HONORS 100 4-Year Plan
- Andrew Shaw
- May 26
- 2 min read
Updated: May 27
I'll admit there are some Type-A tendencies that I haven't been able to shake during college, and obsessively planning for courses has been one of them. As my friends know, I always start out with a plan for classes, and somehow always run into time conflicts, find new classes, or other complications. Needless to say, putting together a schedule each quarter is always a challenge, but looking back at the last four years, taking the time to plan out courses has been immensely rewarding. In conjunction with the philosophy curriculum forecast, the CSE teaching schedule, and MyPlan, my HONORS 100 4-year plan has served as a living artifact of my 4 years in college, and I return to it every quarter to update it with new classes, feeling a little sense of accomplishment everytime I enter an update and see the rightmost column turn green. My 4-year plan is more than just a course planning document, it's a reflection of my college journey from as I've experienced it, quarter to quarter and day to day. It is only fitting, then, that my honors portfolio is also organized after my 4-year plan.
I thought it would be fun for this reflection to compare my updated 4-year plan with my 4-year plan from HONORS 100. The biggest change between the two is that I decided to drop a planned LSJ minor, taking more philosophy classes instead. I also learned throughout college that many of the courses in my HONORS 100 plan weren't even offered anymore, such as PHIL 342 (History of Modern Ethics), PHIL 408 (Philosophy of Diversity), and PHIL 338 (Philosophy of Human Rights). Nonetheless, I've been able to learn about these topics anyways, through a variety of other philosophy classes and research projects.
One commonality between the two plans is my continued interest in AI. When I started college, ChatGPT hadn't even been released, so my interest in AI has only grown since HONORS 100. I've taken all the AI-related classes in my HONORS 100 plan, including CSE 446 (Intro to ML), CSE 447 (NLP), and CSE 473 (Intro to AI), and then a few more not in my HONORS 100 plan, including CSE 599 G (Deep Learning) and CSE 455 (Computer Vision). Overall, my HONORS 100 plan includes classes on a wide range of topics that I ended up deciding not to take, which I think reflects the uncertainty I was facing as a freshman. Over time, I've learned more about my own interests and been able to take classes more narrowly tailored to them, becoming more sure of myself and being able to face the future with greater certainty than before.
My HONORS 100 4-year plan is here:
And my updated 4-year plan is here:
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