Principles of Management: Fr Daniel Parrish
  • He was the coolest priest ever – he used to be a construction worker, he loved tech, he showed us these blazers that had 58 pockets and he would swear sometimes and he was really fun. I didn’t learn a ton in the class and it was more memorization than I thought it would be, but it was fine.
• IT Management Application: Bruce Harris
  • We learned Excel and Access. I had Taryn with me in this class, so she was our leader in all of our work. I don’t remember anything from Access, but what I learned about nested if formulas and other formulas in excel continue to help me at work every day.
  • Once I realized how much it was helping me, I sent him a thank you email and his response could not have been nicer! He’s not creepy, he’s just a really good professor that cares about his former students and where the industry’s heading.
• Notre Dame Film Society
  • This was a one-credit class where you get to see free movies in the Browning Cinema in DPAC, which was a very beautiful movie theater. You saw 6 movies and wrote 5 pages (splitting them up or making them one movie, didn’t matter) and then you got credit. It was awesome.

 

Fall 2015: Junior

• Accountancy II: Michael Favorite
  • He was a good teacher. The class was ok.
• Managerial Economics: Jason Reed
  • This class was like calc all over again. Teacher was fantastic – he was really young, fresh from his PhD program and he LOVED what he did. Made him an awesome lecturer. I was lost a lot of the time – we all were. There were several times he had to take a question off the exam because he forgot that certain mathematical truths aren’t obvious to us, like we haven’t memorized what he memorized throughout his masters. It’s like “He’s 5 years old? Can he talk yet? Or is he ready to drive? I don’t know kids.”
  • He started recording lectures where he used this program that let him write out equations as if he had a magic neon marker in a black void. It was cool tech – and nice of him to post so many lectures and practice problems. It was very helpful and I hope all math teachers/professors do that moving forward.
  • I also really love economics – shadow pricing was fun.
  • I got the highest grade I’d ever gotten on an exam in a business course because he finally modeled the exam off of the homework, so I spent 13 hours doing 25 long problems over and over and over again because I would still get them wrong even though I had JUST read the answer. But I stuck with it, and I got a 98.5%.
• Macroeconomic Analysis: Richard Sheehan
  • I will never forget this class. My professor had a THICK new york accent (quarter, chicago: KOR-ter, him: koo-WUH-tuh) worked at the federal reserve, he was extremely crabby but in a quietly sassy way, calling everyone in washington an idiot, but he was soft spoken and always smirking because he’s super old and SUPER INTELLIGENT. He really knows what he’s talking about.
  • I haven’t memorized the macroeconomic equation, but I think of it all the time. GDP goes up? Inflation goes up. Unemployment goes up? Inflation goes down. It’s all such a precarious balance. I love it. Imports, exports, the demand for money, and government spending are in the equation too but I  can’t remember. So interesting. I’ll definitely go back to my notes some day because he explained it way better than the internet. I think the overall topic is called Keynesian aggregate demand shifts?
• Introduction to Process Analytics: Kaitlin Wowak
  • She was a wonderful teacher and the content in this class was actually way more interesting than I’d expected. Mass organization! It was all about supply chain management and efficiency and it was like learning to juggle billions of dollars in the air at all times, anticipating before every short or overage. It was cool.
• Strategic Management: Mike Montalbano
  • He was an awesome teacher. Really cared about us. Extremely humble. Everyone wanted him to be their cool uncle. He also yelled at us a lot – kinda think he came from an Italian mafia family but got out.
• Accounting and Reporting for Not-For-Profit Organizations: Douglas Kroll
  • I was not good at this class. lol. BUT the professor was wonderful, he always talked about how ND helped his family when his wife beat cancer, and he really cared about what he taught. He took us on this amazing field trip to a company called “Logan Industries” which is a manufacturing company for people with developmental disabilities on one side of the building, and a therapy/training facility on the other side. The idea is that the employees are actually the clients, and they’re able to earn a living for themselves at their individual skill level. Many use the company as a stepping stone, train, and work out in the community. There’s janitorial training, grocery store training, etc. It’s a really beautiful program that’s highly subsidized by the government.
• Walt Disney in Film and Culture: Susan Ohmer
  • THIS WAS AN INCREDIBLE CLASS. I didn’t put enough of my energy into it, so I freaked out and digitally saved everything. This is where I met my friend Sam who I met up with in New York. The class was about more than just Disney movies – but about their powerful business model, and the parks, the Disney technology evolving throughout the ages, the merchandise, about princess culture – it was all awesome. The best part is that we watched a disney movie every single week in the movie theater on campus – and sometimes we got to choose the movie! I think of Disney in a much more analytic way now and I love it.
• Notre Dame Film Society (same as above)

 

Spring 2016: Junior

• Fashioning Identities in Colonial America: Sophie White
  • THIS CLASS WAS INCREDIBLE. This class was one of the reasons why I was so incredibly thankful that ND requires a ton of “gen eds” so this class satisfied a history credit. I was emailing her about this class for a week before signing up for classes. I had to get permission and stuff but I GOT IN AND IT WAS WONDERFUL. We learned so much about life in Colonial America, she’s got a lovely British accent from going to school in London but she was born on Mauritius and lived there ’til she was like 5, a tiny island off the coast of Madagascar and she’s very very proud of that.
  • We tried on a bunch of corsets one day. Someone brought in animal lard and we learned how to style hair the way they used to – on student volunteers, one of the girls in class and one of the guys in class (the guys clearly felt weird about being in this class – toxic masculinity at it’s finest, and Dr. White made light of it and made everyone feel included). We went on field trips at the museum on campus and analyzed portraits. So cool. So much you can learn from portraits – and the LAYERS of paint on the portraits. Like when a couple had a baby, they’d layer over a couple picture with an infant on the woman’s lap or something.
  • She knows so much about the era, she’s a great teacher, cares so much about this stuff – extremely smiley, but didn’t tolerate disrespectful students. One of the girls in class would bring an emotional support dog to class and she would stop talking in the middle of a lecture to talk to the puppy and pat him on the head. So fun.
  • The final project required us to do our own ORIGINAL ACADEMIC INVESTIGATION and I had one idea, but then procrastinated, as I do, found what I thought was an interesting list of items a dead man left behind during the era, and I deduced a ton of info on his life. It was invigorating. I even used a little accounting to make some estimations – she told a colleague about my project – and sent the research along because he was interested in it for his own work! I SUPPORTED THE ACADEMIC COMMUNITY. And what a cool academic community hers was. Such an awesome, specific topic. She was obsessed with different types of fabrics, and different types of STITCHING. So fun. The essay is included somewhere else in this book.
• Decision Processes in Accounting: Jeffrey Burks
  • GREAT teacher. His family is obsessed with visiting every place the Little House on the Prairie family lived/traveled during their life – they even go to Laura Ingalls Wilder conventions. It’s weird but sweet and interesting because he’s got 9 kids and a wonderful little family. He passed up on career opportunities to marry his wife who he knew since high school I think. It was a very sweet story. Gives ya hope, ya know?
  • I remember finding the material really interesting and getting much better at excel. A lot of it was about detecting financial fraud which was cool!
• Strategic Cost Management: Sandra Vera-Munoz
  • She was terrifying and the material was incredibly hard and she wasn’t helpful and was very cranky and sarcastic toward us, while yelling at us about how much she cared about us. It was so weird.
• Accounting Measurement and Disclosure: Thomas Schaefer
  • It was fine. He was a good teacher and wrote a great textbook. He talked about his grandkids a lot.
• Sinatra: Pam Wojcik
  • I actually took this class just because I didn’t get into the FTT class I really wanted, and I am SO GLAD I took this. This is where me & Pam Wojcik became friends (not really, it’s totally one-sided and I love her and revere her and she knows me and doesn’t hate me haha). The way she lectures & structures classes is amazing. She is a TOUGH COOKIE and REALLY harshly grades papers, which is amazing because she pushed me as a writer where no one ever had before. She’s the reason I went to Shanghai because I sought her advice in addition to Dr. Ohmer’s during the thesis process.
  • Anyways, we got to know Frank from gangly Crooner to Vegas staple. He was in over 60 movies, and many of them were extremely good. A ton of them were real classic Hollywood and just rife with essay topics. “Guys and Dolls” is the best. She was right – we really learned to love Frank and all his chips and harsh edges over the years. It was a really interesting narrative to follow.
• Junior Research Challenge: Foresight in Business and Society: Chad Harms
  • This was another semester-long project class. The professor was great. All about tech. My team was great – nothing like my marketing experience – the report was interesting and useful. All about solar power. My portion was about how the utility companies’ political power stifles the national utilization of clean energy. Look it up – especially in Florida. Florida is too red for solar power, and they named some bills in order to trick the public. “Smart Solar” and “Solar Choice” were two sides of one issue the Floridian people voted on, one shut down solar power, the other supported it. See the problem?
• Notre Dame Film Society (same as above)

 

Fall 2016: Senior

• Accounting Measurement and Disclosure II: Brad Badertscher
  • It was fine. Class was hard. Young professor, good at his job.
• Conflict Management (1.5 credit): Sandra Collins
  • It was fine. Not what I wanted. We didn’t discuss emotions in the work place, more like the way to shut down your emotions in the workplace.
• Making ‘Em Move (Animation): Don Crafton and Jeff Spoonhower
  • AMAZING CLASS. Don Crafton has an honorary Emmy due to his years of academic research in animation. Awesome. Jeff is a tech guy who worked in industry for a while and was working on selling a video game that he did all the animation for.
  • Half the class was readings (which very few people did, but I often did, so Dr. Crafton thought I was awesome) and the other half was a project. A lot of people didn’t really fulfill the assignment but fulfilled their creative vision – as was normal in this, the only production class I’d ever taken in FTT. Mine was about a snail who finds alien gum that moves the earth throughout the solar system, then blows up the world, but the cute snail lands on a tiny planet and happily scoots around his new little planet. Amazing and very challenging experience
  • 
• Philosophy of the Life Sciences: Emanuele Ratti
  • INCREDIBLE EXPERIENCE. Lectures were gosh darn amazing. So present, so TODAY, so critical of how the world presents science. So important. Most important lecture was when Prof Ratti (FRESH from Italy, lived their his whole life and then came to Indiana a month before teaching this, his first semester) was when he shattered DNA for us. People spend millions of dollars on a system that could be totally incorrect – we’re trying to “map” DNA into 4 categories… what if there aren’t 4 categories? All the mapping we do, all the research we do depends on the assumption that those 4 categories are valid, and there’s not enough real evidence to suggest that it is, in fact, valid. MIND BLOWN.
  • In terms of work in the class, I never had to follow ANY of the prompts for the midterm essay & the final essay. The final was just an extension of my midterm, and the group project (there were only 3 grades in the class) was also the same topic as my midterm & final. How? because ONE DAY after class, I asked the professor a question about biological determinism – and then he assigned my group the same topic, and said if I’m interested in it, I could make my entire semester about it. The next class period – he came back with three printed credible, philosophical essays on the topic. I wrote about it in terms of whether anxiety and depression were actually genetic diseases or not, and whether that should impact a patient’s access to treatment. I worked with him on it and explored and it was awesome. His grading was so fair, too. He was like “Well done, great essay. I don’t agree with you at all, but you supported it very well.” It was fantastic. Paper is in here somewhere.
• Audit and Assurance Services: Andrew Imdieke
  • Best accounting class I  had – awesome professor, the sole reason why I think being an accounting professor could be awesome. He really cared about what he was teaching, he had a bunch of real-world experience to back it up. Auditing sounds boring but I LOVE AUDIT THEORY. He explained it in such an awesome way – like auditors are investigators in defense of truth and protecting the little guy. Pretty awesome.
• Senior Thesis Workshop
  • Awesome, super chill, taught by my THREE FAVORITE CELEBRITIES ON THE PLANET: Dr. Pam Wojcik, Dr. Becker, & Dr. Ohmer. We all talked about our process and the ebbs and flows and stretches and growing pains of writing a thesis and it was cool.

Spring 2016: Senior: Hasn’t happened yet, so expectations…

• Sustainable Development: The Role of Business (1 credit): Fr Oliver Williams
  • This was pretty cool, though the professor was eh. He seemed pretty self-important, but he’s on the board of the UN Global Compact so that’s pretty awesome. I loved learning about huge companies that use their power for good.
• Spirituality of Work (1 credit): Fr Oliver Williams
  • This was almost the exact same class as the other one he teaches, but I needed them as ethics credits to take the CPA exam. Me & my group partner did a project on Redbubble that he didn’t like, and it was an out-there idea, but I could’ve been best friends with my partner because she was awesome and totally up for the idea. I brought in all my “illegal copyright infringement” Disney stuff as visual aids, and I forgot I was wearing my Inside Out dress until I hit “next slide” with a shot from the movie that was perfectly created on my dress in a seemingly subtle pattern and we got a big gasp from the usually bored audience and it was great.
• The Nuptial Mystery: Divine Love and Human Salvation: Timothy O’Malley
  • SECOND BEST CLASS TAKEN IN MY ENTIRE ND CAREER. It was amazing. There’s way too much to say about this. It was as liberal as a Catholic marriage class could be, strangely. The professor was amazing. I worked hard to get into this one too. I recorded almost every lecture, but accidentally most of them in a tech crisis on my phone. I honestly think the harsh realities of Catholic marriage are so beautiful. This was no rom-com class. This was all about rules and discipline and the endless, unconditional, self-giving, self-emptying, exhausting love of marriage. But that commitment, that effort to one another is absolutely freaking beautiful and I can’t wait to pursue my vocation through the sacrament of marriage. I loved it so much.
• Business Law: Property and Negotiable Instruments: James O’Brien
  • It was fine. I find case law interesting, but it was a stressful class.
• The Movie Musical: Pam Wojcik
  • BEAUTIFUL CLASS. I learned so much about the beginnings of musicals, early celebrities that basically started American film celebrity as a concept. I am aware of influences that even inform the Disney movies we watch today. I just loved it all. AND I GOT TO WRITE MY FINAL ESSAY ON DISNEY SIDE KICKS and Pam LOVED it. It was an extremely amazing, incredible experience and I loved it all. It was HARD though – lots to remember and so many layers to learn about. It was great.
• New Media Studies: Matthew Payne
  • Really cool class. Really weird. Much more about technology than storytelling. Did some really cool projects – wrote our own choose your own adventure story. It was overall a really cool and modern class.
• Federal Taxation: James Wittenbach
  • Worst class I’d ever taken. Mostly my fault. I was so done with accounting and so excited about FTT and I didn’t pay attention enough. Super nice old man taught the course. I struggled but pushed to get a B. I never got a C in college.
• The Hamilton Phenomenon (1 credit): Pam Wojcik
  • Super cool 1-credit. We only met 5 times but we had long really interesting conversations, interviews with professionals who worked on or near the Hamilton team. Then we saw Hamilton for free with the assistant director, an ND grad. It was amazing and it helped me learn about myself and my issues with being white upper-middle-class in this world that needs diversity so badly.