Of the 1,465 courses offered this semester, many students will only attend four. But through a Departmental Independent Study Project, Ari Stang ’26 and Dylan Lee ’25 have already attended 17.
As part of the credit-bearing DISP — tentatively titled “Comprehensive Academic Binging” — Stang and Lee typically visit four courses per week, taking notes on the content to develop sketches and poetry. At the end of this semester, the duo will display their work in a cumulative exhibit.
DISPs are coordinated through academic departments in consultation with a faculty advisor, according to the Curricular Resource Center website. Stang and Lee meet with their faculty advisor, Visual Art Adjunct Lecturer Daniel Stupar, once every three weeks to synthesize their work in preparation for the exhibit.
Unlike Independent Study Projects — which require students to submit their proposed syllabi to the College Curriculum Council for approval one semester in advance — DISPs “do not require an approval process ahead of time,” the CRC website reads. “They are typically planned and facilitated within the same semester.”
The DISP has been “fun” so far, Lee said. “The people are great. The content is fascinating. It’s also just cool seeing such a wide range of teaching styles and personalities.”
So far, the pair have attended courses ranging from HIAA 0770: “Architecture and Urbanism of Africa” to ENGN 2911M: “Instabilities and Turbulent Flows.”
Attending courses as observers allows the pair to “just enjoy the learning a lot more without the stress,” Stang said. A geochemistry and biology double-concentrator, she added that she has no background in some of the courses they’ve gone to.
For Lee, a computer science concentrator, VIET 0400: “Intermediate Vietnamese” was “challenging.”
“The people were super nice, though,” Lee added. “It was funny just seeing what we could still infer.”
Stang said that their creative work is “evolving” as they try to balance digesting the courses’ content with producing art in class.
The idea for the DISP originated last spring, when Lee discussed their course registration struggles with Stang over lunch. Lee joked that they could “go to a new class every day,” and Stang suggested an independent study could do just that.
In the fall, they contacted Stupar, who had Lee as a student in a previous class, to create the DISP.
To select which courses to attend, the duo uses the calendar function on Courses@Brown, which displays every course in its respective timeslot, Stang explained. They usually go to the course that their cursor lands on, she said, but they avoid visiting multiple courses from the same department in a single week.
For courses with fewer than 30 to 40 students, the two receive approval from the instructors ahead of time to avoid disrupting the potentially intimate environment of smaller classes, which may involve workshops or discussions on sensitive topics.
“Mostly, professors have been very happy to have us there (and) very curious about what we’re doing,” Stang added.
The duo posts photos of their sketches and poetry on the Instagram account @brown.take_all_the_classes.
The Instagram account isn’t “an official part of the project, but it’s been really fun to see the excitement from the community,” Stang said. As of Thursday, the account has nearly 800 followers.
“People think it’s really interesting,” she added. “They want to see what we make.”
Doing an independent study is “a fantastic way to closely study something that feels really different because the students’ input and maybe the output or the project at the end might feel more personal,” said CRC Director Peggy Chang.
The cumulative exhibit, which will take place in May, will feature a collage of the drawings, poems and notes that they have created this semester.
“I’m envisioning (that) the walls are just covered in sketches and writing,” Stang said, adding that they may also digitize their work.
Lee said they may also plot a map of the classes they attended or make an “infinite class corridor” by compiling three-dimensional scans of every classroom they visited.
The DISP is “an exciting and very ambitious project. It is the first of its kind that I’m aware of,” Stupar wrote in a statement to The Herald. He added that the DISP — like all courses in the Department of Visual Art — will be graded Satisfactory/No Credit.
Part of the motivation for their DISP, Stang said, was that “there’s never enough time to do everything you want to do, to explore everything.”
“You won’t get to be in this environment ever again in your life,” Stang added, noting that Lee is graduating soon. “You’ll be in maybe similar environments, but nothing quite the same.”
Kate Rowberry is a senior staff writer at The Herald.
