By Cadence Chua
Wondering what to choose for your next intensive? Not sure how to cope with three-hour-long classes every day? Contemplating taking two intensives at once? If you need answers to these questions and more, read on!
The intensive periods of January and June are a hallmark of AUC’s academic calendar, allowing students to focus on only one (or two!) class(es) over the course of a month. Class offerings range from unconventional ones, such as Music and Text, to languages. With the 2026 January intensive semester over, The Herring spoke to some students regarding their experience.
“People probably have very different experiences,” Alma Kloetzer, a first-year Social Science major, comments. She took the unique Music and Text course this January, known to be a fun yet intense course, with classes lasting four hours almost every day. When asked why she chose it, she explained that the Social Science intensives that she had the prerequisites for didn’t interest her, but this particular course did. Plus, it fulfilled her Humanities requirement.
The course focuses on the intersection between music and literature. Given Kloetzer’s musical background, the course was not very challenging, but she “wasn’t necessarily expecting to compose [her own] music”. When asked how many stars out of five she would give the course, the first year replied, “I would say five stars, it was very good.” As for advice regarding intensives in general, Kloetzer says, “You can invest yourself at different levels, and this is maybe also a good point for intensives; you can decide if you want to be doing other projects on the side or not.”
A student who invested a lot of his energy into the intensive period is Robert Stampa, a third-year Humanities major. Stampa decided to take two courses in January, namely Food and Nutrition Security and Spanish 1. “I needed to catch up on my Science requirements, and [Food and Nutrition Security] is a very easy course,” he explains, when asked about his choices. As for Spanish 1, he says, “I mean, the thing for me is, honestly, I just really feel languages come very naturally to me.” The polyglot, apart from being a native German speaker, also speaks Dutch and French. In general, he explained his choices as being “strategic”.
About his experience taking two intensives? “Pretty tough,” Stampa summed it up. “I have to say, I ended up doing kind of okay, great with my grades if that matters… But in my third year, I would say I’m better at coordinating these kinds of things.” Apart from these two intensives, the Humanities major also works five evenings a week, which necessitates extra rest time.
Stampa said that it was doable, but he would not recommend doing two intensives to other people unless they have no other choice.
As for his takeaways from the courses themselves, Stampa commented that he has realised that his confidence has increased from his first year, as evidenced in the Spanish class. “I think if you put me back two and a half years ago and put me on a stage to speak English in front of 70 people, I would not have felt as confident. And I just realised [now] that I don’t care.” When asked about his second course, Food and Nutrition Security, he laughed and remarked, “I realised how quickly I can write papers.”
One piece of advice Stampa would give? “In general, when you’re picking your courses, [choose] a good mix of what interests you, but also what strategically works for you.” In particular, he suggests choosing fun courses and looking into their graded components.
Alex Jarocinska, a second-year Science major, certainly chose an interesting course this January – Gastronomy: the Applied Sciences of Cooking. “I really like cooking and baking, and it’s something I’ve been interested in for a while. Especially since I’ve come to AUC and I have my own kitchen.” The hobbyist chef has even considered enrolling in culinary school! He explains that the course is very much about chemistry, more specifically, “the chemical, physical processes of food and of cooking and how we experience cooking.”
When asked about one thing he learnt from the intensive, Jarocinska says that he learnt a lot more about “specifics about the science behind cooking”, which he feels he’s more cognisant of whenever he’s cooking now. The second-year student states, “I’m not a big fan of chemistry because it doesn’t feel like there are many practical applications of it, but this was the most practical.” He would give this course a solid five out of five stars, but warns, “If you really despise chemistry, maybe it’s not the course for you.”
The Herring 