Recently, reports emerged that the Indian Institute of Technology-Banaras Hindu University is offering a 3-month-long crash course in becoming ‘Aadarsh Bahu’. While the university has denied the existence of any such course, it certainly raised multiple eyebrows because of its sheer absurdness. We took it upon ourselves to dig up a few unconventional and rather weird courses offered by universities around the world –
The Science of Harry Potter
Frostburg State University’s ‘Science of Harry Potter’ teaches students the science behind the ‘magical world of Witchcraft and Wizardry’, using basic principles of physics. The brains behind the course is Prof. George Plitnik, who has received several e-mails from international ‘Potterheads’
The #Selfie course
The #Selfie class at Duke University, as part of the Art, Art History and Visual Studies course highlights the ‘global history of portraiture in the arts and photography from the 19th C to the present, and the emergence of the modern idea of everyday life’.
Patternmaking for Dog Garments
This class at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York is exactly that – learning how to make patterns on clothes for dogs. Besides learning how to sketch these patterns and bring them to life, students are taught to have an understanding of the dog body types, with doggies dress forms of different breeds. Pet owners will totally dig this!
How to Win a Beauty Pageant
In case you thought months and years of rigorous pageantry training wasn’t enough, the faculty at Oberlin College has taken it a notch further by offering a full-fledged course on how to win a beauty pageant. Students taking up this course will analyse beauty pageants from 1920 to the present, and how the ‘interplay of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation’ plays a role in winning them. Students will also go on a field trip to a pageant.
Street Fighting Mathematics
For those who might have a little spare time whilst in the middle of street brawls, MIT has an interesting offering for you. This course will teach you the art of guessing results and solving problems without doing a proof or an exact calculation. The techniques you will learn are ‘extreme-cases reasoning, dimensional analysis, successive approximation, discretization, generalization, and pictorial analysis’. Applications include mental calculation, solid geometry, musical intervals, logarithms, integration, infinite series, solitaire, and differential equations.
American Pro Wrestling
The folks at MIT are back again with yet another strange course offering for students – ‘American Pro Wrestling’. WWE has even assisted faculty with designing the course and provided certain materials to them. This class will explore the cultural history of professional wrestling, beginning with wrestling’s roots in sport and carnival. Students will also learn how “new technologies and changes in the television industry led to evolution for pro wrestling style and promotion and how shifts in wrestling characters demonstrate changes in the depiction of American masculinity”. Their disclaimer reads – “Students may have previous knowledge of wrestling but are not required to, nor are they required to be a fan (although it is certainly not discouraged, either).”
