Student Blogs: 1st Year

Unlike the totalitarian control the school has over your schedule during you first year, the second year sees some real progress in the personal freedoms department. But, while progress has been made to lessen the control of the State, it still has far to go before it reaches the free society threshold. Think modern day Russia.

Now, getting away from my undergrad thesis, you are given a lot more control over your registration destiny as you enter the second year. While you still don’t have control over which courses you take, except for your two electives, you do get control over which semester you take them and which professor you take them with. To be honest though, this is the kind of personal choice I could live without. It was kind of nice those first two semesters being given my schedule with a pat on the back and a “go forth and prosper.” In those days, I didn’t have to worry about which classes I should take, or with whom, or during which semester. Besides, I could always complain about my schedule because, after all, it was some “horrible” person in the registrar’s office that did this to me and not my own shortcomings in judgment.

To be honest, the date for class registration snuck up on me like a bear in the woods. I found myself sitting at my desk with a course schedule, calendar, and course descriptions trying to figure out what the expletive I was supposed to be doing. I was lost. Why hadn’t they told me what courses I was required to take? Why hadn’t they given me some advisement on what I should be doing?

Well, in looking back, I realize that it wasn’t a bear tracking an alert hiker in the woods; it was a herd of elephants rampaging towards a headphone donned teenager too consumed by the sound waves vibrating off his ear drums to foresee his imminent trampling. There were lots of sources that had the information I wasn’t looking for. Namely, page 58 of the student handbook, which reads: “A second year regular division student must take the following: Administrative Law, Federal Income Tax, Business Organizations, Evidence, Criminal Procedure, Constitutional Law II, Professional Responsibility and Legal Methods III, and Sales and Leases.”

In my defense, the timing of course registration could have been better. They scheduled it the day after the first years had to turn in the product of two months of research and writing, the Legal Methods II Appellate Brief. Needless to say, a rapidly approaching deadline for an assignment that comprises the vast majority of one’s course grade can become a quite effective pair of headphones capable of drowning out even the most deafening of elephant herds.

I was lucky to have a professor that took it upon herself to offer her services to lost first years who had failed to see the flashing neon signs. My advice would be to find such a professor for your own registration needs. But, once you figure out the gist of things, you still have to formulate a workable schedule.

A lot of people, when making their schedule, would focus on certain professors or on a goal of having a certain day off each week. I did things a little backwards, as is my way with most things. My first criterion was my finals schedule. I took each class I was thinking about taking and mapped its exam date on a calendar. If a certain combination grouped exams too close together, then it was tossed out. My second criterion was the weekly schedule. I didn’t focus on a goal of having Fridays or Mondays off, but whether there was an even distribution of classes throughout the week. I didn’t want to have one day off but then have another day with four classes. If there were any combinations that had a particularly long day, it was tossed. My last criterion was the professor. Professor choice was my last factor because I donÔøΩt really buy into all the hype over this professor is great and this one is horrible. In my experiences, professor ratings come from very unreliable and often biased sources. Anyone who gets an A is going to say that that professor was fair and the class was good, and anyone who gets a C- is going to say the opposite. Besides, with all the professors being of very similar caliber, whatever small differences between them was not enough to compensate for a crappy weekly and finals schedule.

So, after the charting, calculating, and all of the other processes that go into schedule formation, I had a Fall 2007 schedule I was happy with. Since they stagger the times that different groups register, all I had to do was wait until 5:00 pm, log in, and enter in my schedule. Well, when five o’clock came, I logged on, entered in my schedule, pressed enter, and made preparations for a victory dance. Well, it turned out that three of my five classes were full and the best I could do was waitlist. I sat there and looked at the screen feeling utterly helpless and so frustrated that the image of my laptop hurdling out of my third story window was not too far from being a reality. I mean, what was I supposed to do? I had just spent the past two hours trying to figure out a schedule that would work and then this piece of expletive website tells me “better luck next time.”

Well, had it been any other week, I might have sat there for another two hours and worked out another schedule, but this was the last day of a week filled with nights spent writing, re-writing, proofreading, and crying in a corner about a legal methods paper. I was exhausted, frustrated, and I gave up. I just submitted what I had and left the outcome to the waitlist gods.

Actually, as it turns out, that was the best thing I could have done. Apparently, the waitlist for getting into classes is common, and by the next week a spot for me had opened up in every one of my classes. The waitlist gods had smiled upon me, and course registration became an exception to the maxim that quitters never prosper.