The Best UIUC Classes and Gen Eds: Choose Professors, Not Easy A’s
This is an excerpt from The Jailbroken Guide to the University.
What this means in practice
The practical rule is to stop searching for one universally “best” Gen Ed. Build a short list in three passes: identify professors whose energy makes you want to keep thinking, sample courses outside your major, and keep the class that gives you questions worth carrying out of the room. Use grade data to compare sections, not to hunt for the least demanding option. The book’s one concrete UIUC recommendation is CS 124 or any class with Geoffrey Challen. The larger recommendation is to move between campus worlds and let the professor, the people, and the questions determine the choice.
5.1 Take CS 124
I don’t care what your major is or what you want to do with your life. But you must take CS 124 or any class with Geoffrey Challen. His class changed my life. I know, super cliché. I prefer to always teach myself everything, but man… his excitement, his love for ODESZA, and his τέχνη perspective on the world of computers changed how I approached my life. Ideas like learning enough to be dangerous, the chef vs. cook mentality, and his honesty with himself, the educational system, and the world made a huge impact. Cannot recommend him enough!
If someone says they didn’t like the class or him, it’s because they did badly. Study harder.
Jokes aside, the most important thing I learned from his class is the importance of daily practice. You get better by showing up every day.
Watch the UIUC Talkshow conversation we had with Geoffrey Challen. It was one of the best episodes ever.
5.2 Interesting Professors Over Everything Else
Find out who the most interesting professors are and what they’re teaching, then take their classes officially, or just show up. Inspiration goes a long way, and as long as a professor has that spark within themselves, it won’t matter what they’re teaching.
“Interesting” is like love: you’ll know it when you see it. They’re excited, curious, and they give you new ideas and energy every time you talk to them.
Great teachers matter way more than the subjects. Having one awesome professor every semester makes your life better.
What else should you keep in mind?
• How interesting the professor is (and how interesting you find the topic)
• How interesting the people in the class are
5.3 On Bullshit Classes
Don’t take bullshit classes to improve your GPA. Some Gen Eds are cool, but many are straight-up empty.
Websites like the Grade Disparity between sections at UIUC are overrated. Take classes you actually care about and want to learn more from, not the ones that would get you the easiest grade.
The grade disparity website is still useful to help you distinguish between sections and to help you find who the best professor actually is. Hint: The best professor isn’t always the one with the highest average GPA. There’s a reason for this. If you want to know what it is, keep reading.
5.4 Treat Classes Like a Menu
During the first two weeks, go to whatever seems interesting.
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Think of classes like a menu. You don’t have to commit the moment you sit down. You’re allowed to look around, skim, and try a few things before ordering. Some dishes sound good on paper but aren’t great once you taste them. Others don’t look exciting until you actually try them.
The mistake is picking something just because it’s easy or fills a requirement. That’s like ordering the cheapest item and eating it every day without thinking. Instead, use the first couple of weeks to sample classes and pay attention to specific signals: whether the professor thinks clearly, whether the material connects to things you care about, and whether you leave with new questions.
Sit in, listen, and see how the class feels. If it’s boring, move on. If it pulls you in, keep it.
5.5 Go To Random Classes
Go to random classes more often.
Don’t ask, simply go in. Yes, even for small ones. If the professor notices you, just smile, say hi, and explain you’re sitting in for the day.
Remember Steve Jobs? He famously audited a calligraphy class at Reed College without being enrolled. He later said it shaped how he thought about typography, which influenced the design of Apple products.
Sometimes the value of a class isn’t obvious at first.
For me, this happened more than once. Whether it was rocket propulsion, advanced cryptography, or a class on Hans Christian Andersen, these “random” classes teach you a lot. But sometimes you learn even more from the people in the room. They’ll tend to think, act, and dress differently, and care about different things than the people you usually spend time with
5.8 Day and Night: STEM vs. The Arts
I took mostly science, math, engineering, or computer science classes, because that’s what I wanted to learn. But every semester, I made sure to go to something different: art history, psychology, English, philosophy, history, architecture.
And let me tell you: night and day.
Take Art History. I loved those classes, not just to learn about art history (obviously), but to see how people thought. Wow. The main difference was what people paid attention to.
In engineering, people ask: Does this work? How do we build it? How do we scale it?
In a lot of arts and humanities spaces, the questions shift: Who benefits? Who gets left out? What does this mean? What does it change about how we live?
So yeah, you’d hear way more skepticism toward capitalism, toward markets, and especially toward the idea that “more technology = better world.” Not always wrong, but often pushed too far.
Technological progress clearly improves a lot of things, such as life expectancy, comfort, access, and capability. That’s undeniable. But it also creates second-order effects that people don’t anticipate and sometimes solves one problem while creating another.
One professor argued that the invention of dishwashers and washing machines was bad because it made women busier. I pushed back: even if expectations rise, having leverage over time and labor is still a massive gain. That turned into an entire class debate — me against an entire class of over 150 people. A shocking number genuinely believed technological progress itself was somehow always negative. I can’t count how many arguments I got into trying to show (not even prove, it’s already proven!) that science and technology expand human capability and improve living standards
Then I’d walk back into a computer science or engineering class.
Everyone was anxious — panicking about internships, grinding for perfect grades, and chasing after jobs. In art, psychology, or philosophy courses, literally no one cared about any of that. No one was pretending there was a clean path waiting for them. So they argued more, wandered more, explored more. Sometimes that drifted into vague or ideological thinking. But sometimes it produced genuinely more interesting questions.
Then there were the obvious differences: the gender ratios completely flipped, and yeah, people were generally better-looking in the arts. That part is obvious.
But the bigger takeaway is that when you sit in classes across campus, you will be reminded that the university isn’t just one world. It’s many. And the only way to truly see that is to move between them.
