Ariane de Gennaro
I would like to preface this entire story by saying that I am extremely indecisive. Like the kind of indecisive where for my first semester here, I decided to change my entire course schedule on the brink of tears in the five minutes before registration opened. Well, now it’s time for semester two, so buckle up, bitches, it’s time to do it all over again.
CourseTable shows 2,384 courses, and somehow I want to take all of them and none of them at the same time. So far, I’ve narrowed it down to just 31 courses listed for my Spring 2023 schedule. In my head, I think I can theoretically take them all, even though they all seem to meet at the exact same time. The CourseTable calendar view looks more like an advanced level of Candy Crush than it does a coherent and thought-out schedule for next semester, but that’s a problem for Nov. 17.
While I’ve luckily avoided taking science and quantitative reasoning courses my first semester, it turns out I cannot graduate from this godforsaken university without having to do a pset. Dammit. So now I have a mix of gut and first-year seminar science courses littering my schedule, none of which I actually want to take. I’ve got “Topics in Cancer Biology,” “The Science and Politics of Cancer” and, if those don’t work out, I’m going out-of-the-box with a course called “Cancer.” But maybe I’ll just end up taking “Musical Acoustics and Instrument Design,” an upper-level Engineering and Applied Sciences course, which I’ll definitely be able to handle with its 4.5 workload rating. AP Physics 1 from two years ago technically counts as “a basic knowledge of physics, including concepts of kinetic and potential energy and Newton’s laws,” right?
The only course that I actually know I have to take, like no way around it, is the second semester of my foreign language, and of course the only time it’s offered is at 9 a.m. At least ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics only meets twice a week. By the way, if my parents happen to be reading this, sorry I am not taking Spanish — I refuse to go to class on Fridays. Also, I suck at speaking Spanish, and guess what, it’s actually impossible to speak hieroglyphics, so that’s a plus. Will I ever use it in life? No. Will I ever use knowledge from my science credit in real life? Also no.
Don’t get me started on the creative writing courses in my schedule. I didn’t know you had to apply for them until two days before they were due. What kind of school makes you apply for things after you get in? I really don’t think “The Art and Craft of Television Drama” should be as competitive as the Yale Student Investment Group, but who am I to say. I finished my applications for three of them an hour before they were due, so I’m definitely not getting in, but whatever, I probably couldn’t handle the workload of “Daily Themes” anyways. No human should ever have to write that much.
I have no plan for registration day. I plan to sit on my common room couch with hopefully one first-year seminar that I sorta-don’t-really-wanna take in my schedule and cross my fingers, my toes and whatever other body part is readily available to me. This is what Elihu Yale intended. Nothing has been more humbling than this. How is this le… oh wait, there’s a residential college seminar that looks interesting. It’s at the same time as my required language. I’m applying. May the odds be ever in my favor.