Chocolate and orange? Apple and dill? This course will teach you how to combine unlikely flavors to create stunning and unique dishes. By examining the basis of taste in human physiology and organic chemistry, you will learn how different ingredients can share compounds that make them taste great together. By the end of this seminar, you will have the tools to move away from the cookbook and start on your own culinary journey.

How does language shape our world? In this course, you will join your fellow students to translate a poem from Spanish to English. Through this process, you will dissect the history of words, the assumptions we carry with them, and the problems of communicating between cultures.

This 2-hour seminar presents fundamental linguistic concepts through a classroom-wide effort to create a constructed language (conlang). We will be covering 3 broad topics: sounds (phonetics, phonology), words (root morphology, derivation, semantics), and grammar (morphosyntax, pragmatics). Students will volunteer ideas for each element of the language, with final decisions made by a class vote. Through this process we will develop a sound system, grammar rules, and basic vocabulary. We will also address a short history of conlangs, as well as major subtypes and famous examples, such as Esperanto, Klingon, and Dothraki. By the end of the seminar, students will be able to write a short text in their conlang.