Love It/Hate It: Early Course Registration

Well, the professors won, and here we are already thinking about our spring 2024 courses. Blessing or curse? Flyby thinks it out!

Love It — Alexandra A. Kassinis

Personally, I love looking through my.harvard. The possibilities are endless. A music gened? A folk myth seminar? A TDM dance workshop? An obscurely titled GSD class? Yes please. What better way to spend a lecture than scrolling through courses? At least you’re being (somewhat) productive as you ignore your professor.

Also, you can talk to all your classmates about it. Instead of all being dispersed across the globe over Christmas break, dreading the return of another gloomy spring semester, you can all compare notes on/complain about/rant over classes over dinner at the dhall. Maybe you can even figure out a communal class that the whole blocking group can take??

Being in school while registering for classes also means you could drop by a professor’s office hours and ask them about their class. This may be essential since so many Canvas pages are pretty ~bare~ as of right now. Maybe a quick chat with a professor will save you from taking a bad class for an entire semester.

Most schools have been registering for classes early since forever. I think we are all just struggling with the fact that we too have to conform. If Y*le students can do it, so can we.

Hate It — Eve S. Jones

What are you having for dinner tonight? What’s the next movie you’re going to watch? When are you going to do your laundry? I don’t know the answer to these totally low-stakes planning questions for myself, and I bet you don’t either. So why are we expected to make far bigger decisions much further out? When I enrolled for my first semester, I was still under the impression we’d have shopping week. And now I have to totally commit to courses without even being in the year I’ll take them.

Also, it’s midterms! I have my current courses to worry about! I can’t be writing four papers about characters making bad decisions and also have time to make bad decisions myself. (Yeah, I can handle 500 pages of reading a week. That’s fine, actually.) Let me deal with one thing at a time.

Professors think this will give them more time to prepare while knowing how many people will take their courses, but really it will just give them longer to delude themselves about add/drop. Yeah, that’s right. I’ll enroll in six courses and then drop two. Who is going to stop me?! Not my.harvard.