Whither the Magic of Course Registration Period?

The course registration period never fails to fill us with a sense of wonder. If you are like me, at the end of each break, your Crimson Cart is filled to the brim with any class that you have any interest in at all, and your August and January days contain hours of perusing Harvard’s manifold course offerings in search of hidden treasures.

Fresh from our time spent away from campus, our stores of curiosity replenished from the crushing weight of the last semester, we bask in the endless opportunities before us: to try out a new subject, to broaden our grasp of our field of concentration, or even to fill a credit that brings us closer to the promised land of graduation. All of it fills us with a sense of possibility that pushes us to read dozens of syllabi for classes we will likely never take, to spend hours game-planning our weekly schedules, and to show up to the first one or two lectures of the semester well-rested, with a new notebook and fresh pens, ready to learn.

Now, as we return from spring break and begin the concluding half of the semester, does anybody still feel this sense of wonder?

We’re two months out of the course registration period, and I would wager that most of our current sentiments toward academic pursuits share very little in common with this beginning-of-semester sense of wonder. We aren’t nearly as excited about school as we used to be.

It doesn’t take long for the excited curiosity of the beginning of the term to wear itself out. For some, it might be the first 20-hour problem set that does it. For those more inclined towards the humanities, like myself, it could be the first 3 a.m. night cramming a Frankfurt School reading for Social Studies 10B tutorial — and the week with three essays due that follows it. No matter which way you cut it, our classes lose much of their luster by the time we reach spring break, and the week-long recess does little to restore it. Father Time is not kind to the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed students who walked into the first lecture with a spring in their step.

No matter how hard we try to stay excited about our intellectual experiences, it seems that a kind of motivational decay is inevitable. “Burnout” tends to make us cynical and uninterested in the activities we have chosen to fill our days. Part of this unhappy descent seems inescapable: As more assignments and responsibilities pile up, our aspirations lower from the realm of pure intellectual curiosity to that of ensuring our academic self-preservation. Part of it is also a lack of novelty: As we spend more and more time within a class, no matter how engaging, the attraction it had during registration period must wear off.

But I am not content to let that be the end of it. After all, wouldn’t we all be more fulfilled with our academic lives if we could sustain the sense of amazement we possessed at the very beginning of the semester? This requires treating our academic pursuits as not only means to a professional end but, at least in part, as ends in themselves. It means holding onto the raw curiosity that fuels our love of learning and prompts us to study what we do.

I don’t profess to know the solution. Perhaps professors and teaching fellows designing courses should be more attentive that volume of work often trades off with the desire to do that work. Perhaps the academic calendar could incorporate more frequent breaks or wellness days.

But, in the end, the task of staying curious falls to us as students. We all find ourselves faced at times with the specter of hundreds of pages of reading, plus an essay, plus a pset. We should lose the all-or-nothing mindset, common at least to our high school selves, that encourages GPA and resume maximization at the expense of enjoyment. (God knows I am guilty of that mindset). Instead, we should recognize that we get only 32 Harvard classes over four short years and try to take advantage of those classes to the very fullest.

We are here not simply because we are capable but because we are curious and eager to learn. As easy as it is to forget our natural curiosity, we would all do well to remember how excited we were at the very beginning of the semester — and try to the best of our ability to find that feeling again. We should take the hiatus of spring break as an opportunity to renew our academic energy.

Maybe we can find the magic again.

Sam E. Meacham ’25, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Social Studies concentrator in Pforzheimer House.