There's nothing wrong with taking a course that covers a very wide area, even if you're intending to specialize more deeply in all the topics later. It's actually a very effective learning strategy, because it motivates all the subsequent deeper dives.
I will definitely second that. It's simply not possible to cover every aspect of a topic within any course. Survey courses are a great solution to a very real problem.
I guess personally I would feel like I wasted a semester when I had no problem being motivated to deep dive into the other topics already. I suppose if someone was undirected and needed to pick a specialization this might help.
Ah, but if you're actually motivated there's nothing stopping you from going as deep as you want into any of the topics. There's never an excuse for "wasting" a semester.
What I meant was that I would want to deep-dive into each topic, but we'd be busy moving on, and I'd cover all that material again next year anyways. I don't think survey courses fit my way of looking at topics, I'm very single-minded. That doesn't mean they aren't valuable or they can't work for other people. Just that I wouldn't want them to be mandatory.
