Shopping Period Strategies

Some people smugly tell you, the day before classes even start, that they know exactly what they're taking. Others, on the eve of study card day, admit that they don't have a clue—either hanging harried heads in shame, or speaking with great pride in their indecision (like this blogger, who once happily printed six different versions of her study card for her adviser to sign).

Some students scribble notes throughout the first lecture; some don't even bring a book bag. Some are sitting in their seats on the first day perfectly on time and would never dream of cutting out early, while others crowd in long after all the chairs are taken, or awkwardly climb over dozens of fellow shoppers to leave before the lecture ends.

Shopping week, derided by some as stressful and hailed by many more as an exhilarating opportunity to sample the mind-boggling variety of courses offered at Harvard, can be a very personal matter. One of those choices that all shoppers must make is their shopping tool.

Just as shopping week offers you far more courses than you can take, the menu of shopping tools available to you is broad, and you have to pick. Don't get caught with part of your shopping list in one place and part in another, then realize at the last minute that you have a schedule conflict you didn't notice because one course was on your my.harvard list and the other was stored by CS50.

Your options are as follows:

For starters, there's the my.harvard.edu "Courses" tab, which lets you search for courses by name, read their descriptions, and store a list of the ones you're interested in. There's a pretty nifty tool for comparing your possible courses' Q scores, and a nice graphic schedule tab that shows you in full color that you've scheduled yourself for nine different classes at 1 p.m. on Mondays (true story of this blogger's initial shopping list this semester). You'll have to use this one eventually to create your final study card, but it's a pretty clunky interface—adding or deleting a course to your list can take a lot of scrolling up and down, for instance—so it's perhaps not your best bet for your master planner.

As is true of shuttle services, maps, and the events calendar, CS50 takes something that the University already offers and does it better. Its course tool not only offers basic search, but also lets you see which of your Facebook friends are shopping or taking courses. You can tell it to avoid courses that fall in your "busy blocks"—which we all know means all day Friday or any day before 10 a.m. And it even shows you the required books for a course, with links for purchasing them at the Coop or on Amazon or viewing them in Google Books. Just be sure to click over to your Facebook page to delete the obnoxious announcement that it puts on your Wall when you first start using the tool, even if you tell it you want to be "invisible." We think that adding CS50 to every user's shopping list automatically is cute marketing, but it's irritating to see that red HarvardCourses box in your news feeds over and over.

Since the course catalog went online-only in 2009, many students don't think to page through the entire catalog as they did when it was a book. To this blogger, though, that's the only way to shop. If you so choose, take the time to open every department's page on the Registrar's website and skim the list of classes, making your own shopping list of the most interesting ones in a Word document or in any other tool you choose. Yes, it takes time, but it's the only way to find those intriguing courses which aren't offered by your concentration and aren't wildly overpopulated. You'll come out of the exercise depressed by the paltry number of classes you can actually take and more appreciative than ever of the phenomenal wealth of opportunities available at the College.