Humanities Success Stories

Nancy Cody

Returning to school was at first humbling, but soon became a self-esteem booster when I realized that I am capable of learning new and interesting things. The topics I studied in Humanities revitalized my enthusiasm for learning. My schoolwork became an adventure into different times and places, both current and past, in an effort to understand our world better. Humanities is a great way to learn about history, social and political events. The literature, art, and film media transport the student across time frames of our existence and locations. I found it fascinating! I look at myself and the world differently now.

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Nicole Earp

I started at DVC as an Allied Health Services student, simply fulfilling the Humanities requirement for transfer. The film, fiction and criticism course taught me that love and appreciation for the arts is not only fun and interesting but contributes to personal growth and understanding of the world around us. I learned how to analyze, interpret, and understand popular culture and how we can learn about the human experience through the expression in the arts. I quickly changed my major to Humanities and have never looked back. I believe every one of us must study the Humanities in order to understand ourselves better; for the self and the world.

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Terrell Patillo

This Journey at DVC has been one that I will cherish forever and during this time I was fortunate to be in a Humanities class. The class I took was for American Popular Culture, and it was way more than I expected. We analyzed different time periods and the popular culture that surrounded that time. We covered topics that ranged from Charlie Chaplin to Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” to how advertisements are put out in the world to how different groups of people are projected in movies, television shows, and news. I learned new film concepts and ways of looking at hidden messages in television shows and films. It allowed us to engage in conversations about various topics that we covered, bounce ideas off each other, and develop different interpretations of things we covered in the class. Overall, this was a great experience for me and allowed me to look more in depth at things rather than take it at face value.

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Nicole Rasmussen

I always had an interest in the arts, so I thought a Humanities course would be a perfect way to fulfill a GE requirement. However, my Humanities classes at DVC have been so enriching that I hope to pursue a Humanities minor in the future. I was able to explore my love of film, art history, and literature all in the same class, and was introduced to works I had never been exposed to before. For example, I probably wouldn't have gone out of my way to watch a silent movie in my free time, but Modern Times has since become one of my favorites after watching it in one of my classes. More importantly, though, I was able to not only discuss and analyze these different works, but understand them in the context of the time period in which they were created.