Reflections on 60 years of happiness, based on four years of a liberal arts education. A different time, a different world where the premium was on personal satisfaction more so than financial expectations. As best I can recall, these are the disciplines that were part of my own experience.
ARMY ROTC
Psychology (major) Abnormal Psych
German (minor)
Calculus
Biology
World History
French
Astronomy
Music
Comparative Religions
Art
Creative Writing
Philosophy
Sociology
Physics... (one short semester)
Chemistry
..............................................
And along the way, because of the cultural atmosphere, some ventures into Anthropology, Paleontology (Maine coast shell heaps), chorus, sailing, and... four hours of swimming 6 days a week (year round). All tied in to being in a Greek Letter Fraternity for meals, entertainment, and hanging. This tempered with working in the kitchen as a dishwasher, three meals a day for 50 'brothers' every other week... and a three hour a week job of polishing brass in the museum.
Overall, the atmosphere of learning was such that there was a rub off from other students that teased one into dipping in to unknown waters. Fond memories of hours spent with headphones in the music lab... parsing symphonies or using the Interpreter's Bible to find meaning from four language translations. 2 AM trips to the top of the physics building in temperatures that were 10 below zero... to use the 12 inch reflecting telescope and track a variable star. Classical music concerts, lectures from world renown authors and experts and study cubicles in the corners of a gothic library.
There is something about the sense of history that pervades a college that has been around since 1794. One absorbs the biographies of famous persons and "must reads" of their writings... Hawthorne, Longfellow, Adm Peary and MacMillan, Franklin Pierce... and hmmm... Alfred Kinsey.
One small point that I didn't appreciate at the time. My roommate's family owned the Harriet Beecher Stowe House, and we would study our ROTC Field Manuals together, in front of the Franklin Fireplace and sitting at the secretary where Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin".
It was a point in time... a turning point, from the vestigial Victorian era, to a more integrated world. Vance Packard and "The Hidden Persuaders", Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye", and Tom Lehrer. Just as important, was that those years were the pivot point for drugs. As far as I know, except for a very few apocryphal stories about peyote and mescaline, the "drug" of choice was alcohol. Timothy Leary was still in the experimental stage, Edgar Allan Poe was a historical anomaly. Sex, language, theater and TV were in the older morality framework... man to man, but never man to woman. Politics and political office was respected.
Off topic of current Liberal Arts experience, but a memory trigger of a very pleasant time of life.