As pre-registration for spring semester classes starts, students should remember that “missing out” on a class will not end their academic worlds. Excitement marks the entire class selection process (at least for the nerdier students). Talk about classes can resemble pre-prom excitement from high schoolers — “Who are you taking?” Enthusiasm from older students who took classes that literally, literally, changed their life, and peers caught up in the same whirl of crucial life decisions being made color us.
We no longer need to line up in the cold outside the registrar’s office or throw elbows to secure our ideal section, but the running around before and after our WebAdvisor deadlines can become frantic and our despair real if we don’t make it into the ‘it’ class — everyone’s been there, especially when the student portal spits back an error message.
Remember that classes are really, totally, Collegian-editorial-levels of earnest not all we do at school and not the only way we learn. Classes are very important, worth being excited about, and a class can doubtless have the life-changing effect we talk about, but that’s almost impossible to know from course listings. One class that looks wonderful might not click, and another, unglamorous major requirement can unlock new ways of seeing the world. In the end, it will be more about what you do with the material than whatever legends past students have put in your head. It’s probably better to pursue this truth, the next truth, than the Truth we invent to fill our imaginary post-graduation heads.
If a course doesn’t fit your schedule, read the books over the summer. Talk to the professor about the material anyway, and ask when he or she will offer it again. Our passion over nailing a perfectly curated transcript that will sail us into adulthood can make us lose sight of the actual work of learning. A single class won’t grant you mastery over everything there is to know about vice and virtue.
We must learn to accept that we can’t take two classes at once, and stop being so afraid of missing out that we lose sight of goods that aren’t part of our master plan. Semesters bury all our ambitions, and following an end we’ve set ourselves like some point on the horizon will make us impatient when we build that life for ourselves and somehow it isn’t the same as our starry-eyed dreams. At the end of our time in college, we’ll be able to look back and proudly tell our own stories about high points and low points, but what will have made all the difference is the way we approached each moment, not a completed check list.
