Ever searched Reddit to find which classes to take next semester and learned about the ones that you should never take? Well, here they are and why you need to take them.

Students search far and wide to find the best professors and the best classes at Barnumbia. Usually, the professors are those from Barnard, and the classes are from the humanities department. Thus, this list mainly consists of Columbia STEM classes. Below, you will find the worst classes offered at Columbia University and why you, dear reader, need to take them. There is no particular order to this list, so please consider them all equally horrible.

BIOL UN2005 INTRO BIO I: BIOCHEM, GEN, MOLEC and BIOL UN2006 INTRO BIO II:CELL BIO, DEV/PHYS

This is every Columbia pre-med student’s Seventh Circle of Hell. The course is a crafted wet-dream by the infamous (in the eyes of the undergraduates) Professor Mowshowitz. You should take this course to truly understand how days of preparation still leave you facing questions that seem disjointed, unrelated, and frankly impossible—that is, except for the three students in the class who seem to have a clue what’s actually happening. It’s a life lesson; sometimes, you put in everything and you still fail. Sometimes life’s a bitch, and then you keep on learning, ripe with nights grinding through the Learner’s Manual in hopes of understanding everything that’s going on. Maybe it helps. Maybe it won’t, and you realize that each person has a unique ideal studying method. There’s a tough learning curve, though—confirmation on an exam worth about a third of your grade. Take Intro Bio to determine for yourself whether pre-meds are justified in being annoying. For the rest of your college career, you will have a truly developed view of why premeds bemoan their tortured existence. Think of it like an ethnography, in a way. Also, you’ll learn a few things about how cells work.  

PHIL UN1401 INTRODUCTION TO LOGIC

You probably won’t make it to the third class because during the second one, you’ll sit there, in the lecture hall, watching the professor struggle as they attempt to use some chunky technology from the early 2000s that models Tarski’s World. You’ll sit there, staring, head empty with no thoughts. You’ll begin to do the problem set and pull out your lecture notes. Then, you’ll look at a page with so many symbols with so little meaning attached to them. Take this class if you want to have your mind absolutely melted and your worldview forever changed. You think you understand what possibility, necessity, validity, and sound argument actually mean? No, you don’t. Take this class to overthink their meanings and literally come out questioning everything you know about logic and arguments. Then, after the final, forget everything you learned and move on with your life.

PHYS BC3001 CLASSICAL WAVES

A lot of students at CU need to be humbled, and this is the class to do it. You’ll go to a lecture twice a week where the professor speaks to the board, writes in the smallest and most unreadable font, does not accept or appreciate questions, and literally gives you three different textbooks. You’ll get problem sets where you Google the question and get literal thesis papers as results. Each week you’ll feel like you’re losing understanding. You thought that you were smart? You thought this university accepted you because you were special? No. You’re average and this class will painfully remind you of it. Take this class if you want your deepest dream of being one of the great academics ripped from your beliefs.

MATH UN1201 CALCULUS II

This is the worst calculus class. A majority of economics students skip this one because it’s so horrible. However, you need to take it so you can know all about sinusoidal integrals. This class prepares you for one thing: to answer that niche calculus question that makes the class sit in awkward silence. This class will give you back that academic validation that Waves took from you. You’re special because you took Calculus II, and your professor will respect you for it.

CHEM UN2493 ORGANIC CHEMISTRY LABORATORY I (TECHNIQUES)

First, this class is worth 0 points, so all the work you do to get that A is pointless, no pun intended. Second, the lab fee is $63, or 4.5 hours of work with New York City minimum wage.  This class is, and I quote from the student who took this class, “absolutely foul.” This will be genuinely one of the greatest demands in terms of your time. The lab will always end late. Every week, you will be assigned a lab report, pre-lab write up, and pre-lab computational work. Again, this class is literally pointless, making the workload unnecessarily heavy. This class will convince you that it was created with the one intention of sucking all the joy out of your life. Take this class if you want to suffer for four months straight and receive no credit for that suffering. The only thing you will get out of this class if you do well is academic validation from fellow pre-med students. No one else will think you’re cool because taking this class, in the words of Paris Hilton, is “not hot.” However, any academic validation from an insufferable pre-med major is hot, so you should take this class.

What You’re Expected to Do in Orgo Lab I via Bwarchives