This is not a class I was excited to take; I honestly considered it the lesser of two evils (the worse evil being Intro to Logic). I couldn't understand why the psychology department would require that students in the major take a philosophy course and was going to be frustrated if an inability to memorize texts by Aristotle, Kuhn, Popper, Hume, the list goes on... was going to tank my GPA and prevent me from getting into a PhD program. I wouldn't say that this class started off without a hitch (we ended up moving classrooms four times over the first two weeks of the class), but once we did settle in, I suddenly realized that the class had been surreptitiously growing on me. I liked grappling with the readings we were assigned until they finally made sense. I liked considering the pragmatic applications of different theoretical frameworks and criticizing them when I saw no utility in the argument being made. I also didn't realize that I was learning strategies for argumentative logic that I would use in many papers to come. Looking back on the practical skills that I gained in this class, I can now see that this class was only a benefit to my education, and opposite of ruining my chances for grad school, will have bolstered the critical thinking capabilities that most programs look for.
Below is one of the essays I wrote for this class: