> I suspect that many people who are good at number theory can probably wing it in a literature course.
You may be right, but the worst grade I got in school (as a Mathematics + CS major) was in some absolute throwaway, freshman-level liberal arts class (Intro to Japanese Popular Culture) I took in my third year!
Don't underestimate the value of staying within one's wheelhouse.
I got crushed by a class in environmental humanities. Not due to a lack of comprehension of the material but because I didn’t understand the technical aspects of writing literary analysis (extreme focus on close reading of the language used where I tended to focus on the abstract conceits). It felt equivalent to taking a class in graph theory without first taking a proofs/discrete course and everyone else in the class had. Great class though - I think about the texts all the time
You may be right, but the worst grade I got in school (as a Mathematics + CS major) was in some absolute throwaway, freshman-level liberal arts class (Intro to Japanese Popular Culture) I took in my third year!
Don't underestimate the value of staying within one's wheelhouse.